The Cultural Revolution

Origins: two lines after the Great Leap

The enlarged Central Work Conference held in Beijing from 11 January to 7 February 1962 brought together 7,118 cadres and became known as the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference. Mao Zedong criticised himself for the errors of the Great Leap, saying that “the person primarily responsible should be me”, but added that classes and class struggle would exist throughout the socialist stage and that this struggle was protracted, complex and sometimes violent. Liu Shaoqi said that the famine was caused mainly not by natural disaster but by “errors in our work”. After the conference Mao withdrew to the “second line” on economic decisions, and State Chairman Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping cut the urban population, slowed construction and revived agriculture under the eight-character policy of “readjustment, consolidation, filling out and raising standards”. In some areas households even took responsibility for output. In July 1962 Mao confronted Liu: “The Three Red Banners have been refuted, land is being divided up, and you did nothing? What will happen after I die?” 1 2

The international situation fed this distrust. Relations with the Soviet Union soured after Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, and from 1963 the Chinese party branded the Soviet leadership “revisionist” in the Nine Commentaries. Soviet radio told China that Moscow would help “genuine communists” who overthrew Mao and his “erroneous course”, and as the war between the United States and North Vietnam grew the Chinese leaders feared enemy collaborators inside the country. Mao held that capitalist tendencies were growing within China. His diagnosis that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had sneaked into the party, the government, the army and cultural circles turned the critique of the Soviet Union inward, and the Cultural Revolution was justified as a “continuous revolution” in which the masses themselves would remove such people. 1

The conflict between Mao and Liu surfaced in the Socialist Education Movement (the Four Cleanups) begun in 1963. Liu sent work teams into the countryside to investigate corrupt grassroots cadres and spread as a model the “Taoyuan Experience” report written by his wife Wang Guangmei about a brigade in Hebei. Mao thought this missed the root of the problem. On 14 January 1965 the Central Work Conference issued Mao’s remarks as “Some Current Problems Raised in the Socialist Education Movement in the Countryside”, the Twenty-Three Articles, and the target of the movement shifted to “those within the party in authority taking the capitalist road”. When Edgar Snow asked Mao in December 1970 when he had decided that Liu had to be brought down politically, Mao answered: “When the Twenty-Three Articles were issued.” 3 4 5

Mao had three weapons outside the party apparatus. The first was the cult of Mao that Lin Biao had brought into the army: the PLA General Political Department issued Quotations from Chairman Mao for internal use in May 1964, and of this “red treasure book” over a billion official copies are said to have been printed in 1966–1969 alone, with another count of 350 million copies by December 1967. The second was a circle of intimates who spoke for Mao in culture and theory, such as Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng and Chen Boda. The third was mass mobilisation that moved students and workers directly, bypassing the party organisation. Combined, they made the movement of 1966 not a rectification of the party but an attack on the party itself. 1 6

Prelude: from Hai Rui Dismissed from Office to the May 16 Notification

Wu Han, a historian of the Ming and deputy mayor of Beijing, began writing in 1959 about Hai Rui, a Ming official dismissed for remonstrating with the emperor, and completed the Beijing opera Hai Rui Dismissed from Office in 1961; it was first staged early in 1962. In April 1959 Mao himself had urged cadres to tell the truth like Hai Rui, but after Peng Dehuai was purged for criticising the Great Leap at the Lushan Conference the play was read as an allegory casting Mao as the emperor and Peng as Hai Rui. In February 1965 Jiang Qing, working in Shanghai with Zhang Chunqiao, commissioned Yao Wenyuan to write a critique, and Mao revised the draft himself. Published in Shanghai’s Wenhui Bao on 10 November, “On the New Historical Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” charged that the plot of reversing unjust land verdicts gave a focus to a “bourgeois opposition” that wanted to demolish the people’s communes and restore the rule of landlords and rich peasants. 7 8 1

Beijing mayor Peng Zhen shielded his subordinate Wu Han. He kept other papers from reprinting the article for three weeks, allowed it only after Zhou Enlai intervened, and tried to confine the debate to scholarship. The February Outline issued on 12 February 1966 by his Five-Man Group on the cultural revolution warned against dragging current politics into the dispute and threatened the “obstinate Left”. Meanwhile Mao cleared the ground around him. Chief of Staff Luo Ruiqing fell in December 1965 on Lin Biao’s accusations; Yang Shangkun, director of the Central Committee’s General Office, was dismissed on unsubstantiated charges and replaced by Mao’s security chief Wang Dongxing; and Propaganda Department head Lu Dingyi, an ally of Peng, was removed. Deng Tuo, who had written the Notes from Three-Family Village and Evening Chats at Yanshan in Beijing, killed himself in May 1966 as the attacks mounted. 9 1 10 11 12

