I recently came across the 1945 conversation between Mao Zedong and Huang Yanpei, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Huang told Mao that, throughout history, individuals, families, political organizations and even entire states often follow the same pattern: in the beginning, hardship keeps everyone disciplined, serious and committed. But once conditions improve, that spirit gradually fades. Institutions become complacent, officials become entrenched, and eventually the whole system declines or collapses. In his view, history seemed unable to escape this recurring cycle.

Mao’s answer was that they had found a new road: let the people supervise the government. If the people could genuinely hold those in power accountable, the government would not dare become complacent; if everyone took responsibility for political life, the system would not simply rise and fall with a particular leader.

Reading this, I couldn’t help thinking about what happened two decades later. Whatever one thinks of the Cultural Revolution in practice — including its contradictions, violence and disastrous consequences — one of the questions behind it seems closely related to that earlier conversation: **how does a revolutionary society prevent bureaucracy, privilege and hierarchy from re-emerging inside the revolution itself?** How do revolutionaries avoid eventually becoming a new ruling stratum standing above the people?

No human being’s domination over another is something ordained by nature. If world history was ever going to see a society consciously attempt to break the old cycle of revolution, consolidation, bureaucratization and decline, then a revolutionary country containing roughly one-fifth of humanity was bound to contribute its own enormous, radical and deeply contradictory experiment.

Perhaps that was part of the extraordinary ambition of that generation: not simply to seize political power, but to ask whether power itself could be prevented from hardening into something standing above the people.

The Historical Cycle: From the Yan’an Cave Conversation to the Cultural Revolution