Mao’s China · CHAPTER 9 ·
Cultural Revolution
Chapter 9 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “The Cultural Revolution”
In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution against Communist Party leaders he accused of revisionism. Red Guards, reviewed at Beijing rallies of about twelve million in all, attacked the “Four Olds” and beat teachers and officials, and by July 1967, as the Wuhan Incident showed, the army had been drawn in.
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The map above is the world of China, July 1967 — Power seized: the first revolutionary committees.
Part of IB History: The People’s Republic under Mao →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Mao turned the power of the masses against his own Communist Party, the single party that ran every level of government, in 1966, because he had come to believe that its leaders were taking China back towards capitalism. He called the movement a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a drive to purge “revisionists”, officials he accused of abandoning revolution while keeping its name, much as a zealot accuses priests of heresy, and to remake culture, education and habits of mind. Its shock troops were the Red Guards, school and university students organised into fighting groups, something like a youth militia sworn to one man, and he reviewed them in vast rallies in Beijing, about twelve million in all. Encouraged to attack the “Four Olds” of old ideas, culture, customs and habits, they ransacked temples and homes, humiliated and beat teachers and officials, and in Beijing alone killed at least 1,772 people in August and September 1966 by the count published in 1980; a later internal figure exceeds 10,000. Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, and Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, who had led the recovery, were denounced and removed, which showed that no office in China could now protect its holder from Mao.
The movement turned to armed conflict once rebels, from January 1967, seized power from the Party committees that governed every province, city and workplace, and it split into factions that fought each other with weapons taken from the army. On the map, every province is hatched with upheaval except six where, in the first half of 1967, revolutionary committees were set up: new governments joining rebels, army officers and approved officials, much like emergency administrations after a coup. In July 1967 the Wuhan Incident, in which troops and a mass organisation defied Mao’s envoys, showed that the army itself could split, and Mao began to restore order through the soldiers. By September 1968 every province had a revolutionary committee and the map turns red again. The killing peaked after order returned, in purges carried out by the new authorities. Estimates of the dead run from about 750,000 to two million or more, and the memorial markers stand for counties where most victims came from families labelled as class enemies. A class label assigned at land reform could still decide, fifteen years later, who was killed.
The full story
Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, his movement to purge officials he called “revisionists” and to remake Chinese culture, by going around the Communist Party, the single ruling party, which he chaired. In November 1965 a Shanghai critic attacked a play by Beijing’s deputy mayor that Mao read as a veiled defence of his critics, and by May 1966 the capital’s leaders had been purged. A Central Cultural Revolution Group now directed the campaign: a small committee that answered to Mao, bypassed the Party’s normal leadership and included his wife Jiang Qing. On 25 May a lecturer’s poster at Peking University attacked its leaders, and Mao had it broadcast nationally. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping sent work teams to contain the students, and Mao condemned them. His own poster of 5 August, “Bombard the Headquarters”, told the country that the enemy sat in the Party’s leadership. At the first great rally on 18 August he wore the armband of the Red Guards, student fighting groups much like a youth militia sworn to him. The highest authority in the land had licensed rebellion against every other authority.
Violence fell first on teachers, and then on anyone whose home or faith marked them as part of the old society. On 5 August the deputy principal of a girls’ school in Beijing, Bian Zhongyun, was beaten to death by her pupils. The police were told not to interfere. Red Guards searched homes for the “Four Olds”, meaning old ideas, culture, customs and habits; they burned books and wrecked temples, including the graves at Confucius’s birthplace in Qufu. Millions travelled free by train in the “great link-up”, carrying the movement along routes like the red arrows. Most of the first Red Guards were children of officials and army officers who attacked people with “bad” class labels inherited from land reform. Rebels, often from families with poor labels or grudges against their bosses, soon formed rival organisations and turned on the officials themselves. Each group claimed to be the most loyal to Mao, so loyalty became the weapon in every quarrel.