In May 1966 an enlarged Politburo meeting, with Kang Sheng and Chen Boda in the lead, grouped Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun as an “anti-party clique”, and on 16 May adopted a Notification that revoked the February Outline and dissolved the Five-Man Group. Drafted by Chen Boda and heavily revised by Mao, the document warned that the representatives of the bourgeoisie who had sneaked into the party, government, army and cultural circles would, “once conditions are ripe”, seize power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and that persons like Khrushchev were “still nestling beside us”. The May 16 Notification circulated only among senior cadres until People’s Daily published it on 17 May 1967. The Central Cultural Revolution Group that replaced the Five-Man Group, with Chen Boda as head, Kang Sheng as adviser, Jiang Qing as first deputy, Zhang Chunqiao as deputy and members including Wang Li, Guan Feng, Qi Benyu and Yao Wenyuan, soon became the movement’s command and took the place of the Politburo. 9 13 14 1

Right after the Notification, Lin Biao’s speech of 18 May catalogued historical coups and said its purpose was to forestall a counter-revolutionary coup and establish the absolute authority of Mao’s thought. In a letter to Jiang Qing in July Mao wrote that he had never thought his pamphlets had such magic power and found Lin’s inflation “deeply disturbing”: “the higher one is driven, the harder his fall.” Yet he agreed to circulate Lin’s speech as a party document. The letter was made public only after Lin’s death, and the tension between the man who built the cult and the man who used it led to the confrontation of 1970–1971. 9

Summer 1966: posters, work teams and “Bombard the Headquarters”

With Peng Zhen gone, the Beijing party committee all but ceased to function. On 25 May, guided by Kang Sheng’s wife Cao Yi’ou, Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy lecturer at Peking University, and others put up a big-character poster attacking the university’s party committee and its president Lu Ping. Mao endorsed it as “the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in China” and had it broadcast nationwide on 1 June; on 31 May Chen Boda, with Mao’s approval, had led a work group to take over People’s Daily. Students at the middle school attached to Tsinghua University began to call themselves Red Guards. Students rose against the party organisations of their schools, and on 13 June the suspension of classes and of college entrance examinations was extended nationwide. 1 15 16 2

Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who ran the front line, consulted Mao in Hangzhou and in early June sent work teams into universities and middle schools, trying to keep the movement under party control with “eight rules” such as no beating and no disruption of study and work. But this movement’s targets were the very cadres who made up the work teams. At Tsinghua a work team under Ye Lin, vice-chairman of the State Planning Commission, took over the university party committee and criticised radical students like Kuai Dafu, and Wang Guangmei, who served in it, clashed head-on with Kuai in July. During the so-called “fifty days” work teams in many places branded resisting students as “rightists”. 1 2 17 18

In July Mao, after swimming across the Yangtze at Wuhan to show his vigour, returned to Beijing, accused the work teams of suppressing the student movement and on 24 July decided to withdraw them. The Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee opened on 1 August, and on 5 August Mao wrote “Bombard the Headquarters: My Big-Character Poster”. In the last fifty days or so, he wrote, some leading comrades from the centre down to the localities had, “adopting the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie, enforced a bourgeois dictatorship”, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries and imposed “a white terror”; this should be viewed together with the Right deviation of 1962 and the tendency of 1964 that was “Left in form but Right in essence”. No names were given, but everyone knew the target was Liu Shaoqi. After the plenum Lin Biao became sole vice-chairman and number two, and Liu fell to eighth place and lost his place as heir. 1 5 19 20

On 8 August the plenum adopted the Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Sixteen Points. It defined the Cultural Revolution as “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls” and a new stage of the socialist revolution, and declared the present objective to be to struggle against and overthrow “those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road”, to criticise the “reactionary bourgeois academic authorities” and to transform education, literature and art and the whole superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base. The Sixteen Points turned the student movement into a national campaign drawing in workers, peasants, soldiers and lower cadres. The Decision called for struggle by reasoning, not by force, but party leadership in the schools had already collapsed. 1

