The cultural revolution was a political movement in the People’s Republic of China that lasted, by the official reckoning later adopted by the Chinese state, from 1966 until 1976. Its full name in the documents of the period was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched by Mao Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China (hereinafter: the Party), it was presented as an effort to preserve the revolution by removing those said to have taken a capitalist road and by transforming culture, education and thought. Over the decade that followed, it produced widespread political persecution, factional violence, the disruption of education and administration and a struggle for power at the highest levels of the state. This article sets out the principal events in the order in which they occurred.
Background and Origins
By the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong occupied a position of great authority within the Party but had stepped back from the day-to-day direction of government following the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the economic campaign of 1958 to 1962 that had contributed to a severe famine. Practical management had passed to other senior figures, among them Liu Shaoqi, who held the office of President of the People’s Republic, and Deng Xiaoping, the General Secretary of the Party. Historians such as Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals have described a growing divergence between Mao’s continued emphasis on class struggle and ideological purity and the more administrative approach of these colleagues.
Mao came to hold that the Party and the state were in danger of losing their revolutionary character, and that elements within them were steering the nation towards the restoration of capitalism and towards the kind of development he associated with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics after the death of Joseph Stalin. The movement that became the Cultural Revolution grew out of this conviction. Its earliest public episode is generally identified as the criticism, late in 1965, of a historical play entitled Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, written by Wu Han, a writer and deputy mayor of the municipality of Beijing. An article attacking the play, published in Shanghai, was read as a coded political assault on figures in the capital and is often treated by historians as the opening move of the campaign.
The Launch of the Cultural Revolution, 1966
The movement was formally set in motion in 1966. On 16 May, the Party leadership issued a document, later known as the May Sixteenth Notification, which warned that representatives of the bourgeoisie had infiltrated the Party, the government, the army and cultural bodies, and which called for them to be exposed and removed. A small body called the Central Cultural Revolution Group was established to direct the campaign. Among its members were figures who would become closely associated with the movement, including Jiang Qing, who was Mao Zedong’s wife, and Chen Boda, a writer and Party theorist.
In the same period, agitation spread to the universities and schools. At Peking University, a wall poster written by a philosophy lecturer named Nie Yuanzi attacked the university authorities; Mao ordered its text broadcast and published, which encouraged similar actions elsewhere. Students began to organise themselves into groups that took the name Red Guards. In August 1966, a meeting of the Party’s Central Committee adopted a document known as the Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly called the Sixteen Points, which set out the aims and methods of the campaign and endorsed the mobilisation of the masses. During the same month, Mao Zedong wrote his own wall poster under the title “Bombard the Headquarters”, which was understood as a signal directed against Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.
From August 1966, Mao reviewed mass gatherings of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where very large numbers of young people assembled. The Red Guards were encouraged to attack what was termed the “Four Olds”, namely old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. In the months that followed, this licence produced widespread destruction of cultural and religious sites, the burning of books, the public humiliation of teachers, officials and others identified as class enemies and numerous instances of violence, some of it fatal. Free railway travel was granted to Red Guards to spread the movement, and groups travelled across the nation to exchange experience and to carry the campaign into new areas.
Escalation and Disorder, 1967–1968
As the movement developed, it moved beyond the schools and universities into workplaces and organs of government. Early in 1967, in events centred on Shanghai and associated with the activist Wang Hongwen, groups of workers and others sought to seize administrative power from existing authorities, an episode often called the January Storm. Mao Zedong endorsed the seizure of power from those deemed to be following the capitalist road, and existing Party and government bodies were displaced, across the nation. There followed an attempt to construct new organs of administration, called revolutionary committees, which were intended to combine representatives of the masses, the army and reliable officials.
This period was marked by intense factionalism. Rival groups, each claiming to be the true representatives of the movement and the most loyal to Mao, came into conflict with one another, and the disputes frequently turned violent. In a number of places, the fighting involved firearms and resulted in considerable loss of life. The disorder reached into the armed forces and the security apparatus, and in some regions approached a breakdown of public order. The People’s Liberation Army, under the direction of Lin Biao, the Minister of National Defence, was increasingly called upon to restore stability and to support the new revolutionary committees, which gave the army a prominent role in civil administration.
The leading victims of these years included many of the most senior figures in the state. Liu Shaoqi was removed from his offices, denounced, detained and subjected to mistreatment; he died in detention in 1969, though his death was not made public at the time. Deng Xiaoping was stripped of his posts and sent away from the capital. Across the nation, large numbers of officials, intellectuals, teachers and others were investigated, dismissed, imprisoned or sent to perform manual labour; many were subjected to public denunciation meetings known as struggle sessions.
Consolidation and the Rustication of Youth, 1968–1971
By 1968, the leadership moved to bring the most disruptive phase to a close. The Red Guard organisations, having served the purposes for which they had been mobilised and having become a source of disorder in their own right, were disbanded as autonomous bodies. In December 1968, Mao Zedong issued a directive calling on educated young people to go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Under this policy, which is often referred to as the rustication or sending-down movement, very large numbers of urban young people were dispatched to rural areas and frontier regions over the following years, an experience that disrupted the education and careers of an entire generation.
