May 16 Notification (1966)
5·16 통지 (1966)
The inner-party Notification adopted by an enlarged meeting of the CCP Politburo on 16 May 1966. It revoked Peng Zhen’s February Outline, dissolved the Five-Man Group on the cultural revolution and set up the Central Cultural Revolution Group, and called for the removal of the “representatives of the bourgeoisie” and “persons like Khrushchev” who had sneaked into the party, government, army and cultural circles; it is regarded as the founding document of the Cultural Revolution.
In depth
The enlarged Politburo meeting sat in Beijing from 4 to 26 May 1966 under the chairmanship of State Chairman Liu Shaoqi and concentrated its fire on Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun. Drafted by Chen Boda and revised by Mao several times, the Notification charged that the February Outline had hidden the class struggle behind academic discussion and led the movement “towards the right”. The passage Mao added himself warned that the representatives of the bourgeoisie 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, still trusted and being trained as successors, were “nestling beside us”.
The Notification was at first transmitted only to senior cadres; People’s Daily published the full text on 17 May 1967. It brought down the leadership of the party’s cultural apparatus, and the posters and Red Guard movement that followed went looking for the “enemies within the party” it described. In his speech of 18 May Lin Biao read it as a matter of preventing a coup and of the absolute authority of Mao’s thought. The 1981 Resolution judged the Notification and the Sixteen Points to be the erroneous documents with which the Cultural Revolution was launched in full.