Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, began in China in 1966 and did not end until Mao Zedong's death a decade later. It left behind a phrase still used in China today: "ten years of chaos."
In 1981, the Communist Party of China issued a verdict on what it had set in motion. The Cultural Revolution, the party declared, was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the people, the country, and the party since the founding of the People's Republic." Coming from the institution that launched the movement, this was a remarkable admission.
The toll defies easy accounting. Estimates of those killed range from hundreds of thousands to several million. Tens of millions more were persecuted. Schools and universities shuttered. The National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled. Over ten million young people from cities were sent to work in the countryside. The Temple of Confucius in Qufu was besieged. Libraries were burned.
How did a government turn its own population into instruments of destruction against itself? Why did the man who launched this upheaval eventually send workers to disarm the very student groups he had created? And what remained when it was over? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.
On the 11th of January 1962, more than seven thousand party officials gathered in Beijing for what became known as the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference. It was there that Mao Zedong stood before the largest internal audience of his tenure and admitted fault. "Any mistakes that the Centre has made ought to be my direct responsibility," he said, "and I also have an indirect share in the blame because I am the Chairman of the Central Committee."
The admission came in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, a mass campaign that had caused catastrophic famine and, as Liu Shaoqi put it at the same conference, had also produced cannibalism. Liu told those present: "History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!" These were not the words of a unified leadership.
After the conference, Mao stepped back from economic affairs. But he could not step back from ideology. When individual households began taking responsibility for their own agricultural output in 1962, Mao saw it as a betrayal of communist principles. His anger settled on Liu, whom he accused of doing nothing while "the Three Red Banners have been refuted" and land was being divided up.
Simultaneously, Mao's relationship with the Soviet Union was collapsing. In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had denounced his predecessor Josef Stalin and introduced economic reforms. Mao regarded this as revisionism: a slow surrender of Marxist-Leninist principles to capitalism. The USSR refused to support China's bid to join the United Nations. It reneged on a pledge to supply China with a nuclear weapon. By 1963, the CCP was publishing open polemics against Moscow.
Soviet radio broadcasts into China offered to help "genuine communists" who wished to overthrow Mao. This confirmed for Mao what he most feared: that capitalist tendencies were not just a foreign problem. They were growing inside China itself, inside the party, inside the government, inside the army. Liu Shaoqi, the man Mao had once trusted as his political successor, represented exactly the enemy Mao believed he was fighting.
In late 1959, Wu Han, a historian and deputy mayor of Beijing, published a stage drama called Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The play told the story of an honest official dismissed by a corrupt emperor. Mao initially praised it.
By February 1965, he had changed his mind. Mao secretly commissioned his wife Jiang Qing and a writer named Yao Wenyuan to produce an attack on the play. Yao argued that the drama was a political allegory: the honest official stood for Peng Dehuai, a general who had questioned Mao's policies at a 1959 conference in Lushan, and the corrupt emperor stood for Mao himself. The charge was explosive.
Beijing's mayor, Peng Zhen, was Wu Han's direct superior and the head of the Five Man Group, a committee Mao himself had commissioned to study the potential for a cultural revolution. Peng Zhen understood the danger immediately. He blocked Yao's article from appearing in the nationally distributed People's Daily, restricting it to local papers. He issued the February Outline in 1966 to reframe the controversy as a minor academic debate.
Mao responded by systematically dismantling every person who stood in his way. He fired Yang Shangkun, who ran the party's internal communications network. He sacked Lu Dingyi, who led the Propaganda Department and was a Peng ally, giving Maoist loyalists direct access to the national press. He then had Kang Sheng and Chen Boda label Peng and three other officials the "Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique." On the 16th of May 1966, the Politburo formalized the destruction of the Five Man Group and replaced it with the Maoist Cultural Revolution Group.
A historical play had become the lever for clearing every institutional obstacle between Mao and what came next.
