The Cultural Revolution has now been denied in all but name in China two years after Mao Zedong's death, and it may not be long before it is done openly. As wall-posters in Beijing begin to raise the question of the state of Mao's mind in his final years, it is extremely hard to find anywhere in China a convincing defence of the Cultural Revolution which he started in 1966.

Negating the Cultural Revolution is the means by which the dominant group in the leadership hopes to get rid of some Maoist dead wood - perhaps at a new Third Plenum of the Central Committee early next month. Many ordinary, and especially young Chinese will also see it as the best way to criticize and expose the middle-ranking bureaucrats and to achieve both a more efficient society and something approaching real `socialist democracy'. Three weeks of travelling and interviewing widely in China, as these questions were coming to a head, have convinced me that the Cultural Revolution as a source of political inspiration is now dead, and that if people want to return to the issues which it raised they will choose a very different way.

The immediate conflict within the leading Politburo is between the modernizers headed by Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping - the Gang of Four's chief enemy before Mao's death - and those whose past is compromised by equivocation when the Gang held power. The main target is Wang Dongxing, the Communist Party Vice-Chairman who was Mao's bodyguard during the Revolution and whose special troops removed the Gang led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, two years ago. Wang is portrayed in backstreet gossip, no doubt with encouragement from his enemies, as a rather stupid fellow who cannot keep up with the times.

Chairman Hua Guofeng himself has been attacked in one wallposter this week, and a case can be made that he too has some explaining to do for his rise to power (at Deng Xiaoping's expense) before Mao's death. But his previous political record is clear, and most people probably feel that with his Party connections and support from the armed forces he is a very important part of the new team. The Politburo still includes Wu De, the former Mayor of Beijing who was compromised by his suppression of the Tiananmen incident in April 1976, when Deng Xiaoping's supporters occupied the main square in Beijing to mourn the death of the late Premier Zhou Enlai. Another Politburo member likely to go is Saifudin, from the far west Muslim region of Xinjiang, where I was told he had `suppressed the national minorities' during the Cultural Revolution and had closed down the mosques - now open again.

Some criticism is also attached to Chen Yonggui, China's most famous peasant who led the `model brigade' of Dazhai - from whom the rest of Chinese agriculture was urged to learn during the Cultural Revolution. He too seems to be unable to move with events. Models in general are not so popular. The industrial twin to Dazhai - the oilfield of Daqing - is still to be emulated but there is one feature from which one is asked not to learn: Daqing's policy of low wages which conflicts with the nationwide move towards `more pay for more work' plus bonuses for the deserving workers and deductions for the lazy ones.

Last week's official verdict that the Tiananmen demonstration in April 1976, which led at the time to Deng Xiaoping's removal, was a `revolutionary action', will obviously further weaken the power of the residual Maoists in the leadership. But it means more than this for many ordinary people who still demand much more radical political changes. Condemning the Gang, or criticizing (obliquely at first) Mao's tolerance of them, is not just an historical issue, but a weapon with which to curb the still considerable power of large numbers of middle-ranking bureaucrats. A marginal note, scribbled by an anonymous `citizen of Beijing' on a poster which I read in the city centre, made the point clear: `Every goverment unit,' he wrote, `still has secret lairs where the minions of the Gang of Four still hide. Unless we dig them out, then their poison will rise again and infect the masses.'

The rule of law is to be restored, though it seems to be taking rather a long time. (During the week I spent in the region of Xinjiang, I was told that fortunately there were `no cases at all' coming up before the courts, so less fortunately there were none that I could attend.) Significantly the official Party newspaper People's Daily has published a long article, which first appeared in Chinese Youth, demanding a `massive development of people's democracy.' More outspoken articles have been appearing in the Youth Newspaper, only - it is rumoured - after Chairman Hua himself insisted they should not be censored.

In the cultural world, there is a sense too of more serious questions trying to break through. So far the new spirit of `a hundred flowers' has mostly meant lots of foreign films (especially those which are shown by invitation only) and the revival of Beijing opera and local plays. But there are essays and stories about the scars left upon China by the Gang of Four, which by implication also say something about the future. Cultural bureaucrats cannot very well object to these `scars' being exposed, but they would like intellectuals to write rather more about the `positive' side of what has been achieved since the downfall of the Gang.

I began my visit to China by carefully enquiring, at every school or factory I visited, what advantages had accrued to this particular unit from the Cultural Revolution. The answers were uniformly embarrassing. Some fell back on the official formula that the Cultural Revolution had been a 70 per cent success; most people mumbled something about how it had improved their style of work and brought them closer to the masses. But all the actual mechanisms by which this was supposed to be achieved were described in wholly negative terms. The managers had come too close to the masses to the point where they did not dare to take decisions. `People seized power from us', one factory manager said with unusual frankness. `The Revolutionary Committee' (which has now been abolished and used to include worker representatives) `was legal at the time, but we did not want it.'

