Socialist Education Movement
사회주의 교육운동
The campaign launched in 1963, after the post-Leap retreat, to stop corruption among rural cadres and the “restoration of capitalism”; also called the Four Cleanups, for its audits of accounts, granaries, property and work points. Liu Shaoqi sent work teams that punished grassroots cadres on a large scale, while Mao’s “twenty-three articles” of 1965 shifted the target to “those in authority within the party taking the capitalist road”. That clash led to Liu’s overthrow in the Cultural Revolution.
In depth
The movement began with Mao’s call at the Tenth Plenum in September 1962 to “never forget class struggle”. As household contracting and markets revived in the countryside after the famine and cadres tolerated them, Mao saw a resurgence of class struggle; the “first ten points” of May 1963 ordered the cleansing of cadres by relying on poor and lower-middle peasants.
The method Liu Shaoqi and his wife Wang Guangmei tested at Taoyuan in Hebei — work teams stationed in the village isolating and interrogating cadres — was generalised nationwide in the revised “later ten points” of 1964. Millions of grassroots cadres were investigated and suicides followed. At the end of 1964 Mao attacked the method for “not trusting the masses”, and the “twenty-three articles” of January 1965 redefined the movement as the contradiction between socialism and capitalism.
The phrase “those in authority taking the capitalist road” that appeared in the twenty-three articles became the central slogan of the Cultural Revolution. The Socialist Education Movement was absorbed into it in the countryside, and Liu Shaoqi’s head-on clash with Mao over its methods became the background to his denunciation as “China’s Khrushchev”.