The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement that took place in the People’s Republic of China from 1966 until 1976. Set into motion by Mao Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, its stated goal was to preserve ‘true’ Communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Maoist thought as the dominant ideology within the Party. The Revolution marked the return of Mao Zedong to a position of power after the Great Leap Forward.
The movement paralyzed China politically and significantly negatively affected the country’s economy and society. The Revolution was launched in May 1966, after Mao alleged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society at large, aiming to restore capitalism. He insisted that these “revisionists” be removed through violent class struggle. China’s youth responded to Mao’s appeal by forming Red Guard groups around the country. The movement spread into the military, urban workers, and the Communist Party leadership itself.
It resulted in widespread factional struggles in all walks of life. In the top leadership, it led to a mass purge of senior officials, most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. During the same period Mao’s personality cult grew to immense proportions. Millions of people were persecuted in the violent struggles that ensued across the country, and suffered a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and seizure of property.
A large segment of the population was forcibly displaced, most notably the transfer of urban youth to rural regions during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed. Cultural and religious sites were ransacked. Mao officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have ended in 1969, but its active phase lasted until the death of the military leader Lin Biao in 1971. After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping gradually began to dismantle the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution.
In 1981, the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”. Background Great Leap Forward In 1958, after China’s first Five-Year Plan, Mao called for “grassroots socialism” in order to accelerate his plans for turning China into a modern industrialized state. In this spirit, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, established People’s Communes in the countryside, and began the mass mobilization of the people into collectives.
Many communities were assigned production of a single commodity-steel. Mao vowed to increase agricultural production to twice 1957 levels. In the meantime, chaos in the collectives, bad weather, and exports of food necessary to secure hard currency resulted in the Great Chinese Famine. Food was in desperate shortage, and production fell dramatically. The famine caused the deaths of millions of people, particularly in poorer inland regions. The Great Leap’s failure reduced Mao’s prestige within the Party.
Forced to take major responsibility, in 1959, Mao resigned as the State Chairman, China’s head of state, and was succeeded by Liu Shaoqi. In July, senior Party leaders convened at the scenic Mount Lu to discuss policy. At the conference, Marshal Peng Dehuai, the Minister of Defence, criticized Great-Leap policies in a private letter to Mao, writing that it was plagued by mismanagement and cautioning against elevating political dogma over the laws of economics. Following the Conference, Mao had Peng removed from his posts, and accused him of being a “right-opportunist”.
Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, another revolutionary army general who became a more staunch Mao supporter later in his career. While the Lushan Conference served as a death knell for Peng, Mao’s most vocal critic, it led to a shift of power to moderates led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who took effective control of the economy following 1959. By 1962, while Zhou, Liu and Deng managed affairs of state and the economy, Mao had effectively withdrawn from economic decision-making, and focused much of his time on further contemplating his contributions to Marxist-Leninist social theory, including the idea of “continuous revolution”.
This theory’s ultimate aim was to set the stage for Mao to restore his brand of Communism and his personal prestige within the Party. Sino-Soviet Split and anti-revisionism In the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union were the two largest Communist states in the world. While they had initially been mutually supportive, disagreements arose following the ascendancy of Nikita Khrushchev to power in the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin.
In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his policies and subsequently set about implementing post-Stalinist economic reforms. Mao and many members of the Chinese Communist Party were opposed to these changes, believing that it would have negative repercussions for the worldwide Marxist movement, among whom Stalin was still viewed as a hero. Mao believed that Khrushchev was not adhering to MarxismLeninism, but was instead a revisionist, altering his policies from basic Marxist-Leninist concepts, something Mao feared would allow capitalists to eventually regain control of the country.
Relations between the two governments subsequently soured, with the Soviets refusing to support China’s case for joining the United Nations and going back on their pledge to supply China with a nuclear weapon. In 1963, the Chinese Communist Party began to openly denounce the Soviet Union, publishing a series of nine polemics against its perceived revisionism, with one of them being titled On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and Historical Lessons for the World, in which Mao charged that Khrushchev was not only a revisionist but also increased the danger of capitalist restoration.
Yao boldly alleged that Hai Rui was really an allegory attacking Mao; that is, Mao was the corrupt emperor and Peng Dehuai was the honest civil servant. Yao’s article put Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen on the defensive. Peng, a powerful official and Wu Han’s direct superior, was the head of the “Five Man Group”, a committee commissioned by Mao to study the potential for a cultural revolution. Peng Zhen, aware that he would be implicated if Wu indeed wrote an “antiMao” play, wished to contain Yao’s influence. Yao’s article was initially only published in select local newspapers.
Peng forbade its publication in the nationally-distributed People’s Daily and other major newspapers under his control, instructing them to write exclusively about “academic discussion”, and not pay heed to Yao’s petty politics. While the “literary battle” against Peng raged, Mao fired Yang Shangkun – director of the Party’s General Office, an organ that controlled internal communications – on a series of unsubstantiated charges, installing in his stead staunch loyalist Wang Dongxing, head of Mao’s security detail.
Yang’s dismissal likely emboldened Mao’s allies to move against their factional rivals. Luo’s removal secured the military command’s loyalty to Mao. February Outline Having ousted Luo and Yang, Mao returned his attention to Peng Zhen. On February 12, 1966, the “Five Man Group” issued a report known as the February Outline . The Outline, sanctioned by the Party centre, defined Hai Rui as constructive academic discussion, and aimed to formally distance Peng Zhen from any political implications.
However, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan continued their denunciation of Wu Han and Peng Zhen. Meanwhile, Mao also sacked Propaganda Department director Lu Dingyi, a Peng Zhen ally. Lu’s removal gave Maoists unrestricted access to the press. Mao would deliver his final blow to Peng Zhen at a high-profile Politburo meeting through loyalists Kang Sheng and Chen Boda. They accused Peng Zhen of opposing Mao, labeled the February Outline “evidence of Peng Zhen’s revisionism”, and grouped him with three other disgraced officials as part of the “Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique”.
On May 16, the Politburo formalized the decisions by releasing an official document condemning Peng Zhen and his “anti-party allies” in the strongest terms, disbanding his “Five Man Group”, and replacing it with the Maoist Cultural Revolution Group. Early Stage: Mass Movement The May 16 Notification In May 1966, an “expanded session” of the Politburo was called in Beijing. The conference, rather than being a joint discussion on policy, was essentially a campaign to mobilize the Politburo into endorsing Mao’s political agenda.
The conference was heavily laden with Maoist political rhetoric on class struggle, and filled with meticulously-prepared ‘indictments’ on the recently ousted leaders such as Peng Zhen and Luo Ruiqing. One of these documents, released on May 16, was prepared with Mao’s personal supervision, and was particularly damning: Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khruschev for example, who are still nestling beside us. This text, which became known as the “May 16 Notification,” summarized Mao’s ideological justification for the Cultural Revolution. Effectively it implied that there are enemies of the Communist cause within the Party itself: class enemies who “wave the red flag to oppose the red flag. ” The only way to identify these people was through “the elescope and microscope of Mao Zedong Thought. ”
The charges against esteemed party leaders like Peng Zhen rang alarm bells in China’s intellectual community and among the eight non-Communist parties. Early mass rallies After the purge of Peng Zhen, the Beijing Party Committee had effectively ceased to function, paving the way for disorder in the capital. On May 25, under the guidance of Cao Yi’ou – wife of Maoist henchman Kang Sheng – Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy lecturer at Peking University, authored a big-character poster along with other leftists and posted it to a
