ON THIS DAY ·
Wuhan Incident
20 Jul 1967 — Soldiers and the mass organisation “Million Heroes”, backed by the regional commander Chen Zaidao, seize two envoys from Beijing while Mao himself is secretly in the city. Mao is flown out to Shanghai and Chen is removed. The incident showed how close the movement had come to splitting the army.
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The moment in context
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.
From Cultural Revolution, chapter 9 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1967).
The place: Wuhan Incident — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- 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…
- The turn — 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.…
- 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,…
Then ask the room: Was the Cultural Revolution a revolution from below or a purge directed from above? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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