The return of institutions and practices which one had thought the Cultural Revolution had finally disposed of - particularly in the restoration of material incentives and competitive education - is quite staggering for the naive foreigner who felt that in these fields at least socialist morality had taken a step forward. Now one is told with a laugh that `you can't eat socialism.'

Last month was Quality Month all over China. Workers who excel in the course of it can earn a special bonus of anything between thirty and fifty yuan. In more normal months they may now get as much as ten yuan, about a fifth of the average skilled worker's wage. At this rate the most diligent among them should be able, I reckon, to buy a Swiss watch by the end of 1979. Not perhaps the Longines which I found improbably in an Urumqi department store in the far west of China. But a reliable brand for around 200 yuan (roughly sixty pounds at the current exchange rate).

If there was one thing of which most observers outside China were thoroughly convinced during the Cultural Revolution, it was that bonuses had died a decisive death. Differences in pay would continue according to the `eight-grade scale for workers' and the more elaborate scales for other state employees. Where there was room for argument was whether the differential gaps should remain the same. But the Shanghai dockers had surely got it right when, rejecting a proposed bonus scheme in 1974, they proclaimed that `We shall be masters of the wharf, not of tonnage! '

Now it appears that this was the `absolute egalitarianism' preached by the Gang of Four, under whose regime things got to such a pass that `it did not matter if the worker checked in late or not at all.' Last year the higher-paid workers all got a rise, and the new bonus system is just getting under way. There are various kinds of moral incentives, too, carefully listed for me as consisting of public praise, banners and flags, individual certificates, a favourable entry for one's work record, and being awarded the title of `advanced worker'. These moral incentives should in theory take precedence over those of a material kind.

Mao said so and is still quoted to this effect. But what one sees being emphasized at the moment in every factory are the sort of incentives which produce more cash, with the targets written up on blackboards. Several national conferences have been held to work out a proper `socialist' basis upon which bonuses sould be awarded. The principles are sensible enough; the only problem is that as far as I could tell they were already being eroded in practice. First, the basic wage system should consist of a time rate, plus bonuses. But two important exceptions have already been made, allowing for piece-rate wages to be paid to manual labourers and those working in handicraft industries.

The diggers of ditches and the makers of plastic flowers will be paid entirely on the basis of how much they produce. Is this not retrogressive? No, one is told, because the piece rates will be carefully fixed to assure a reasonable income.

A second principle is that a basic wage should be guaranteed. This is only more or less true, since the new system also provides for deductions for managers who are inefficient, for workers who damage equipment, produce too many faulty products or use too much raw material. However, one is told that the reduction of wages should never be excessive - perhaps a figure of ten per cent would be in order. Nor can workers be sacked except for criminal behaviour, though they can be placed in a special category of `dismissal on retention' where they are nominally sacked but allowed to continue work.

The Chinese accept that there may be a law of diminishing returns with any bonus system, as the economic slack in the system gets gradually taken up and the marginal gains become less. But they feel - and most Western experts who visit their factories agree with them - that a 20 to 30 per cent rise in efficiency, using the same plant and manpower, is quite feasible in most industries.

Any doubts as to the compatibility of a bonus scheme with the socialist system are speedily dismissed by referring to the Marxian principle `to each according to his work' or, more bluntly, in the Chinese phrase duolao duode - `the more you work the more you get.'

A banner flies in one of the factories which I visited, with a little jingle on it in praise of Chairman Hua Guofeng and his Four Modernizations. Roughly translated, it says:

To modernize thoroughly the whole of China by the end of the century is indeed a lofty peak, and it is being scaled by competitive methods which leave the visitor with memories of the Cultural Revolution gasping.

The bearded patriarch, Tuerdi, whose `workers' home' I am visiting, has only two teeth left, but he can count eighty-two direct descendants down to his great-grand-children. This is one for every year of his life. The Uighurs, a Turkic `national minority' in North-west China, evidently have that Central Asian capacity to produce very old men. The last Imam before the present one, at the mosque which Tuerdi attends on Fridays, died at the age of 100.

In Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, these old men warm themselves in the late autumn sun - some outside the mosque, some outside the new Chinese department store. There is a cold wind from across the Gobi Desert, and they are wearing their high, leather boots and fur-lined caps with the flaps hanging down. The street looks at first glance like a photograph from a missionary's album of China `before Liberation'. Old women sell raw pepper, bread, and glasses of tea on the pavement. Cobblers sit in their dark doorways. The houses are of whitewashed mud - one-stored, with thick wooden shutters, painted dark brown.

