8 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
is concerned. Moreover, apart from the Cultural Revolution, the control by the party over the basic-level social and economic units has been relatively tight., as, for example, a glance at the current constitutions of party and state will indicate. In a poor country such as China still is, such control is important in the development of the productive forces, and the transformation of production relations will not come about automatically, but needs a mass force such as the party to push the process forward and prevent the emergence of ^congealed9 social classes. The inherent danger of the party losing its revolutionary zeal under such circumstances, in which it has huge powers and responsibilities, is obvious. The Cultural Revolution demonstrated Mao's extraordinary concern with this problem, but it did not enable him to resolve the contradiction between, on the one hand, the need for tight party control and huge powers accruing to it, in order to both transform the economy and change social relations along socialist lines and on the other hand, the danger that the party might itself become an instrument for, and vehicle of, structured and persisting inequality. It was a dilemma of an awful kind for as serious a revolutionary as Mao, and one that he has been almost unique among post-revolutionary leaders in facing up to.
There remains, too, the superstructural question in relation to culture. The dilemma China has faced here is of the classic kind, revolving around the problem of how best to relate ends to means. Ever since the debates in Yenan in the 1940s, the CCP has treated culture primarily in a narrow functional sense, as being first and foremost a weapon in the political struggle: literature, art, music, theatre, cinema, and intellectual research have been geared to the aim of producing an ideological climate most suitable for rapid economic development, and for transforming ihe unequal cultural and material structure of society. In Mao's Yenan Forum terminology, these policies have been strong on ^populariza-tion' and weak on ^raising standards'. However, Mao did identify a real problem, which is the danger that in a poor post-revolutionary country with relatively limited cultural resources, and in which cultural products have in the past been predominantly produced by and for the leisured upper classes, greater ^freedom' will result in the development of a stratified culture which both reflects and helps to congeal emerging social differentiation. Perhaps some middle way between ^popularization' and ^raising standards' would have been preferable to the extremism lhat has characterized cultural affairs since the Cultural Revolution, but in the heat of political struggle, such 'fine calculations' may be easier to urge on China from the outside than they are to carry out from within.