The power seizures of 1967 turned rebellion into civil war in miniature. After rebel workers led by Wang Hongwen took over Shanghai in the January Storm, with Mao’s blessing, rebels everywhere tried to seize Party committees, and the army was ordered to “support the left”. Commanders backed rival factions, which armed themselves from military stores. At Wuhan in July 1967 troops loyal to the regional commander seized two envoys from Beijing while Mao was secretly in the city. Mao now relied on the army to impose order. Revolutionary committees were formed province by province: new governments shared by army officers, rebels and surviving officials, much like emergency rule after a coup. In July 1968 Mao disbanded the Red Guards. The new committees then launched the “cleansing of the class ranks”, a purge of hidden enemies by investigation and forced confession, and most of the movement’s dead were killed in it by militias and officials, as at Dao county in Hunan and across Guangxi. The rebels’ revolution ended in the state’s repression.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why did Mao launch the Cultural Revolution?
Historians explain Mao’s decision through power, ideology and succession, and the evidence supports each in part. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, in Mao’s Last Revolution, show a leader who believed his colleagues had sidelined him after the famine and would repudiate him after his death, as Khrushchev had repudiated Stalin, so he struck first at Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Maurice Meisner gives more weight to ideology, arguing that Mao genuinely feared a new bureaucratic class that would betray the revolution, a fear he set out in the polemics against Soviet “revisionism”. Andrew Walder’s China Under Mao and Agents of Disorder stress the result more than the motive: Mao attacked the party-state from within, so the bureaucracy itself split into warring parts, which explains why the conflict was so violent and so hard to stop. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday present it as revenge and the pursuit of power alone. Most scholars now argue that Mao could not separate his own authority from the revolution, so for him a threat to one was a threat to both.
Who were the Red Guards?
The Red Guards were never a single movement, and research since the 1980s has shown how class background and the politics of the moment divided them. Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen and Jonathan Unger, interviewing former Red Guards in Hong Kong, found that the first groups in 1966 were dominated by children of officials and army officers, who defended the existing order and directed their violence against families with “bad” labels such as landlord or rightist. Students from those stigmatised families, together with workers on temporary contracts and others with grievances, joined the rebel organisations that attacked officials in late 1966 and 1967, as Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun showed for Shanghai’s workers. Andrew Walder’s study of Beijing’s universities, Fractured Rebellion, adds that factions often formed through accidents of timing and local alliances more than through social interests. Women were prominent among the students, and girls’ schools were among the sites of the worst violence in 1966. What united all factions was the language of loyalty to Mao, which every side used to justify attacking the others.
Counting the dead, and who killed them
No full count of the Cultural Revolution’s victims exists, and the best estimates come from patient work with local records. Andrew Walder and Yang Su used the county histories published in the 1980s and 1990s, many of which list deaths, injuries and persecutions, and estimated between 750,000 and 1.5 million dead in rural China, a similar number permanently injured, and some 36 million people persecuted. Walder later put the toll for 1966–69 at between 1.1 and 1.6 million nationally; other estimates run to two million and more. Both studies found that most deaths came in 1968–71, above all in 1968, after revolutionary committees took power, through campaigns such as the cleansing of the class ranks carried out by militias and officials, while the rebels’ own violence killed far fewer. Investigations in the 1980s documented collective killings of “class enemies” in Dao county in Hunan and across Guangxi, including acts of cannibalism. Yang Su’s Collective Killings in Rural China explains such massacres as the work of local authorities who treated a campaign against enemies as a licence to exterminate them.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Mao’s fear of a Chinese Khrushchev. After the famine Mao believed that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were running the country without him and leading it towards capitalism, much as he thought Khrushchev had done in the Soviet Union. The Socialist Education Movement had not removed them, because they controlled the Party machine that ran it. Mao concluded that only a movement from outside the Party, mobilising the young and backed by the army, could purge “those in authority taking the capitalist road”.
A generation raised on the cult. Students in 1966 had grown up with Lei Feng, the Little Red Book and lessons that taught loyalty to Mao above family and teachers. They also faced shrinking chances of university places and city jobs, and in June 1966 the university entrance examinations were suspended altogether. When Mao told them that rebellion was justified, they had both the faith and the frustration to take him at his word. Teachers, who stood for the examinations and the order that had judged them, became the first targets.
