The Cultural Revolution

Origins: two lines after the Great Leap

After 1962 Mao withdrew to the “second line” while Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping ran daily affairs, and the adjustment policies restored the economy. Mao saw this as “revisionism” and “restoration of capitalism”. In the Socialist Education Movement (1963–1966) Liu’s work-team methods clashed with Mao’s definition of “those in authority”, and the “twenty-three articles” of 1965 shifted the target to “those in authority within the party taking the capitalist road” — the logic that had branded the Soviet Union revisionist in the Sino-Soviet polemics turned inward. Source 1 · Source 2

Mao had three weapons: the Mao cult and the Little Red Book that Lin Biao had introduced into the army; the culture-and-theory group of Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng and Chen Boda; and mass mobilisation outside the party apparatus. Yao Wenyuan’s attack on Hai Rui Dismissed from Office in November 1965 targeted the Beijing mayor Peng Zhen and his “independent kingdom”, and the May 16 Notification of 1966 removed Peng, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun, declaring that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had infiltrated the party, state, army and culture. Source 3) · Source 2

Summer 1966: the Red Guards

When Mao endorsed a Peking University poster of 25 May as “the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in the country”, the student movement exploded. The work teams Liu Shaoqi sent to restore order were denounced in Mao’s own poster of 5 August, “Bombard the Headquarters”, as a “bourgeois dictatorship”. The Eleventh Plenum formalised the Cultural Revolution in the “sixteen points”, made Lin Biao sole vice-chairman and dropped Liu to eighth in rank. Source 2 · Source 4

On 18 August Mao received a million Red Guards at Tiananmen, and eleven million attended eight receptions through November. In the name of “destroying the Four Olds” Red Guards ransacked homes, destroyed cultural relics and beat teachers and people of “bad class origin”; in Beijing alone 1,772 were beaten to death in August and September. The “old Red Guards” of cadre children, preaching the “bloodline theory”, led the first phase; from December “rebel” groups emerged and attacked the party organisation itself. Source 5 · Source 6

1967: power seizures and armed struggle

In January 1967 Shanghai’s worker rebels (Wang Hongwen), guided by Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, seized the municipal government, and Mao endorsed it as the “January Storm”. “Power seizures” followed across the country, but factions fought over who were the true rebels. In February the protest of veterans — Ye Jianying, Chen Yi, Tan Zhenlin — against the Cultural Revolution Group, the “February Countercurrent”, ended in Mao’s rebuke, and the Politburo effectively ceased to function. Source 7 · Source 2

The army was ordered to “support the left” but could not tell which faction the left was. In July the Wuhan incident, in which the regional commander Chen Zaidao detained the centre’s envoys sent to back the rebels, was a crisis of army loyalty, and Mao left Wuhan in haste. All summer factions fought with guns and artillery in Chongqing, Changsha and elsewhere, and in Guangxi massacres and even cannibalism were reported. In summer 1968 Mao sent worker and army propaganda teams into the schools and disbanded the Red Guards. Source 8 · Source 9

The victims: from Liu Shaoqi to the nameless

Liu Shaoqi was dragged to struggle sessions inside Zhongnanhai in 1967, expelled for life in October 1968 as a “renegade, traitor and scab”, and died in custody at Kaifeng in November 1969. Peng Dehuai, He Long and Tao Zhu died under persecution; Deng Xiaoping was sent to a tractor factory in Jiangxi. The “cleansing of the class ranks” (1968–1969) and “one strike, three antis” (1970) campaigns executed and persecuted hundreds of thousands in the provinces, and fabricated cases investigated by Kang Sheng — the “61 renegades”, the “Inner Mongolian People’s Party” — followed. Source 4 · Source 10

The December 1968 order sending educated youth to the countryside moved seventeen million people, and the universities admitted no new students until 1970. Estimates of the dead range widely, from half a million to more than two million, and Ye Jianying said in 1978 that a hundred million had been persecuted. Intellectuals, teachers and doctors, the families of the “five black categories”, ethnic minorities and religious believers suffered most; Tibet’s monasteries and cultural relics throughout the country were destroyed. Source 11 · Source 2

The death of Lin Biao and the visit of Nixon

The Ninth Congress of 1969 wrote Lin Biao into the party constitution as successor, and the army ruled the provinces through revolutionary committees. But at the Lushan plenum of 1970 Mao clashed with Lin Biao and Chen Boda over restoring the state chairmanship, removed Chen and turned the pressure on Lin. On 13 September 1971 the Trident carrying Lin Biao, his wife Ye Qun and son Lin Liguo crashed at Öndörkhaan in Mongolia. The party announced that Lin had fled after plotting to assassinate Mao (“Project 571”). Source 12 · Source 13

The treachery of the “closest comrade-in-arms” undermined the Mao cult and the Cultural Revolution’s rationale from within. Mao gave Zhou Enlai the task of normalisation and Deng Xiaoping returned in 1973. Abroad, the Soviet threat after the Zhenbao Island clashes of 1969 hastened rapprochement with the United States: Kissinger’s secret visit in 1971, the recovery of the UN seat in October, and Nixon’s visit and the Shanghai Communiqué of February 1972 redrew the map of the Cold War. Under the slogans of “anti-imperialism, anti-revisionism” China joined hands with America. Source 14 · Source 15

1976: three deaths and the arrest of the Gang of Four

The 1974 campaign to “criticise Lin Biao and Confucius” was aimed at Zhou Enlai, and when Deng Xiaoping’s “consolidation” of 1975 showed results the Gang of Four attacked him again through the campaign to “beat back the right-deviationist reversal of verdicts”. After Zhou died in January 1976, a million people brought wreaths and poems to Tiananmen Square at Qingming in April; the authorities suppressed it as a “counter-revolutionary incident”, removed Deng again and made Hua Guofeng first vice-chairman. Source 16 · Source 17

Zhu De died in July, the Tangshan earthquake of 28 July killed 240,000, and Mao died on 9 September. Ye Jianying and Li Xiannian persuaded Hua Guofeng, and on 6 October Wang Dongxing’s Unit 8341 arrested Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan at Zhongnanhai, then Jiang Qing. Hua became party chairman and the “victorious conclusion” of the Cultural Revolution was proclaimed. The special court of 1980–1981 tried the Gang of Four and the Lin Biao group for the crimes of the decade, and the 1981 Resolution on History acknowledged the errors of a movement Mao had “launched and led” while concluding that his merits outweighed his faults. Source 18 · Source 19

Interpretations: ideology, power, society

What the Cultural Revolution was remains disputed: interpretations that take Mao’s ideology seriously — the masses supervising a bureaucratised party, “continuous revolution” against revisionism — compete with those that read it as a power struggle to recover the authority lost after the Great Leap (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals), and with those that see the eruption, on Mao’s summons, of social grievances accumulated under the party-state: class-origin discrimination, temporary workers, sent-down youth. Source 20 · Source 2

Official history classes the Cultural Revolution as “ten years of turmoil” but confines its causes to Mao’s errors and their “exploitation” by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, preserving the party’s leading role and Mao Zedong Thought. The frame hardened after 1989, and the 2021 Resolution on History shortened the account further. The “scar literature” and memoirs of the 1980s and scholarship in Hong Kong and abroad keep memory alive, but systematic research and commemoration remain restricted on the mainland. The lost schooling of a whole generation and the experience of the “Red Guard generation” lie beneath the politics of reform-era China. Source 2 · Source 21