In April 1969, the Party held its Ninth National Congress, which declared the Cultural Revolution a victory and confirmed the changes in the leadership that had taken place. The Congress named Lin Biao as Mao Zedong’s successor, an unusual step that was written into the Party’s constitution. Within two years, however, the relationship between Mao and Lin Biao deteriorated. According to the official account subsequently given by the Chinese state, Lin Biao came to fear for his position and was implicated in a plot against Mao; in September 1971, he died in an airplane crash in the Mongolian People’s Republic while, by that account, attempting to flee. The death of the man who had been designated successor, and the explanations offered for it, are generally held by historians to have damaged the credibility of the movement among the population.
The Later Years, 1972–1976
The years after the death of Lin Biao saw a partial recovery of order and a measure of rehabilitation for some of those who had been removed. Zhou Enlai, the Premier of the State Council, who had remained in office throughout, worked to stabilise administration and the economy. With Mao Zedong’s agreement, Deng Xiaoping was returned to senior office in 1973, taking on responsibilities for the government and the economy as Zhou Enlai’s health declined.
At the same time, the figures most closely identified with the radical direction of the movement remained influential. Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, who were later collectively named the “Gang of Four”, occupied prominent positions and promoted political campaigns through the press and the cultural sphere. Among these was a campaign launched in 1973 and 1974, known as the “Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius” campaign, which paired condemnation of the recently fallen Lin Biao with condemnation of the ancient philosopher Confucius, who had lived in the sixth and fifth centuries before the common era.
The pairing was political rather than chronological: by associating the disgraced Lin Biao with a thinker the radical leadership cast as a symbol of reaction and of the wish to restore an older order, the campaign sought to portray him as a backward-looking opponent of the revolution. It was also widely understood at the time as an indirect attack on Zhou Enlai. A contest over the future direction of policy developed between this group and the older administrators associated with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.
The year 1976 brought a rapid succession of events. Zhou Enlai died in January. In early April, at the time of the Qingming festival, when the dead are traditionally mourned, large numbers of people gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to commemorate him, in a gathering that also expressed criticism of the radical leadership; the authorities cleared the square, and the episode, later called the Tiananmen Incident, was used as grounds to dismiss Deng Xiaoping from his posts once more. Mao Zedong himself died on 9 September 1976. Within weeks, in October, the four figures known as the Gang of Four were arrested on the orders of a leadership that included Hua Guofeng, whom Mao had designated as his successor. Their arrest is conventionally taken to mark the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Assessment and Aftermath
The human cost of the decade is a matter on which estimates vary, and historians have arrived at differing figures for the number who died as a result of persecution, factional violence and the conditions of the period; the published estimates range widely, and the absence of complete records makes precision difficult. There is broad agreement that the movement caused severe disruption to education, to scientific and cultural life, to the administration of the state and to the economy, and that it brought suffering to very large numbers of people across society.
After Mao Zedong’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the leadership moved gradually to reverse the policies of the period. Deng Xiaoping returned to a position of influence and became the leading figure in the changes of economic policy that followed from 1978. In 1981, the Party adopted a formal document, the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, which assessed the Cultural Revolution. That resolution described it as 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, and it attributed primary responsibility to Mao Zedong while distinguishing his errors in this period from his earlier contributions. The members of the Gang of Four were placed on trial in 1980 and 1981 and convicted.
Conclusion
The Cultural Revolution unfolded over a decade, from its launch in 1966 to its conclusion with the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976. It began as a campaign directed from the top against perceived enemies within the Party and state, drew in students and workers through the Red Guards and other organisations, passed through a phase of widespread disorder and factional violence, was brought under tighter control through the army and the rustication of urban youth and concluded amid a struggle for the succession to Mao Zedong. The Chinese state itself, in its resolution of 1981, came to describe the period as a grave error.
From a political science perspective, the Cultural Revolution is a very interesting phenomenon. It stresses that good politics needs to always retain a healthy and nuanced balance between what a people is and what it needs to become to be successful and progressive. The radical and brutal top-down imposition of cultural norms, paired with mechanical policymaking decisions in the fields of education and the economy, disrupted society, culture and the biological foundation of the people. Eventually, the Chinese found and forced their way back to a mode of governance and politics that suits them better, still with the communist ideal as guidance.
It also shows that the organic fabric needs to be the basis for all normative policy changes and strategies. It also determines the speed of change and the sustainability of adopted change. In the Chinese example, the direction and composition of the Cultural Revolution may not have been so far off; otherwise the nation would have turned towards a completely different system, and Chairman Mao and his comrades would be perceived as much worse. However, it was the speed, clumsiness and the radicality which led to the failure of the idea. True change is responsive to the fabric of society. A great leader acknowledges this and pulls people with him; not as a superior, but as the first amongst equals. Only that way, a nation can take action in the present to connect the past to the future.