On the 25th of May 1966, a philosophy lecturer at Peking University named Nie Yuanzi posted a handwritten critique of her university's administration on a public bulletin board. Mao called it "the first Marxist big-character poster in China" and had it broadcast nationwide. Within days, students across the country were writing their own.
By early June, classes were suspended in Beijing's primary and secondary schools. On the 13th of June, that suspension was extended across the country. Young people, many still in their teens, began forming political cadres. They called themselves Red Guards.
On the 8th of August 1966, during what became known as Red August, the party's General Committee passed its "Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," known as the Sixteen Points. The decision declared the revolution "a great revolution that touches people to their very souls" and directed the movement to "struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road."
Ten days later, on the 18th of August, over a million Red Guards gathered in and around Tiananmen Square. Mao appeared among them and put on a Red Guard armband. Lin Biao denounced the movement's perceived enemies from the same platform. The rally was filmed and shown to approximately 100 million people within its first month of release.
A central directive issued on the 22nd of August forbade police from intervening in Red Guard activities. The national police chief, Xie Fuzhi, regularly pardoned Red Guards for crimes they committed. During Red August in Beijing alone, 1,772 people were murdered. In Shanghai the following month, 704 suicides and 534 deaths were recorded. In Wuhan, 62 suicides and 32 murders occurred during the same period. Many of the murdered were teachers killed by their own students.
By December 1967, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung had been printed 350 million times. Millions of babies were given revolutionary names. The Sixteen Points had done exactly what they promised: they turned a student protest into a nationwide mass movement.
Between August and November 1966, eight mass rallies drew twelve million people, most of them Red Guards. To make attendance possible, the Great Exchange of Revolutionary Experience program provided free food and lodging across the country from September 1966 through early 1967.
At those rallies, Lin Biao called for the destruction of the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Some consequences were relatively minor. Streets, places, and even people's names were changed. Other consequences were catastrophic.
Red Guards besieged the Temple of Confucius in Qufu. Libraries of historical and foreign texts were burned. Temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, and cemeteries were shuttered, looted, or converted to other uses. Marxist propaganda recast Buddhism as superstition and religion as a tool of foreign infiltration. Clergy were sent to camps. Many Tibetan Buddhists were forced at gunpoint to help destroy their own monasteries.
Zhou Enlai, one of the few senior leaders who maintained some moderating influence, tried to thread an impossible line. In September 1966, his office issued the Instructions on Grasping Revolution, Promoting Production, directing that production must continue alongside revolution. It had limited effect.
The destruction of cultural and religious institutions was not incidental to the Cultural Revolution. It was among its stated objectives. The Sixteen Points had explicitly called for transforming "education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure." What the Red Guards burned, smashed, and looted in 1966 would take generations to partially restore, and in many cases could not be restored at all.
On the 3rd of January 1967, a young factory worker named Wang Hongwen led a coalition that overthrew the Shanghai municipal government in what became known as the January Storm. Within three weeks, 24 more province-level governments had fallen. Revolutionary committees replaced them.
The problem was that no one could agree on who counted as a revolutionary. The "support the left" policy, established in January 1967, directed the People's Liberation Army to back radical leftists. But almost every mass organization claimed to be leftist. PLA commanders, who had worked closely with the established party apparatus, often ended up suppressing the very radicals they were supposed to support. Zhang Chunqiao of the Gang of Four later admitted that the most decisive factor in whether a local takeover succeeded was not the Red Guards or the Cultural Revolution Group but the PLA.
In Wuhan, on the 20th of July 1967, local agitators kidnapped Mao's emissary Wang Li in what became known as the Wuhan Incident. The Army commander who had ordered the kidnapping, Chen Zaidao, was brought to Beijing and tried by Jiang Qing. His defiance was the last major open resistance from within the PLA.
