Mao’s political secretary and the codifier of “Mao Zedong Thought”, head of the Cultural Revolution Group until his fall in 1970
“The Cultural Revolution was a mad age, and I was a madman then,” Chen Boda said in 1988, after his release. “My life has been a tragedy; let people draw lessons from it.”
From Fujian, he studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and from 1937 served at Yan’an as Mao’s political secretary, editing Mao’s writings and establishing the term “Mao Zedong Thought”. After 1949 he edited Red Flag and led propaganda work, supplying the theory of the Great Leap, and in 1966 headed the Central Cultural Revolution Group. At the 1970 Lushan plenum he sided with Lin Biao over the state chairmanship, provoked Mao’s anger and fell; in the 1981 trial of the “Lin Biao and Jiang Qing counter-revolutionary cliques” he received eighteen years. He died in 1989.
Career Timeline
- 1958–1966Editor-in-chief of Red Flag
- 1966–1970Head of the Central Cultural Revolution Group