Red Guards, “Red August” and the destruction of the Four Olds

On 1 August Mao wrote to the Red Guards of the middle school attached to Tsinghua University backing their “to rebel is justified”. Before a million people in Tiananmen Square on 18 August he put on a Red Guard armband, asked Song Binbin, the schoolgirl who pinned it on him, whether the “Bin” of her name was the “bin” of “refined and courteous”, and told her, “Be martial.” The rally was filmed and seen by about 100 million people in its first month. By November eight receptions had drawn 11 to 12 million people, and in the “great exchange of experience” from September to early 1967 Red Guards travelled the country with free train rides, food and lodging. The mass movement spread an epidemic of meningitis in 1966–1967 that infected over three million and killed more than 160,000. 16 21 1 2

The violence broke out first in the schools. On 5 August Bian Zhongyun, first vice-principal of the girls’ middle school attached to Beijing Normal University, was beaten to death by Red Guards who were mostly her own students, the first educator in Beijing killed by Red Guards. On 22 August Mao approved a Ministry of Public Security document forbidding police intervention in the student movement, and Minister Xie Fuzhi told the police not to arrest Red Guards, saying it did not matter if “bad people” were beaten to death. Official figures of 1980 count 1,772 people killed in Beijing in August and September, 33,695 homes ransacked and 85,196 families driven from the city; official figures of November 1985 put the deaths at 10,275. In suburban Daxing County 325 people, from an 80-year-old to a 38-day-old baby, were massacred between 27 August and 1 September. The writer Lao She, beaten in front of the Confucius Temple on 23 August, drowned himself in Taiping Lake the next day, and the translator Fu Lei and his wife killed themselves in Shanghai on 3 September. In September Shanghai recorded 704 suicides and 534 killings. 21 22 23 24 1 2

The destruction of the “Four Olds”, old ideas, culture, customs and habits, that Lin Biao called for at the rallies began with renaming streets and people in “revolutionary” style and spread to house searches and the destruction of cultural relics. Red Guards laid siege to the Temple and Cemetery of Confucius at Qufu; of the 6,843 sites that Beijing had placed under protection in 1958, 4,922 were damaged or destroyed, and in Beijing alone 2.3 million books and 3.3 million paintings, art objects and pieces of furniture were burned. Temples, churches and mosques were closed or put to other uses, and Tibetan monks were made at gunpoint to tear down their own monasteries. The searches also yielded great wealth: a document of the October 1966 Central Work Conference put the gold alone collected by Red Guards nationwide at 1.1 million taels, about 65 tonnes. 25 1 21 2

The first phase was led by the “old Red Guards”, many of them cadres’ children. Under the “bloodline theory”, “if the father is a hero the son is a real man; if the father is a reactionary the son is a bastard”, they attacked the families of the “five black categories”: landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists. “On Family Background”, written by the young Beijing worker Yu Luoke in the second half of 1966 and published in the Middle School Cultural Revolution Paper in January 1967, rebutted discrimination by class origin head-on and was read across the country, but he was arrested in 1968 and executed on 5 March 1970. When their own parents came under attack in autumn 1966 the old Red Guards lost ground and “rebels” who targeted the party organisation itself rose. At the October Central Work Conference Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping had to criticise themselves for carrying out a “bourgeois reactionary line”, and in December Kuai Dafu led over 5,000 people to Tiananmen and shouted “Down with Liu Shaoqi” for the first time. 16 26 1 17

1967: the January Storm, power seizures and the “February Countercurrent”

In Shanghai, which produced nearly half of China’s industrial output, the movement spread into the factories. On 6 November 1966 the Workers’ Revolutionary Rebel General Headquarters was formed under Wang Hongwen, a security cadre at a textile mill; when the municipal party committee declared it illegal, workers stopped a train and held out at Anting station for three days. Zhang Chunqiao, sent by the Cultural Revolution Group, arrived on 11 November and accepted the Headquarters’ demands. The city authorities organised the Scarlet Guards, mainly skilled workers, to resist; on 30 December the two organisations fought their first major battle at Kangping Road, injuring 91, and a Scarlet Guard general strike paralysed the city’s economy. The People’s Daily New Year editorial of 1 January 1967 proclaimed that the year would be one of “nationwide all-round class struggle”. 27 28

