Was the Cultural Revolution from below or from above?

The short answer

• 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.

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.