Cultural Revolution 1966-1976: Mao, the Red Guards and Upheaval

The Cultural Revolution was a mass political movement launched by Mao Zedong in China in May 1966 that lasted, in its broadest definition, until his death in 1976. Mao called on young Red Guards and ordinary citizens to attack “bourgeois” elements in the Communist Party and in society, unleashing a decade of persecution, factional violence and cultural destruction that cost hundreds of thousands to millions of lives and left deep scars on Chinese society.

Background: Mao after the Great Leap Forward

The origins of the Cultural Revolution lay in the disaster of the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962. Mao’s drive for rapid collectivisation and industrial growth caused a famine in which an estimated 15 to 45 million people died. Mao stepped back from day-to-day government, and leaders such as head of state Liu Shaoqi and Party general secretary Deng Xiaoping introduced more pragmatic policies to restore the economy.

Mao increasingly suspected that these colleagues were steering China towards what he called “revisionism”, the path he believed the Soviet Union had taken after Stalin. The Sino-Soviet split sharpened these fears. Mao worried that the revolution would be betrayed by a new privileged class of bureaucrats and that his own legacy, and authority, were at risk.

He found allies outside the Party’s regular leadership. Defence minister Lin Biao promoted Mao’s cult in the army and compiled the “Quotations from Chairman Mao”, the famous Little Red Book, first issued to soldiers in 1964. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, a former actress, sought to radicalise literature and the arts, while a group of Shanghai radicals provided intellectual ammunition.

Launch of the movement

The first salvo was cultural. In November 1965 a Shanghai newspaper published an attack by Yao Wenyuan on the historical play “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” by Wu Han, a historian and deputy mayor of Beijing. The critics claimed the play was a veiled defence of Peng Dehuai, the marshal Mao had purged in 1959 for criticising the Great Leap.

On 16 May 1966 the Politburo issued a directive, later known as the May 16 Notification, which warned of “representatives of the bourgeoisie” inside the Party and set up a new Central Cultural Revolution Group. Its members included Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao. Beijing’s Party leadership under Peng Zhen was purged.

On 25 May a philosophy lecturer at Peking University put up a “big-character poster” attacking the university’s leaders, and Mao ordered it broadcast nationwide. Students at Tsinghua University’s attached middle school formed the first “Red Guard” group at the end of May. In August Mao wrote his own poster, “Bombard the Headquarters”, aimed implicitly at Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, and the Party’s Central Committee adopted a 16-point decision formally endorsing the movement.

The Red Guards

On 18 August 1966 Mao, wearing army uniform, received around a million Red Guards at a rally in Tiananmen Square. Over the following months he reviewed an estimated 11 to 12 million young people in eight mass rallies, while students travelled free by train across the country to “exchange revolutionary experience”.

The Red Guards were told to destroy the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. They renamed streets, smashed temples and statues, burned books and paintings and ransacked private homes. In November 1966 Red Guards damaged the Temple of Confucius and the Kong family cemetery at Qufu.

Violence spread rapidly. Teachers, intellectuals, former landlords and people with “bad class backgrounds” were beaten, paraded in dunce caps at “struggle sessions” and sometimes killed. In Beijing alone, official figures later recorded about 1,700 deaths in August and September 1966, a period remembered as “Red August”. Many writers and scholars, including the novelist Lao She, died by suicide after persecution.

Factional war and the army

From early 1967 the movement turned against Party authorities across China. In the “January Storm” rebel groups in Shanghai seized power from the city government. Elsewhere, rival rebel organisations, each claiming loyalty to Mao, fought each other with spears, rifles and even artillery. In July 1967 a mutiny in Wuhan saw a visiting central official detained by local forces.

Mao relied on the People’s Liberation Army to restore order. New “revolutionary committees”, combining army officers, approved rebels and rehabilitated officials, replaced the old local governments by 1968. Factional massacres continued in some provinces, and the most lethal violence of the whole period took place in rural areas in 1967–1968, often during army-led campaigns to “cleanse the class ranks”.

