Jacques Guillermaz asked rhetorically of this criticism, "[c]ould the Chinese really have been thinking of Enver Hoxha?" The Sino-Soviet rift and the obsession with Khrushchev's revisionism looms large in the coming of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao saw revisionism and de-Stalinization as a threat not only to his own position but also to the very survival of the Chinese Communist Party as a revolutionary force. Accordingly, an appreciation of Kang's role as a supporter of Mao's line in this period helps explain his return to very near the pinnacle of power a few years later. As an important ally of Mao Zedong's efforts to regain control of the CPC, Kang was an important enabler of and participant in the Cultural Revolution, later described by the CPC's Central Committee as having "lasted from May 1966 to October 1976" and as "responsible for the most severe setback and heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic." The Central Committee resolution concluded that the Cultural Revolution "was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong." In outlining the "errors" that had been made by Mao and others in the run-up to the Cultural Revolution, the Central Committee noted that "[c]areerists like Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, harbouring ulterior motives, made use of these errors and inflated them." Well before the start of the Cultural Revolution as such, Kang played his part in attacking rivals of Mao in the Party leadership, many of whom were unhappy with a range of policies including Mao's refusal to rehabilitate Peng Dehuai, the former Defense Minister and outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. In 1962, Kang used the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, as the basis for reviving the Gao Gang affair, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun and others to reverse the Party's verdict on Gao. As a result of this, Kang was promoted to the secretariat of the Central Committee at the 10th Plenum in August 1962. As MacFarquar writes, Two months later, [Kang] moved to the Diaoyutai guest complex in the capital to mastermind a team of ideologues for the campaign against Soviet revisionism. The most cynical hit-man of Mao's Cultural Revolution swat team was now an agent in place, helping to initiate the domestic and foreign policies that were the prelude to that cataclysm.