"The Cultural Revolution not only failed to produce permanent institutions of popular self-government but also failed to resolve the more immediate problems of political succession. One of the original aims of the Cultural Revolution was to "train revolutionary successors." But in the summer of 1968, when Mao summoned Red Guard leaders to his "proletarian headquarters" to inform them that the time had come to end their rebellions (and then dispatched most of their followers to the countryside), it was an admission that the young generation had failed the political test. Nor did the Cultural Revolution yield an answer to the short-term question of political succession at the top-in effect, the question of who would (or who possibly could) succeed Mao. If the masses were politically quiet after 1968, that was not the case in the Politburo, where the unresolved issues of the Cultural Revolution were to erupt into fierce political struggles in the 1970s and throw its participants into a Byzantine world of political intrigue."