Chinese Cultural Revolution

Date: 1966 to 1976

Place: China

Significance: In an attempt to transform China into a “pure” socialist state, Mao Zedong mobilized millions of workers and students to burn books and attack anyone deemed “bourgeois,” leaving him the only voice in China

Mass persecution of intellectuals is a Chinese tradition that started with Emperor Shih huang-ti in the third century b.c.e. Shih had hundreds of Confucian scholars killed, and he burned many books in order to establish an ideology favorable to his regime. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party, led by Mao, launched several movements to suppress dissenting intellectuals and officials, thereby sowing the seeds for the future Cultural Revolution. In 1957 Mao advocated the “Hundred Flower Blossom” movement, inviting intellectuals to criticize party leadership. However, when criticism turned on one-party dictatorship, Mao abruptly declared his critics “rightists” and sent a half million of them to labor camps. Two years later, when Defense Minister Peng Dehua criticized Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” movement—an ambitious economic program that had created a nationwide depression—Mao launched a campaign to purge Peng and his friends. During the early 1960’s, in the midst of the open debate and split with the Soviet Union, Mao conducted the “Socialist Education Movement” to “rectify party powerholders who take the capitalist road.” Mao aimed to prevent China from becoming like the Soviet Union, which he regarded as a capitalist country in disguise. The final catalyst of the Cultural Revolution came from Wu Han, a leading nonparty intellectual and deputy mayor of Beijing, who published a historical play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, depicting an honest official in the Ming Dynasty who lost his job after pointing out the mistakes of the emperor’s land program. In late 1965 radical communists in Shanghai called the play a veiled defense of ousted Peng and—by extension—an attack on Mao, sparking a nationwide debate on Wu’s play and works by other intellectuals.

Cultural Revolution: First Phase

As criticism of Wu and other intellectuals spread in schools across the country in early 1966, some party officials such as Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, partly succeeded in organizing the debate as an academic one, instead of one symbolizing life-and-death struggles among the proletariat and bourgeoisie and true Marxists and party reactionaries—the view Mao favored. In May, 1966, the first big-letter wall poster appeared at Beijing University, charging the administration of trying to suppress the Cultural Revolution. The poster, published nationwide by Mao’s order, rallied millions of people, who used wall posters to denounce intellectuals and government cadres as “bourgeois reactionaries.” In June, Mao’s political opponents, Chairman of the Republic Liu Shaoqi and Party Secretary General Deng Xiaoping, dispatched to universities and schools workteams which led counter-attacks on many students, teachers, and low-level cadres, calling them “reactionaries.” The tide turned again in August when Mao criticized the workteams for suppressing “revolutionary students” and ordered their withdrawal. Mao also published his own big-letter poster—“Bombard the Headquarters,” which endorsed the Red Guards (students and workers), whom he used to sweep his political enemies, Liu, Deng, and their allies out of power. In the frenzy of eradicating “bad elements,” the Red Guards beat up, killed, and imprisoned millions with “bourgeois ideology” or born into a “bourgeois family.” They also burned and banned books written by Westerners and ancient Chinese authors.

While attacking and seizing power from intellectuals and government officials, the Red Guards also turned on one another as different internal factions tried to prove that they alone were true Mao loyalists and others were disguised bourgeois defenders. In late 1966 and 1967, oral debates on university campuses turned into armed clashes and bloodshed in many cities, stopped only when teams of soldiers and factory workers were sent to schools to take control. Starting in late 1968, as most radical students were sent by Mao to the countryside to be re-educated, order gradually returned to schools and factories, and studying Mao’s works became the focus of the revolution. In April, 1969, Lin Biao, the designated successor of Mao, declared the Cultural Revolution to be in a new phase.

Issues and Debates

Intense as they were, no debates among the people and factions of Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution were free of Mao’s own political framework, which was published in party newspapers. Every debate—whether it be on Chinese traditional music, school reform, or industrial policy—was conducted with an underpinning theme: to discover the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Everything was seen as a two-line struggle between Mao’s proletarian ideology and Liu’s bourgeois ideology. The central concern of the debates and the reforms that emerged from them was how to promote Mao’s line and suppress the bourgeois line. For example, the central issue of the “revolution in education” was how to bridge the gap between intellectuals (representing the bourgeoisie) and manual laborers (representing the proletariat) through reforming or re-educating intellectuals and students so that they would acquire the proletarian ideology. The debate led to a number of reforms, such as recruiting college students only from among workers and peasants with five years of work experience, and sending millions of high school graduates to the countryside to be re-educated by peasants. Similarly, the debate on the “revolution in art” led to the abolishment of the traditional Peking Opera, which was based on stories of emperors and Confucian intellectuals. It was replaced by “Modern Peking Opera” featuring proletarian heroes.

Cultural Revolution: Second Phase

From April, 1969, to October, 1976, when the Communist Party formally declared the end of the Cultural Revolution, there were additional large-scale political campaigns and debates. However, they were no longer spontaneous; they were orchestrated by the government to promote Mao’s ideology or to discredit political opponents. For example, in 1972, after Lin Biao died in a plane crash during a coup attempt, a nationwide campaign was launched and millions were instructed to criticize him and Confucius, for Lin was discovered to have admired Confucius greatly. In April, 1976, Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’in, and her allies mobilized the masses to criticize Deng as the unrepentant bourgeois capitalist. After Mao’s death and the arrest of his wife and her friends in October, 1976, Deng’s allies launched campaigns to discredit them, blaming them for all the sufferings caused by the Cultural Revolution.

Aftermath

The Cultural Revolution’s decade-long destruction of schools and teachers, and its discredit of Confucianism, left a generation of Chinese youths with little education or sense of cultural heritage. The damage it did was still evident decades later. At the same time, however, the Cultural Revolution’s many political flip-flops greatly weakened the public’s faith in communist ideology. After the Cultural Revolution, intellectual freedom not seen since the founding of communist China began to flourish, even though direct criticism of the government was still forbidden.

The official stance of the Chinese Communist Party since 1981 has been to condemn the Cultural Revolution and assign primary responsibility to Mao, while softening this criticism of Mao by asserting that he was manipulated by counterrevolutionary elements. Public discussion of the Cultural Revolution remains limited; textbooks and museum exhibits do not mention the details, many government documents from the era are still classified, and internet discussions on the topic are subject to monitoring by government officials.

Bibliography

Baum, Richard, ed. China in Ferment: Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Cheng, Nien. Life and Death in Shanghai. Grove Press, 1987.

Daubier, Jean. A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Translated by Richard Seaver, Vintage, 1974.

Joseph, William, et al, eds. New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Harvard UP, 1991.

Leese, Danie. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution. Cambridge UP, 2011.

Kraus, Richard Curt. The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2012.

Kwong, Julia. Cultural Revolution in China’s Schools, May 1966-April 1969. Hoover Institution P, 1988.

Plaenkers, Tomas. Landscapes of the Chinese Soul: The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution. Translated by John Hart, Karnac Books, 2014.

Wu, Yiching. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis. Harvard UP, 2014.