Grievances waiting for a target. Seventeen years of campaigns had left many people with grievances: families stigmatised by class labels, workers on insecure temporary contracts, victims of earlier purges and students resentful of privileged classmates. The Cultural Revolution gave them, briefly, the right to attack those in authority. Rebel factions drew on these grievances, which is one reason the movement spread so fast and proved so hard to control. Each faction’s enemies were often personal and local, so the national campaign broke into thousands of separate feuds.
An army ordered to take sides. Mao ordered the army in January 1967 to “support the left” in the power seizures, but nobody could agree who the left was. Regional commanders backed the factions that suited them, and rival groups armed themselves from military depots. A campaign that began with posters and meetings therefore became a series of armed conflicts in which machine guns and even artillery were used in some cities. Once soldiers took sides, the only force that could end the fighting was a decision by Mao about which side the army should back.
THE TURNING POINT
Wuhan, 20 July 1967. The Wuhan Incident was the hinge because it showed Mao that his revolution could split the army, the one institution he could not afford to lose. Troops and the mass organisation “Million Heroes” seized two envoys from Beijing while Mao himself was in the city; he had to be flown out to Shanghai. Mao removed the regional commander, but he also drew back. Within weeks the most radical members of the Cultural Revolution Group were arrested, the army became the arbiter of every province, and the drive to form revolutionary committees accelerated. From this point the Cultural Revolution turned from rebellion to the restoration of order by force.
What it changed
The army becomes the government. Military officers dominated the revolutionary committees, and by 1969 nearly half the Central Committee wore uniform. The army ran factories, schools and ministries, and its leader, Lin Biao, was named Mao’s successor. The cost of ending the chaos was a militarised state, in which political work teams of soldiers and workers took over universities and the army’s methods became the model for civilian life.
The young sent away. Once the Red Guards had done their work, Mao dispersed them. From December 1968 millions of urban school leavers were sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to learn from the peasants, removing the movement’s shock troops from the cities and easing urban unemployment at the same time. About seventeen million young people were sent down by 1980, and for most of them the rebellion ended in a village.
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping destroyed. Liu Shaoqi was expelled from the Party in October 1968 as a “renegade, traitor and scab” and died in custody in Kaifeng in November 1969, denied proper medical care. Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor plant in Jiangxi, and his son was crippled after a fall while held by Red Guards. Deng’s survival would shape China after Mao.
Schools closed, heritage destroyed. Secondary schools and universities stopped normal teaching in 1966, and the university entrance examination did not return until 1977. Temples, libraries, graves and private collections were destroyed in the attack on the Four Olds. China lost a decade of trained graduates and a large part of its material past. The reformers of the 1980s had to rebuild universities, research institutes and professions almost from the beginning.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Cultural Revolution a revolution from below or a purge directed from above?
It was launched from above and became, for a time, a rebellion from below, before ending in repression from above again. Mao chose the targets, licensed the Red Guards, called for power seizures and decided when to end the movement, so the initiative was his throughout. Yet millions joined for their own reasons: students angry at privilege, workers with insecure contracts, families stigmatised by class labels, and officials settling scores, and the research of Perry and Li Xun and of Yiching Wu shows rebels pursuing real grievances. Walder’s work adds a crucial point about the violence, since most deaths were caused by the authorities, militias and army-backed committees in 1968–71, while the rebels’ battles killed fewer. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals emphasise the leader; social historians emphasise the society that responded. A balanced judgement is that Mao opened the door and decided when to close it, while what happened in between depended on millions of local choices. The case shows how authoritarian leaders can mobilise popular anger and how quickly the state reclaims it.
An interesting fact
Mao announced his return to politics in July 1966 with a swim. On 16 July, aged 72, he floated down the Yangtze at Wuhan, and the state news agency reported that he had covered nearly 15 kilometres in 65 minutes, a speed faster than any world record of the time; the current did most of the work. Photographs of the swimming chairman filled the newspapers, and the anniversary of the swim was celebrated with mass swims for years afterwards. The message was political, since two days later Mao was back in Beijing to condemn the work teams.
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