Harsh Thakor's Counterview article on the fall of the "Gang of Four" revisits the arrest of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen on 6 October 1976, barely four weeks after Mao's death. Thakor rightly sees it as a decisive shift in China's political direction, and he acknowledges that Mao's worries about bureaucratic privilege, bourgeois right and capitalist restoration arose from contradictions within socialist society itself (Thakor 2026). Yet his account stops short of the most fundamental theoretical problem the Cultural Revolution raised: if the Communist Party represents the working class but also controls the state, who supervises the Party?
This is not a secondary matter of organisation. Public ownership does not automatically eliminate inequalities of power, expertise or access to resources, and a party's revolutionary origins do not guarantee that its interests will remain identical with those of working people. Once the Party becomes the governing authority, its relationship with the masses acquires a new contradiction. Mao took this problem more seriously than many of his successors, and the Cultural Revolution, despite its excesses, was an attempt to address it through mass supervision of the Party (Mao 1957).
Thakor recalls the Shanghai January Storm, the proposed Shanghai People's Commune and the revolutionary committees that followed, and he notes that these remained subject to Party authority. That deserves far more emphasis. If workers challenge an entrenched bureaucracy but the resulting institutions stay subordinate to the same hierarchy, what has changed in the distribution of power? Wang Hongwen's rise from Shanghai factory politics to the top leadership symbolised the assault on inherited hierarchy, but a worker entering the Politburo is not the same as workers supervising the Politburo. Once a representative joins the governing apparatus, he acquires responsibilities, privileges and institutional interests that can separate him from his constituency. Changing the social origin of officials does not abolish the contradiction. Only the continuing capacity of workers and peasants to supervise and challenge those who rule in their name can address it.
Zhang Chunqiao's own argument supports this. He held that socialist ownership had not eliminated commodity exchange, wage differentiation or the conditions for new inequalities, so the real question was who controlled administration and distribution (Zhang 1975). But the same insight must be applied to the Cultural Revolutionary leadership: if public ownership does not automatically yield proletarian control, revolutionary credentials do not automatically yield mass accountability. The Four's weakness was not simply a lack of military backing. Even had they commanded the People's Liberation Army, military victory would not have established socialist democracy.
Mao's contribution also cannot be reduced to naming individual capitalist-roaders. His more enduring claim was that contradiction persists under socialism, and that differences between leaders and led, mental and manual labour, town and countryside, and administrators and producers can harden into political inequalities. The Cultural Revolution's methods were often destructive, and the persecution of intellectuals, teachers, cadres and ordinary citizens was not incidental. But a fair assessment distinguishes the legitimacy of the problem from the adequacy of the solution. Nor can the alternative be to hand supervision of the Party back entirely to the Party. Internal discipline and anti-corruption campaigns may be necessary, but a Party that alone decides which criticism is permitted and which officials may be challenged becomes both subject and final judge of its own accountability.
Thakor's account would also benefit from Deng Xiaoping's interview with Oriana Fallaci in August 1980. Deng had twice been denounced as a capitalist-roader, and his family suffered badly. Yet when Fallaci raised the idea that some Chinese saw Mao as a fifth member of the Four, Deng rejected the equivalence, distinguishing Mao's mistakes from the crimes of Lin Biao and the Gang. He also recalled that Mao had protected him from those who wished to destroy him. This was Deng's own retrospective testimony, not proof that Mao bore no responsibility for the campaigns against him (Deng 1980). Deng also acknowledged that Mao's aim was to prevent capitalist restoration; he rejected the diagnosis and the methods but not the concern itself. That is more complex than the conventional opposition between Maoist revolution and Dengist reform, and it explains why Mao's portrait stayed above Tiananmen while the Four sat in prison.
Deng's achievements, however, created new contradictions. Industrialisation, technological advance and poverty reduction came with widening inequality, new concentrations of wealth and a changing relationship between economic resources and political influence. His reforms answered underdevelopment but did not permanently settle the questions of class differentiation and bureaucratic privilege that troubled Mao and Zhang.
These questions remain live under Xi Jinping. His emphasis on Party discipline, anti-corruption, ideological education and Common Prosperity reflects a recognition that growth does not automatically eliminate inequality or bureaucratic degeneration, so his programme cannot be described as a simple continuation of Deng's. It would equally be misleading to claim, without specific evidence, that Xi has repudiated the Cultural Revolution, and the CPC's 2021 historical Resolution retained the Party's established critical judgment of it (CPC 2021). The deeper question is whether stronger internal supervision can substitute for the masses' independent role. Anti-corruption investigations may discipline officials, but they do not show that workers and peasants hold effective authority over the institutions governing their lives. This is no argument for romanticising disorder. It is an argument that socialist democracy must preserve the relationship between Party leadership and mass supervision, lest the masses be mobilised to implement policy while lacking any means to challenge its authors.
The Soviet collapse reinforces the point. The system was not destroyed primarily by a foreign army in Moscow; it disintegrated from within, and elements of the Party-state elite helped convert public property into private wealth. This does not show that the Cultural Revolution would have prevented that outcome, which would exceed the evidence. It does show that socialist ownership alone cannot guarantee socialist social relations, and that the question cannot be settled once and for all by constitutional declarations or the achievements of an earlier generation.
So was 6 October 1976 a victory or a defeat? A turning point is not an explanation. The Four fell because their opponents controlled decisive institutions of the Party-state and because the Cultural Revolutionary Left lacked an independent, durable mass base. The succession was settled by the balance of power at the summit, not through any organised expression of popular supervision. A movement meant to subject bureaucratic authority to mass scrutiny depended heavily on Mao's personal authority, and once he died its leaders could not sustain themselves through independent institutions. Their defeat does not make their concerns about restoration imaginary, nor does their revolutionary language exempt them from criticism for coercion, factionalism and their own accumulation of authority. They identified genuine contradictions within socialism but failed to resolve the one between mass emancipation and concentrated leadership.
Their arrest ended a political struggle, not the contradiction between the revolutionary Party and the masses whose emancipation is its purpose. Mao confronted a problem created by revolutionary victory itself: what happens when the Party that led the working class to power becomes the organisation administering society? Fifty years on, the question stands: who controls the Party that controls the state? The answer cannot be the Party alone. It must include the continuing, substantive and effective supervision of the Party by the masses themselves.
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*Director, Centre for Game Theory & Global Strategy, UNEP/UNCTAD Consultant, London
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