The Muslim minorities in this farthest west corner of China had had a hard time in recent years. They were 'persecuted by agents of the Gang of Four,' I am told by Temur Dawamad, himself a Uighur and a vice-chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Committee. The chief agent, he reveals indiscreetly, was Saifudin, the veteran Communist Party first secretary of the region who was transferred to Beijing last year where he is still a member of the central Party Politburo.

`They closed the mosques, and would not let people wear their caps', he says. `We are still trying to eradicate their poisonous influence.' Later I discover that all the local community organisations for the national minorities, including street committees and the religious affairs committee, are only now being `restored' after having been closed since the Cultural Revolution began. There are now at least 20 mosques open again in the old Uighur quarter of Nanliang. I even saw a woman begging outside one of them, perhaps tolerated because charity is one of the main Islamic virtues.

Xinjiang has only just been `opened' to foreign tourists, and next year as many as 1,700 are scheduled to visit the region, helping to relieve the pressure on the main tourist routes to and from Beijing. The local officials are often more straight-forward and helpful to visitors than those in the more familiar parts of China, but they are slightly at a loss on how to deal with the expected tours from Thomas Cook.

Tuerdi, in his new house outside the old quarter, represents the more acceptable face of `national minority' development which the Chinese will want to show their visitors. If one enquires closely into the lives of his eight children and their children, it is clear that within certain limits things have greatly improved. Education, as so often, is the key. The first four children only attended `lower middle' - the first three years of secondary school. (The two eldest daughters have sixteen children between them). A fifth daughter went to Xinjiang University; a sixth completed the full five years of middle school; the seventh went to a technical school. The path forward for all these young Uighurs has been as skilled technicians, working in the post office, on the railways, or in the armed forces. They are proud of one grandson in the airforce.

Xinjiang was first developed after the 1949 Liberation by a Production and Construction Corps, formed out of the Liberation Army forces and the Kuomintang troops who surrendered to them. Then, in the late 1950s, as relations with the Soviet Union across the border worsened, a big influx of civilian settlers from China proper began. These Han Chinese form distinct communities in Urumqi, living mostly in the new part of the city across the river.

Despite the upward social mobility shown by Tuerdi's family, it is still very difficult for a member of a national minority to cross the cultural divide between non-Han and Han. But his last child, a daughter now aged 24, has done so. She studied physics in Wuhan on the Yantgzi River for three years, and is now a supervisor in the Urumqi telephone office earning the standard rate for university graduates of sixty-two yuan a month - a third more than a worker's starting wage. She speaks reasonable Chinese, and has her foot on the first step of the officials' salary scale.

By law, all government documents should be published in the four major languages in Xinjiang: Han Chinese (41 per cent of the total population of eleven million), Uighur (45 per cent), Kazakh (6 per cent) and Mongol (1 per cent). Yet the Chinese language is such a strong unifying cultural force that those without full mastery of it suffer a political disadvantage. At the simplest level, a Uighur official in Xinjiang will have to use Chinese to communicate with a Chinese official; the latter will not reciprocate in Uighur, unless it is a formal occasion with a translator present.

The Han Chinese cadres also have a different status. They have been appointed by the State to serve in Xinjiang and may be transferred elsewhere in the future. My own impression, based upon observing the way that Chinese and minority cadres behave together, is that there is an air of deference towards the superior culture. A senior Uighur official does not command the automaic respect a Chinese at the same level of hierarchy would enjoy.

The children of a mixed nationality school finish their morning drill, 1,400 of them in unison on the dusty exercize ground. Then they disperse for five minutes free play - Han Chinese children to the left, all cropped black hair and round faces, Uighur children to the right, with a hotch-potch of long noses, broad foreheads, even some ginger hair, and earrings for the girls. There are Hanzuban, Han classes, and Weizuban, Uighur classes, pursuing a common curriculum each in their own language. The Chinese children are supposed to learn some Uighur, but it is not essential to their lives, and recently it has been dropped in favour of English. The Uighur children must learn some Chinese, but how much?

A few minority children, one or two in each Han class, follow the Chinese side of the system. One imagines that their home background and job opportunities will be very different. At Xinjiang University, the separate language streams continue. Minority students do a year of preliminary Chinese, not so that they can join the Chinese language stream, but so they can use original Chinese texts in their subjects.