Liu Shaoqi, once Mao’s designated successor, was denounced as a “capitalist roader”, expelled from the Party in October 1968 and died in detention in November 1969. Deng Xiaoping was removed from office and sent to work in a tractor factory in Jiangxi province. Peng Dehuai died in custody in 1974.

Sent down, Lin Biao and the end

Once the Red Guards had served their purpose, Mao dispersed them. From December 1968 the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” movement sent millions of urban young people to live and work in rural villages; by the late 1970s about 17 million had been sent down. Universities had stopped normal admissions in 1966, and the national entrance examination was not restored until 1977.

The Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 named Lin Biao as Mao’s successor in the Party constitution. Yet relations between the two men soured. On 13 September 1971 Lin, his wife and son died when their aircraft crashed in Mongolia while apparently fleeing to the Soviet Union, after what the Party described as a failed coup plot. The affair shook public faith in Mao’s judgement.

In the early 1970s premier Zhou Enlai worked to stabilise government and the economy. China’s foreign policy shifted, culminating in Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated in 1973, but radicals led by Jiang Qing and her allies, later called the Gang of Four, fought to keep the revolution going.

Zhou Enlai died in January 1976. In April crowds in Tiananmen Square laid wreaths in his memory and criticised the radicals; the gathering was dispersed, and Deng was blamed and dismissed again. Mao died on 9 September 1976.

On 6 October 1976 his successor Hua Guofeng, with support from senior military leaders, had the Gang of Four arrested. The Eleventh Party Congress in August 1977 declared the Cultural Revolution over. Deng Xiaoping returned to power and by late 1978 had launched the reform and opening up that transformed China’s economy.

By the numbers

Consequences and legacy

The human cost was enormous. Beyond the dead, millions were imprisoned, tortured, publicly humiliated, separated from their families or deprived of education. A generation of young people lost years of schooling. Countless historic buildings, artworks, books and religious sites were damaged or destroyed, though some treasures, such as the Forbidden City, were protected on Zhou Enlai’s orders.

In 1980–1981 the Gang of Four were tried in a televised trial and convicted; Jiang Qing received a suspended death sentence, later commuted. In June 1981 the Communist Party adopted a resolution on its own history that held Mao chiefly responsible for the Cultural Revolution and described it as the most severe setback the Party and the people had suffered since 1949. It also affirmed that Mao’s achievements outweighed his mistakes.

Inside China open discussion of the period remains limited, and there is no national museum devoted to it. Outside China, memoirs such as Jung Chang’s “Wild Swans” and the work of historians have made the Cultural Revolution one of the best-known episodes of 20th-century communist history.

Myths and facts

• Myth: It was mainly about culture. Despite its name, it was above all a political struggle in which Mao sought to remove rivals and reshape the Party; the attack on culture was one part of it.
• Myth: The Red Guards ran China for ten years. The Red Guard phase lasted only about two years; from 1968 the army and revolutionary committees took control, and most Red Guards were sent to the countryside.
• Myth: Most of the killing was done by students. Students were responsible for much of the violence of 1966, but research shows that the largest numbers of deaths came later, in army-supervised campaigns and rural massacres.

Timeline

• 1965, 10 November: Yao Wenyuan attacks the play “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office”.
• 1966, 16 May: The Politburo issues the May 16 Notification.
• 1966, 5 August: Mao writes “Bombard the Headquarters”.
• 1966, 18 August: Mao receives Red Guards at the first mass rally in Tiananmen Square.
• 1967, January: The “January Storm” seizure of power in Shanghai.
• 1968, December: Mass sending-down of urban youth to the countryside begins.
• 1971, 13 September: Lin Biao dies in a plane crash in Mongolia.
• 1976, 9 September: Mao Zedong dies.
• 1976, 6 October: The Gang of Four are arrested.
• 1981, June: The Party adopts a resolution condemning the Cultural Revolution.

Why it matters

The Cultural Revolution showed how a personality cult and the deliberate breakdown of institutions could turn a society against itself. Its trauma shaped the cautious, reform-minded leadership that followed Mao and remains a defining, and still sensitive, memory in modern China.