On 4–5 January the rebels seized Wenhui Bao and Jiefang Daily, and on the 6th a struggle rally watched by a million people resolved to dismiss Mayor Cao Diqiu and to make First Secretary Chen Pixian account for his “counter-revolutionary crimes”. Mao endorsed this on the 8th as “one class overthrowing another, a great revolution”, and on the 11th the Central Committee, State Council, Central Military Commission and Cultural Revolution Group jointly sent congratulations. On 5 February the rebels founded the “Shanghai People’s Commune”, modelled on the Paris Commune. But Mao drew back, holding that a commune whose leaders were elected would undermine the authority of the party and the State Council, and on 23 February it became the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee with Zhang Chunqiao as chairman and Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen as vice-chairmen. The commune lasted 18 days. 27 1

Shanghai’s “January Revolution” became the model for power seizures across the country. On 16 January Red Flag wrote that the Shanghai working class had seized power from the “capitalist roaders”, and provincial governments and party organs fell one after another. In Heilongjiang provincial secretary Pan Fusheng led rebels himself and seized power from his own organisation, and in Beijing three groups declared power seizures on the same day. The vacuum was filled by revolutionary committees formed as a “triple alliance” of soldiers, revolutionary cadres and representatives of mass organisations. In January the PLA was ordered to “support the left”, and in March this widened into the “three supports and two militaries”: supporting the left, industry and agriculture, with military control and military training. Yet almost every organisation claimed to be leftist, and commanders close to local party organisations often suppressed the rebels. At the centre Vice-Premier Tao Zhu, ranked fourth, fell in January to attacks by Jiang Qing and Chen Boda. 27 1 29 30

At meetings of the central caucus chaired by Zhou Enlai on 11 and 16 February the veterans exploded. Ye Jianying and Xu Xiangqian accused the Cultural Revolution Group of making a mess of the country and undermining the army; Vice-Premier Tan Zhenlin called the radicals “reactionary” for rejecting party leadership and persecuting people for their family origin; and Chen Yi compared their rise to the transition from Stalin to Khrushchev. Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Li and Yao Wenyuan reported to Mao that night, and on 18–19 February Mao raged at the Politburo and ordered Tan Zhenlin, Chen Yi and Xu Xiangqian to take leave and criticise themselves. The 1981 Resolution records that Li Fuchun, Li Xiannian and Nie Rongzhen had also criticised the errors of the Cultural Revolution and were branded with the “February adverse current”. The veterans were not purged, but the Politburo all but ceased to function and the Cultural Revolution Group took its place. 31 32 33 1

The army and armed struggle: from the Wuhan incident to the workers’ propaganda teams

In Wuhan the “Million Heroes”, mostly skilled workers and state employees, and the “Workers’ Headquarters” of Red Guards and radical workers faced each other with some 500,000 members apiece. Chen Zaidao, commander of the Wuhan Military Region, disbanded the Workers’ Headquarters in March, jailed some 500 of its leaders and backed the Million Heroes. More than 70 people were killed in clashes on 23–24 June alone. On 16 July Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi and Wang Li of the Cultural Revolution Group arrived and demanded support for the Workers’ Headquarters, while Mao himself stayed secretly at the East Lake Guest House. In the early hours of 20 July the Million Heroes and part of Unit 8201 occupied the city’s transport hubs, surrounded the guest house, dragged out Wang Li and beat him until his leg was broken. Mao left for Shanghai by air, breaking a ban on his flying in force since 1959, and Zhou Enlai flew in to settle the crisis. About a thousand people died in Wuhan that July, and across the province 184,000 were seized, beaten, maimed or killed. Chen Zaidao was denounced and dismissed in Beijing and later rehabilitated. 34 35 1

After the Wuhan incident Jiang Qing told Henan Red Guards to “attack with words, defend with weapons”, and rebels took it as licence for armed struggle. Under the slogan of dragging out “the handful in the army”, armouries were looted, and 18.8 million guns, 14,828 artillery pieces and 2.72 million grenades ended up in civilian hands; tanks, armoured vehicles and even warships were used in Chongqing, Xiamen and Changchun. In Chongqing, home to many munitions factories, factional fighting lasted from May 1967 to October 1968. Fearing a backlash from the army, Mao swung behind it in August; Wang Li and Guan Feng were arrested that month and Qi Benyu in January 1968. Deaths in the armed struggles of 1967–1968 are estimated at 300,000 to 500,000, and industrial output in 1967 fell 14% from the year before. 34 1 36 37 2