In Chongqing, where munitions factories concentrated the supply of weapons, factional combat between rebel groups ran from the 16th of May 1967 to the 15th of October 1968. During the 25th of July Incident in 1967, one faction attacked four hundred members of rival factions with knives, pistols, rifles, submachine guns, and machine guns, killing ten. Tanks, armored vehicles, and even warships were deployed in Chongqing, Xiamen, and Changchun. In Changchun, rebels from geological institutes tested crude radiological weapons they called "radioactive self-defense bombs" on the 6th and the 11th of August.
Nationwide, a total of 18.77 million firearms, 14,828 artillery pieces, and over 2.7 million grenades ended up in civilian hands. By year end, national industrial output had fallen by 13.8 percent from the previous year. The Cultural Revolution had turned China into a country at war with itself.
At the 9th National Congress in April 1969, Lin Biao's name was written into the party constitution as Mao's "closest comrade-in-arms" and "universally recognized successor." No other communist party in the world had ever enshrined a successor in its constitution. Over 28 percent of the new Central Committee were PLA members loyal to Lin.
But Mao had not handed Lin a gift. He had handed him a problem. Lin's supporters wanted to restore the position of State Chairman, which Mao had abolished after purging Liu Shaoqi. If Lin became chairman or vice-chairman, his succession would have a constitutional foundation. Mao refused.
At the Second Plenum of the Ninth Congress in Lushan in late August 1970, Lin's ally Chen Boda pushed for the restoration of the presidency despite Mao's opposition. Mao confronted Chen openly, calling him a "false Marxist," and had him removed from the Politburo Standing Committee. He then demanded written self-criticisms from Lin's principal generals.
In October 1969, Lin had issued "Order Number One" to the PLA's eleven military regions without going through Mao, apparently as a war preparedness measure. Mao saw it as usurpation. According to official sources, Lin's son Lin Liguo then formed a coup apparatus in Shanghai and drafted what he called the Outline for Project 571. The name was chosen because in Mandarin it sounds like the words for "military uprising." Whether Lin Biao was personally involved remains disputed; scholar Jin Qiu argues that Lin Liguo drove the plan while his father was a passive figure.
On the 13th of September 1971, Lin, his wife Ye Qun, Lin Liguo, and staff members boarded a plane. It crashed in Mongolia, killing everyone on board. The plane had apparently run out of fuel. A Soviet investigation could not determine the cause. Beijing did not confirm Lin's death until the 30th of September, two weeks later. The public was not told for two months after that.
The news shattered the ideological framework of the Cultural Revolution. Lin had been its loudest champion. His apparent betrayal meant that the revolution's own chosen successor had turned against it. Mao became depressed and reclusive. Much of the Chinese public, as the details filtered through, simply felt they had been deceived.
On the 8th of January 1976, Zhou Enlai died of bladder cancer. On the 15th of January, Deng Xiaoping delivered his eulogy at a state funeral attended by every senior leader except Mao, who had grown increasingly hostile to Zhou in his final years.
The Gang of Four, the clique formed by Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, moved quickly to limit public mourning. On the 25th of March 1976, the Shanghai newspaper Wen Hui Bao called Zhou "the capitalist roader inside the Party." It backfired. The attack on Zhou's memory only deepened public attachment to him.
On the 4th of April 1976, on the eve of the Qingming Festival, thousands of people came to the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square and laid wreaths, poems, banners, and flowers. Up to two million people may have visited the square that day. A small number of slogans openly attacked Mao and the Cultural Revolution itself. The Central Committee, under Jiang Qing's direction, declared it counter-revolutionary and cleared the memorial items after midnight on April 6. A crowd of over 100,000 people responded by forcing their way into government buildings surrounding the square. Deng was stripped of all his positions on the 7th of April. It was his second purge.
Mao Zedong died on the 9th of September 1976. Public institutions closed for over a week. The nation mourned. Weeks later, on the 6th of October, the Central Security Bureau's Special Unit 8341 arrested all four members of the Gang of Four in a bloodless coup, backed by Marshal Ye Jianying, Wang Dongxing, Vice Premier Li Xiannian, and party elder Chen Yun.
