ended with Hua's arrest of the Gang of Four, in October 1976. The Anti-Lin, Anti-Confucius campaign was the last campaign of the Maoist era, and with the demise of the Gang of Four, such campaigns were largely abandoned as a feature of Chinese politics. Theoretical focus The Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign was used as a political tool by the Gang of Four, but it did produce a genuine attempt to interpret historical Chinese society within the context of Mao's political theories. Maoist theorists attempted to use what they knew about the stone-age Dawenkou culture to produce evidence that a slave society had existed in Chinese history, just as Mao had described. These Maoist theorists used the recurrent patterns of peasant revolts, which have occurred throughout Chinese history, as evidence that the common people had consistently rejected both feudalism and the Confucian ideology that supported it. After their vitriolic denunciations of Confucianism, radical theorists attempted to interpret all of Chinese history as a long episode of conflict between the forces of Confucianism and Legalism, and attempted to identify themselves as modern Legalists. The campaign was an intense moment in 20th Century Chinese intellectual history, combining both specialist scholarship and with an openness to mass study. There was a spike in new political economy texts produced for a lay audience (as opposed to party members or university students), and mass dissemination of information made thousands of documents and articles available to ordinary Chinese, including worker-formed study "groups for theory" in factories. Workers writing groups also collaborated with specialists on drafting texts, such as the 1976 Political Economy in Front of the Smelting Furnace (Lianganglu qian de zhengzhi jingjixue) by the theory group of Shanghai Number 5 Steel Factory and the Fudan University philosophy and economics departments. The campaign resulted in reprints and new editions of classic Legalist writings as well as historical reconstructions of their debates with the Confucians. It also provided the impetus for archeological excavations. Local level During the campaign, some dormant radicals on the local level resumed political activities, one such example was the Hangzhou incident of 1975, which had to be put down with a massive deployment of troops. See also List of campaigns of the Chinese Communist Party Yang Rongguo References Bibliography Hsiung, James C. "'Lin Biao and the Gang of Four' by Tien-wei Wu". The China Quarterly. No.99, Sept.1984. pp. 637–638. Retrieved December 15, 2011.