The worst was Guangxi. While the “United Headquarters”, which backed Wei Guoqing, first secretary of the region and first political commissar of the Guangzhou Military Region, fought the opposing “April 22” faction, local revolutionary committees and militias in 1967–1968 systematically killed the families of the “five black categories” and members of the rival faction. A central investigation team concluded in 1983 that there were 89,810 abnormal deaths with names and addresses alone, and over 100,000 with the missing and unnamed. In Wuxuan County and elsewhere cannibalism took place without any famine: initial records counted 137 people eaten, later released archives 302, and independent researchers have named 421. In Dao County, Hunan, 7,696 people were killed in August–October 1967 and 1,397 driven to suicide. Most of these massacres were led not by Red Guards but by local party and government bodies, militias and the army. 38 39 40 1

From 23 April to 27 July 1968 Kuai Dafu’s Jinggangshan Corps and its rivals at Tsinghua fought the “Hundred-Day War”, which left 18 dead. On 27 July, at Mao’s behest, tens of thousands of workers entered the campus as a “Mao Zedong Thought propaganda team”; five of them were killed by shots and stones. The next day Mao summoned five Beijing Red Guard leaders, Nie Yuanzi, Kuai Dafu, Han Aijing, Tan Houlan and Wang Dabin, to the Great Hall of the People, the only time in the Cultural Revolution that he met student leaders directly. When Kuai protested that a “black hand” had sent the workers, Mao replied, “The black hand is nobody else but me”, and scolded them that after two years of struggle-criticism-transformation they were waging only armed struggle, and that the people, the workers and the students were all unhappy. Worker and army propaganda teams took over the schools, and the Red Guard movement ended. In August Mao sent mangoes given him by the Pakistani foreign minister to the propaganda team, setting off “mango fever” across the country. 17 1

The price of order: cleansing the class ranks, rustication and the death of Liu Shaoqi

Restoring order killed more people than the armed struggle. The Cleansing the Class Ranks campaign began on 25 May 1968 after Mao ordered nationwide circulation of a report, submitted by Yao Wenyuan, on the experience of the military control committee of Beijing’s Xinhua Printing Plant. Military control committees and propaganda teams sorted out “traitors, spies, capitalist roaders and counter-revolutionaries” along with the rebels of the earlier phase; some 30 million people are estimated to have been persecuted and 500,000 to 1.5 million killed. As Andrew Walder sums it up, “the cure for factional warfare was far worse than the disease.” In Inner Mongolia military commander Teng Haiqing claimed that the long-dissolved Inner Mongolian People’s Party had revived and set out to dig out Ulanhu’s “poison”. The 1980 indictment of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate recorded 346,000 arrested, 16,222 killed and over 81,000 maimed; other estimates put the dead at 20,000 to 100,000. Most of the victims were Mongols. 41 1 42 43

The victims at the top went the same way. In January 1967 Kuai Dafu lured Wang Guangmei out with a lie that Liu Shaoqi’s daughter had been in a road accident and took her to Tsinghua, and on 10 April he staged a struggle rally attended by half a million people, in which she was made to wear the qipao from her visit to Indonesia and a necklace of ping-pong balls. Liu himself was dragged to struggle sessions in Zhongnanhai. The Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, 13–31 October 1968, using material assembled by Kang Sheng’s special-case group, branded him a “renegade, traitor and scab” and expelled him for ever. Moved to Kaifeng in Henan on 17 October 1969, he died without treatment on 12 November and was secretly cremated. He Long died in June 1969, Tao Zhu in Hefei that November, and Peng Dehuai in prison in November 1974. Deng Xiaoping was sent in October 1969 to the Xinjian County tractor factory in Jiangxi to work at a lathe; his eldest son Deng Pufang, held by Red Guards, fell from a building in 1968 and was left paraplegic. 18 20 43 44 30 45 46 2