The language of instruction is Uighur (the lingua franca for the other nationalities too) but the content is mostly Chinese. Only 20 per cent of the textbook material is of Uighur origin, dealing with things like local customs and raising sheep, but at university there is no study of regional history - abolished, I was told, by the Gang of Four. Proper histories of the national minorities have been written but they come in the category of neibu (restricted) material. At the main Urumqi bookshop, and at another one in the biggest department store, I found two recent novels in Uighur and one in Mongolian, as well as a handbook of local traditional medicine. Everything else was translated from Chinese, including the great classial novesl like the Dream of the Red Chamber and the Water Margin. There was a good deal of puzzling over titles by Chinese shop assistants who had no idea what the books were.

The window of a photographer's shop in Shanghai illustrates a new aspect of Chinese life in the 1980s. `Western garments may be hired here,' says the sign, in response to the popular preference for having one's picture taken in foreign clothes. Some samples of the studio's efforts are on display. They include the picture of a real live foreigner - a rather shaggy North European with a large beard - and another of a sharply dressed Chinese lad wearing shades. Then there are some wedding photographs in traditional bridal white, but propped against one of these is a very Chinese slogan: `For the sake of the Revolution, only have one child!'

On a lamp-post farther down the street, the other end of the human cycle in Shanghai is dealt with. `Public cemetery with a view of the hills!', says the fly-poster. A passing Chinese student stops to explain it to me. Space at the Shanghai crematorium is apparently so limited that after three years they throw away the ashes unless you come and collect the urn. Enterprising communes in the countryside now augment their income by selling off minute plots of land for sixty yuan (eighteen pounds or a month's average wage).

Insights like these into the everyday preoccupations of Chinese life make the Cultural Revolution and our former vision of a new socialist man in China seem more than ever unreal. At least in the cities, the picture is now one familiar to us from the developmental experiences of most other Third World countries. It is the same jumble of traditional (Chinese) and modern (mostly foreign-based) images and aspirations, the same articulation of consumer demands none the less real for being posed in a much less advanced economic context than ours. The Chinese say that these demands are all the more intense for having been politically pent up during the Cultural Revolution when it was wiser not to betray any material aspirations.

Another reason is simply that, in spite of what is said about the `wasted years' of the Cultural Revolution, there was continued economic progress, even if by fits and starts. Whereas in the 1960s many people were still saving up for their first bicycle, today in the towns and wealthier rural areas they have the bicycle and the watch and probably the transistor radio too. Add to this the new money released into the economy by recent wage increases and bonuses for industrial workers and we have the familar phenomenon of a lot of money chasing too few goods.

The shafa, a word I had never even heard used on previous visits to China, has now become a new measure of purchasing power. There are single shafas (armchairs) and double shafas (sofas - the word is a Chinese transliteration of our own term). The three-piece suite has appeared on the Shanghai high street at about 400 yuan - more than half a year's wages for the average worker - for a rather shoddy set with simulated leather covers. `But you can get them made much more cheaply by people working on their own, something they were afraid to do in the years of the Gang of Four,' it is explained. Furniture workers are happy to do some moonlighting on their day off from the state-owned factory and build you a single or double shafa in your home.

At the local street market one may see, tacked up on a wall, a duplicated sheet of furniture designs which can be bought for a few fen (cents). These free markets are themselves a new concession to consumer demand, abhorrent to anyone who still believes in the `progressive limitation of bourgeois rights,' but they are on quite a limited scale and seem very popular. `It means that you can get eggs when you want them, and more vegetables in the winter.'

The peasants with produce from their small `private plots' may have travelled through the night to be there at dawn, dozing on their barrows as they wait for the first six o'clock customer. They must pay a small stall fee to the market inspector, who is supposed to check for excessive prices and prohibited items. Prices that I saw were not wildly above those in the state markets. Shopping is a lively collective business in which everyone standing around is quick to denounce the seller of peanuts asking for five fen more than the accepted price that day.

Outside the main department stores in Beijing and Shanghai, the crowds gather to gape at Japanese colour TV sets on sale for 1,000 yuan (three years' wages for the average worker) and other bits of expensive electronics. Is this really a common aspiration in the same category as the need for more vegetables and cheaper furniture - or do the displays of Sony, Sanyo, Hitachi and Toshiba serve a more subtle purpose? Though the brand name differs, the marketing approach is the same everywhere. An entire shop window has been filled with the products of the company concerned, in the home setting of a model consumer family - Mum and Dad plus child. Dad looks Eurasian, and is listening to his stereo on a headset. Mum has an apron, blonde hair and nice European legs. She may be doing the ironing, or usiing one of those new vacuum cleaners which can get into all the corners. The son in the Toshiba display on Xidan (Beijing) is wearing a Snoopy shirt and looking bored. The daughter on Nanjing Road (Shanghai) is wearing shorts and has the looks of a trim nymphet. It is all absolutely amazing for the crowd, rarely less than a hundred strong, pressing its collective nose against the shop window.

