To call the Cultural Revolution a time of lawlessness is an understatement. Liu Shaoqi, China's president, died in a solitary prison cell, never having been tried for any crime. Photographs survive showing Peng Dehuai, the defense secretary deposed a few years earlier, on a stage with his hands bound behind him and a large placard hung around his neck, being “tried.” In one of the rallies, beatings by the Red Guards broke two of his ribs. Peng Zhen was “arrested” by Red Guards and paraded through the streets of Beijing – a city he had led as the mayor just months earlier – and then jailed for eight years without charge. These denials of due process for the grand and powerful were not nearly as great as for those individuals out of the public eye who were deemed outcasts, such as former landlords and rich peasants in the countryside.

Lawless though it was, China was far from without rules and was not in a state of anarchy. China under Mao was a highly regulated society; behavior and thoughts were strictly channeled and programmed. Society was worthy of the term tyranny. In such an environment, taboos and boundaries abounded, including limits on political violence – that is, including the prohibition of unsanctioned killings of any civilian groups, the so-called class enemies included. In this chapter, I discuss the depletion of three sources of social control: the legal system, the party-state bureaucracy, and the political mass campaign.