On 22 December 1968 People’s Daily printed Mao’s instruction that “it is very necessary for educated young people to go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants.” By 1978 some 17 million urban youths had been sent to mountain villages, the countryside and frontier farms, which also moved unemployed Red Guards out of the cities. Deprived of university and urban jobs, they called themselves the “lost generation”, and only after mass protests demanding return, in Xishuangbanna in Yunnan and elsewhere at the end of 1978, were they allowed back in early 1979. Persecuted cadres and intellectuals were sent from 1968 to labour in “May Seventh Cadre Schools”. Universities took no new students until 1970 and then admitted “worker-peasant-soldier students” recommended without examinations. In the countryside, on the other hand, cooperative clinics and “barefoot doctors” appeared in every production brigade and primary and secondary schooling spread; by one assessment the share of children completing primary school rose from under half to almost all. 47 48 49 1

Three central directives of 31 January and 5 February 1970 launched the One Strike-Three Anti campaign: the “strike” at counter-revolutionary sabotage and the three “antis” against graft, profiteering and waste. Official figures say 1.87 million people were persecuted as traitors, spies and counter-revolutionaries and over 284,800 arrested or killed in February–November 1970 alone, and most of the 10,402 official death sentences of the Cultural Revolution were passed in this campaign. Yu Luoke, author of “On Family Background”, was sentenced to death with nineteen others at a mass trial of 100,000 people in the Beijing Workers’ Stadium on 5 March 1970 and executed at once. At the same time the hunt for “May Sixteenth elements” swept away the early rebels once more. 50 26 2

The fall of Lin Biao and rapprochement with America

The Ninth Party Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People on 1–24 April 1969, gathered 1,512 delegates said to represent some 22 million members, but they came by selection of revolutionary committees, not by election of members. Lin Biao gave the political report, and the party constitution named him “Chairman Mao’s close comrade-in-arms and successor”; no other communist party had written the successor to a sitting leader into its constitution. Of the 279 full and alternate members of the new Central Committee only 53 had sat on the Eighth, and soldiers made up over 28%. The Politburo Standing Committee consisted of Mao, Lin Biao, Chen Boda, Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng. The 1981 Resolution judged the congress’s guidelines “wrong, ideologically, politically and organizationally”. 51 1 33

Just before the congress, on 2 March 1969, Chinese troops ambushed Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri, and in August Soviet forces struck back at Tielieketi in Xinjiang; there are documents indicating that Moscow considered a nuclear strike. The crisis eased after Kosygin and Zhou Enlai met at Beijing airport on 11 September, but in October the leadership was evacuated from Beijing, and on 18 October Lin Biao issued “Order Number One” putting the whole army on war footing without going through Mao. The threat of war raised the weight of the army and of Lin, and one interpretation holds that Mao’s turn towards the United States was partly a way to avoid military dominance. 52 1

At the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee at Lushan in August 1970, Lin Biao’s camp pressed for restoring the office of state chairman, which Mao wanted abolished, and for Mao’s “genius” theory, with Chen Boda in the lead. Mao denounced Chen as a “false Marxist”, brought him down and made Lin’s generals write self-criticisms. According to the official account, Lin’s son Lin Liguo, deputy director of the Office of the Air Force Command, drew up a coup plan, the “Outline of Project 571”, with confidants in Shanghai in March 1971; “571” (wu qi yi) sounds like “armed uprising”. Whether Lin himself was involved is disputed. When word reached Beidaihe that Mao had criticised Lin on his southern tour of August–September, Lin’s daughter Lin Liheng warned the guard unit on the night of 12 September that her father might be taken away. At about 0:30 on 13 September a Trident carrying Lin Biao, Ye Qun and Lin Liguo took off from Shanhaiguan airfield; asked whether to shoot it down, Mao reportedly said, “Let him go.” The aircraft crashed near Öndörkhaan in Mongolia at about 2:30 a.m., killing all nine aboard. 53 54 55 56 57 1