The goods displayed are not entirely for show: I myself saw two purchasers of Hitachi colour TVs manoeuvring their cartons onto the back of a bicycle or into a pedicab. Often a Chinese-made equivalent product is available - including stereo sets and TV - at a lower price. But it can only be purchased with coupons which are allocated in very restricted numbers through one's place of work.

What I found most disturbing was the lack of any clear rational economic argument for these displays, which are backed up by giant ads on the billboards. In the end I had to conclude that the answer most frequently given was the right explanation. `It will show the masses how hard we must struggle to catch up with the advanced technology of the developed world. It will encourage them to work harder for the Four Modernizations.' This makes sense of a sort. The sustaining myths of the Cultural Revolution, based on an anti-materialistic philosophy which may have been partly bogus but was compelling at the time, have been systematically and scornfully demolished. The gap has been partly filled by the quite reasonable demands of the Chinese people for a higher standard of living, after fifteen years in which nobody got a wage rise and it seemed as if not a single building in the capital city of Beijing had received a lick of new paint.

But the masses do not demand, unprompted, these expensive goodies from abroad. Just as the ads have replaced the quotations from Mao on the billboards, so these inviting displays are an act of official propaganda, a deliberate attempt to substitute the myths of consumer socialism for those of a revolution which went wrong.

The old men who run China have been offered a nice deal by Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping, himself in his 70s and pledged to retire before 1985. They can take their well-deserved rest on 120 per cent full pay, the story goes, plus retaining the office car for their personal use. The problem is that most of them still prefer to hang on to power.

A revolution that has aged means inevitably that its leadership has aged with it. In the absence of the job mobility associated with capitalism, where dud ministers can move painlessly into company boardroooms, old cadres never seem to die. China's system of work organisation means that the perks of high office go with the `unit' - danwei - to which one belongs, right down to the provision of free cinema tickets. They cannot be bought with a retirement bonus.

`The old cadres in our place may have been fine in the past', says one impatient Chinese in his late 30s. `But now they take five hours to read a document you or I could finish in one.'

During the Cultural Revolution, there was a new institution, or at least a new aspiration, called the Three-way Alliance, which was intended to bring together `the old, the middle-aged and the young' in equal and harmonious shares of power. One used to meet them all together, smiling a bit too emphatically, on the 'revolutionary committees' which took over management in factories, schools and local goverment. Now the managers have come back, and new measures of social and economic stratification - such as restoration of academic titles and selective pay increases to the better qualified - have only helped to widen the generation gaps. The young are impatient with the middle-aged, the middle-aged with the old, and he old - it sometimes seems - with everyone else. One might say that age warfare has replaced class warfare.

`We have seventy teachers in our schools', a junior member of staff at a university in Tianjin told me, `but less than a third of them teach. There are fifteen more working on a dictionary of Chinese-German synonyms, and the rest just collect their pay.'

At the other end of the scale, many of the young people living off their wits in Shanghai have escaped from the land, illegal returnees from Xinjiang in the North-west or Heilongjiang in the Northeast, without proper papers or ration coupons. Although no numbers are given, enough have come back for this to be officially cited as an important factor in the housing shortage.

The crime and illegal trading generated by these problems is only a symptom of much deeper discontent. Twelve million students went `down to the countryside' during the years 1968-76, of whom more than a million came from Shanghai, and only a small number have been allowed back. Those who remain, like the ones in the Aksu Reclamation Zone of Western Xinjiang, whose `illegal organisations: have recently been banned, not have no future, but have been deprived of the political rationale which partly sustained their exile.

`What did you think at the time?' I asked one student of a foreign languwge college who spent six years in the countryside.

`Of course, then, I believed it was a good thing. I would learn what manual labour was like and help to bridge the gap between the worker and the peasant. But now I know I have lost six years of my life.' This student belongs to a particularly vulnerable group who returned to higher education at the end of the Cultural Revolution, having earned their ticket as gongnongbing `worker-peasant-soldiers' in the portmanteau phrase for those who had been `steeled through labour' in factories, villages or in the army.

This year the class of '76 will graduate all over China, yet so far there is confusion as to how they will be examined and whether they will merit proper graduate status and the same job prospects. At the national level, the intellectuals who have regained control of education and research say with resignation: `We have lost a whole generation, maybe two'.

It is little wonder if those who are lost, and cannot even fill their rice bowls by legitimate means, should find it necessary to sell mimeographed love stories or Turtle shirts or foreign coins cadged from tourists on street corners.