At the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee on the 18th of December 1978, Deng Xiaoping called for "a liberation of thoughts" and urged the party to "seek truth from facts." The Plenum marked the formal beginning of reform and opening up. Within a few years, Deng and his protege Hu Yaobang had helped rehabilitate over 3 million cases that the party itself acknowledged as "unjust, false, erroneous." The trial of the Gang of Four ran from 1980 to 1981; the court found that 729,511 people had been persecuted by the Gang, of whom 34,800 had died. The party's formal verdict in 1981 used language that has never been rescinded: the Cultural Revolution was the greatest catastrophe the People's Republic had inflicted upon itself.
Common questions
What was the Cultural Revolution and when did it take place?
The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China launched by Mao Zedong in 1966. It lasted until Mao's death on the 9th of September 1976. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society.
How many people died in the Cultural Revolution?
Death toll estimates vary widely. Andrew G. Walder's 2014 review of 2,213 county annals estimated 1.1 to 1.6 million deaths between 1966 and 1971. The CCP History Research Center counted 1.728 million "unnatural deaths" in its internal investigations. Estimates from other sources range from 400,000 to over 7 million. Most deaths occurred after the mass movements ended, during organized campaigns to consolidate order.
Who were the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution?
The Red Guards were cadres of mainly young students who formed in response to Mao Zedong's call in 1966 to bombard the headquarters of counterrevolution. They originated in schools and universities and later spread to factories and other institutions. Between August and November 1966, eight mass rallies drew twelve million people, most of them Red Guards. Mao formally ended their authority over the PLA on the 27th of July 1968.
What were the Four Olds that Red Guards sought to destroy?
The Four Olds were old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Lin Biao called for their destruction at mass rallies in 1966. Red Guards responded by burning books and historical texts, besieging the Temple of Confucius in Qufu, destroying temples, churches, mosques, and monasteries, and forcing many Tibetan Buddhists to participate in demolishing their own monasteries at gunpoint.
What happened to Lin Biao during the Cultural Revolution?
Lin Biao rose to become Mao's constitutionally designated successor at the 9th National Congress in April 1969, the only time any communist party had enshrined a successor in its constitution. By 1971 his relationship with Mao had broken down. According to official sources, his son Lin Liguo drafted a coup plan called the Outline for Project 571. On the 13th of September 1971, Lin, his wife Ye Qun, and Lin Liguo fled by plane and crashed in Mongolia, killing everyone on board.
How did the Cultural Revolution end and what happened to the Gang of Four?
The Cultural Revolution effectively ended with Mao Zedong's death on the 9th of September 1976. On the 6th of October 1976, the Central Security Bureau's Special Unit 8341 arrested all four members of the Gang of Four in a bloodless coup. The trial of the Gang ran from 1980 to 1981, with the court finding that 729,511 people had been persecuted by the Gang and 34,800 had died. In 1981, the Communist Party declared the Cultural Revolution "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic."
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- 166bookMao's Little Red Book: A Global HistoryAndrew F. Jones — Cambridge University Press — 2013
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- 170bookPicturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural RevolutionRowman & Littlefield — 1999
- 171bookChinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural RevolutionLincoln Cushing et al. — Chronicle Books — 2007
- 172bookPainters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1979Julia Frances Andrews — University of California Press — 1995
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- 176bookChina on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and ControversyRowman & Littlefield — 2013
- 177bookHandbook of Chinese Popular CultureGreenwood — 1994
- 178bookChinese National CinemaRoutledge — 2004
- 179bookHistorical Dictionary of Chinese CinemaTan Ye et al. — Scarecrow Press — 2012
- 180bookAfterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to XiChristian Sorace — Australian National University Press — 2019
- 181bookMaterial Contradictions in Mao's ChinaJie Li — University of Washington Press — 2022
- 182bookBeijing Record: A Physical and Political History of Planning Modern BeijingJun Wang — World Scientific — 2011
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