A Soviet team identified Lin and Ye Qun from their skulls in 1972 and judged that the aircraft had enough fuel to reach Irkutsk or Chita. Many records were destroyed with Politburo approval under Hua Guofeng, and the full story remains unclear. Air force commander Wu Faxian, chief of staff Huang Yongsheng and other military chiefs were suspended at once, and over a thousand senior officers were purged within a month. The National Day celebrations of 1 October were cancelled, and the public was told only in June 1972. The betrayal of the “closest comrade-in-arms” undermined the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution and the myth of Mao’s infallibility from within. Abroad, rapprochement was already under way: Mao had stood Edgar Snow beside him on the Tiananmen rostrum on National Day 1970, and after the world table tennis championships at Nagoya in April 1971 China invited the American team. Kissinger visited Beijing secretly in July, on 25 October the UN General Assembly gave China’s seat to the People’s Republic, and from 21 to 28 February 1972 Nixon visited China and issued the Shanghai Communiqué. Under the slogans of anti-imperialism and anti-revisionism China joined hands with America against the Soviet Union. 53 58 59 60

1972–1976: the Gang of Four, consolidation, the April Fifth movement and 6 October

After the Lin Biao affair Mao suffered a stroke in January 1972, and Zhou Enlai, now running day-to-day affairs, rehabilitated purged cadres and proposed criticising the “ultra-Left trend”. Mao, however, still held that the task was to oppose the “ultra-Right”. Wang Hongwen, brought from Shanghai at 38 in September 1972, became vice-chairman second only to Zhou at the Tenth Congress in August 1973, and Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen formed a Gang of Four inside the Politburo. Deng Xiaoping returned as vice-premier in March 1973. In late 1973 and 1974 Jiang Qing’s camp ran the campaign to Criticise Lin Biao and Confucius, aiming at Zhou through allusions to the Duke of Zhou; Mao, seeing that they were after power, warned them not to form a “gang of four”. 1 53 61 33 62

At the Fourth National People’s Congress in January 1975 Zhou Enlai again set out the Four Modernisations. Standing in for the hospitalised Zhou, Deng Xiaoping became vice-premier, chief of the general staff and party vice-chairman, and “consolidated” the railways, the steel industry and the army; production recovered. But when consolidation looked like a negation of the Cultural Revolution, Mao launched the campaign to “counter the Right-deviationist trend to reverse verdicts” at the end of 1975, and the Gang of Four attacked Deng and Zhou through commentary on Water Margin and a campaign against “empiricism”. Zhou Enlai died on 8 January 1976. Deng read the eulogy at the memorial on 15 January, but Mao chose neither the Gang nor Deng but Hua Guofeng as acting premier. When Wenhui Bao on 25 March cast Zhou as a “capitalist roader inside the party”, protest erupted in Nanjing at the end of March and spread across the country. 1 61 2 63 64

On 4 April, the eve of the Qingming festival, wreaths, poems and placards mourning Zhou piled up beneath the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, and up to two million people visited the square that day. They came from every stratum, from peasants to senior officers and cadres’ children; the poems attacked Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, and some targeted Mao and the Cultural Revolution itself. That night the Politburo labelled it a “counter-revolutionary incident” and removed the wreaths. On the morning of the 5th an angry crowd burned police cars and forced its way into nearby buildings, and that night militia and police cleared the square with clubs. Many were arrested and sentenced to prison or labour camps, and similar events took place in Zhengzhou, Kunming, Taiyuan, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou and elsewhere. On 7 April Deng Xiaoping, branded the “mastermind”, was stripped of all posts inside and outside the party, and Hua Guofeng became first vice-chairman of the party and premier. 65 1 66

Zhu De died on 6 July, and on 28 July the Tangshan earthquake killed 242,469 by official count, at least 300,000 by historians’ estimates and over 655,000 by some estimates. Mao Zedong died on 9 September. Hua Guofeng claimed the succession through a note Mao was said to have left him, “With you in charge, I’m at ease,” while the Gang of Four trumpeted the “established principles” in the press and kept the Shanghai militia on alert. Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, director of the General Office, joined Hua, and Li Xiannian and Chen Yun stood with them. On the evening of 6 October Hua called Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan to Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai for a Standing Committee meeting, and Unit 8341 arrested them and then Jiang Qing at her residence. Mao’s nephew Mao Yuanxin was also seized, and supporters summoned to a “meeting” were taken in Shanghai. The day after this bloodless coup Hua became party chairman and chairman of the Military Commission. In August 1977 the Eleventh Congress declared the “first Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” victoriously concluded, but kept the line of “taking class struggle as the key link”. 67 62 68 63 2

Assessment: resolution, trial, numbers and interpretations

The reckoning went under the name of Boluan Fanzheng, “bringing order out of chaos”. The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978 reversed the verdict on the 1976 Tiananmen incident, declaring it a revolutionary event; the Fifth Plenum in February 1980 rehabilitated Liu Shaoqi as “a great Marxist”, and Deng Xiaoping delivered the eulogy at a memorial in the Great Hall of the People in May. Within a few years more than three million “unjust, false and erroneous cases” were redressed. From November 1980 to January 1981 a special tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court tried the Gang of Four and survivors of the Lin Biao group, sentencing Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao to death with reprieve (later commuted to life), Wang Hongwen to life and Yao Wenyuan to twenty years. The indictment’s figures for those persecuted and killed are reported differently: 729,511 persecuted and 34,800 dead in one account, about 750,000 persecuted and 34,375 dead in another. 1 20 62 65

On 27 June 1981 the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, drafted over fifteen months under Hu Qiaomu and revised repeatedly by Deng. It declared that the Cultural Revolution of May 1966 to October 1976 “was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”, that it “was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong”, and that chief responsibility for its “grave ‘Left’ error, an error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration” lay with him. At the same time it said that careerists like Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng had exploited and inflated his errors, separating the crimes of two “counter-revolutionary cliques” from Mao’s “errors”, and concluded that “his merits are primary and his errors secondary”. The familiar “70 per cent right, 30 per cent wrong” does not appear in the text, but became its accepted gist. The Resolution divided the Cultural Revolution into three stages and returned to the judgment of the Eighth Congress of 1956 that class struggle should not be the key link. 69 33 70

The death toll can still be given only as a range, because the records are secret and it is hard even to decide which deaths to count. Andrew Walder and Su Yang, analysing 1,520 county gazetteers published after 1987, estimated 750,000 to 1.5 million deaths in the countryside alone, a similar number permanently injured, and 36 million persecuted. Chen Yung-fa gives at least 1.72 million, Ding Shu about two million, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday at least three million, and Rudolph Rummel 7.73 million. Ye Jianying is reported to have told the Central Work Conference in December 1978 that “twenty million died and a hundred million were persecuted”, but this survives only in secondary works. Partial estimates fill in the range: at least 300,000 killed in massacres, 300,000 to 500,000 in armed struggles, and 100,000 to 200,000 suicides in the early phase alone. For the economy, official statistics show gross industrial and agricultural output falling 9.6% in 1967 and 4.2% in 1968 and then recovering, for an average annual growth of 7.1% over 1967–1976; the hydrogen bomb and the first satellite also came in these years. 2 1

Interpretations of what drove the decade also diverge. One takes seriously Mao’s idea that the masses should supervise a bureaucratised party and prevent revisionism and the restoration of capitalism through “continuous revolution”; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’s Mao’s Last Revolution, the standard narrative, treats it as a power struggle to regain authority after the failure of the Great Leap. Social historians argue that conflicts built up under the party-state, such as discrimination by class background, the position of temporary and contract workers and the grievances of sent-down youth, burst out at Mao’s call. Stuart Schram weighed the horrors of the Cultural Revolution against the gains of land reform and the First Five-Year Plan; Frank Dikötter completed his People’s Trilogy with The Cultural Revolution in 2016, and Yang Jisheng published The World Turned Upside Down the same year. The records of those who died rebutting its logic from inside the movement, like Yu Luoke and Zhang Zhixin, executed in 1975, add weight to these readings. 71 1 72

Official history defines the Cultural Revolution as the “ten years of turmoil” but confines its causes to Mao’s errors in his later years and their “exploitation” by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, preserving party leadership and Mao Zedong Thought. In the 1980s “scar literature”, memoirs and the New Enlightenment kept memory alive, but after 1989 the framework hardened, and the third historical resolution of 2021 shortened the account of the Cultural Revolution. Systematic research and commemoration on the mainland remain restricted. The questions the decade leaves the socialist movement are heavy. A call for the masses to rise against the party bureaucracy produced a Shanghai Commune modelled on the Paris Commune and withdrew it after 18 days, and the freedom to “rebel” ended in a leader cult, persecution by class origin and massacres led by the army. The lesson that resistance to bureaucratisation cannot rest on mobilisation borrowed from one man’s authority stayed at the bottom of reform-era Chinese politics, together with a whole generation’s lost schooling and the experience of the “Red Guard generation”. 1 73 74 69