Cultural Revolution

Category: History
Key figures: Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Qing
Period: May 1966 – October 1976

Summary

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was a ten-year period of social and political chaos initiated by Mao Zedong to reassert his authority and purge what he perceived as capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society and the Communist Party itself. Launched with the slogan “to destroy the old world and build a new one,” Mao mobilized millions of high school and university students—organized into the Red Guards—to attack traditional culture, intellectuals, party officials, and anyone deemed insufficiently revolutionary. Universities closed for up to four years; intellectuals, teachers, and party cadres were publicly denounced, beaten, exiled to rural labor camps, or killed; temples, historical artifacts, and books were destroyed; and families were torn apart by denunciations. The chaos spiraled beyond Mao’s control, factionalized into violent struggles between competing Red Guard groups, and required military intervention to restore order. The death toll remains contested but credible estimates range from 500,000 to 2 million dead from political violence alone, with tens of millions more persecuted, displaced, or permanently harmed. The movement gradually wound down following the September 1971 death of Lin Biao and the death of Mao himself in September 1976, after which Deng Xiaoping’s reformers reversed many of its destructive policies.

Origins and Launch (1964–1966)

The Cultural Revolution grew from Mao’s political position within the Chinese Communist Party following the catastrophic Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), whose famines had killed an estimated 15–45 million people. By the early 1960s, Party moderates including Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Peng Dehuai had effectively sidelined Mao from day-to-day economic policy, implementing pragmatic recovery measures that implicitly repudiated his radical collectivization campaign.

Mao spent the years 1963–1965 building a coalition with Defense Minister Lin Biao, who had reoriented the People’s Liberation Army toward ideological campaigns, and with a group of radical Shanghai intellectuals including his wife Jiang Qing and propagandist Zhang Chunqiao. In November 1965, Mao’s allies published a critique of the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office in the Wenhui Daily, interpreting it as a veiled defense of Peng Dehuai—a shot across the bow of the cultural establishment in Beijing.

The formal launch came on May 16, 1966, when the Politburo issued the “May 16 Circular,” drafted under Mao’s direction, declaring that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had infiltrated the Party and must be purged. On June 1, the People’s Daily published the first big-character poster from Peking University, calling for attacks on the university administration; Mao personally endorsed this as a “Marxist-Leninist big-character poster.” Schools at all levels were suspended on June 13, 1966.

The Red Guards (1966–1968)

Red Guard organizations formed spontaneously at high schools and universities throughout China during the summer of 1966, answering Mao’s call for revolutionary youth to “make revolution.” On August 18, 1966, Mao appeared on the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate wearing military uniform and a Red Guard armband before an estimated crowd of one million young people, personally greeting Red Guard representative Song Binbin—symbolically renaming her “Song Yaowu” (“Song Be Violent”). Between August 18 and November 26, 1966, Mao appeared at eight mass rallies in Beijing, reviewed by approximately 11–12 million Red Guards.

The Red Guards’ “Four Olds” campaign—attacking old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—resulted in the destruction of temples, ancestral shrines, libraries, and private property throughout China. In Beijing alone, Red Guards conducted roughly 33,000 household raids in August and September 1966, confiscating religious objects, foreign books, musical instruments, jewelry, and evidence of “bourgeois” lifestyle. Approximately 1,700 people were beaten to death in Beijing during this period. In Shanghai, 84,222 households were raided in a single month.

Notable early victims included Liu Shaoqi (the head of state), who was publicly denounced as a “capitalist roader,” stripped of his posts in October 1968, expelled from the Party, and died in detention in November 1969. Deng Xiaoping was twice purged—first in 1966 and again in 1976—and spent years in internal exile. Peng Dehuai, the former defense minister, was beaten so severely by Red Guards that he required hospitalization; he died in 1974 without receiving medical treatment adequate to his condition.

Factional Violence and Military Intervention (1967–1968)

By early 1967, competing Red Guard factions had begun fighting each other as well as established Party structures. In January 1967, radical Shanghai workers, backed by Jiang Qing’s faction, seized control of the Shanghai municipal government in what was called the “January Storm,” establishing a revolutionary committee modeled on the Paris Commune. Mao endorsed the seizure but rejected calls to abolish the government apparatus entirely.

The factional violence escalated into armed clashes. In Wuhan in July 1967, the “Wuhan Incident” saw PLA units loyal to regional commanders physically detain two central government envoys sent to adjudicate local factional disputes—an astonishing act of defiance against the central Party leadership. The incident led Mao to begin pulling back from unlimited support for the Red Guards.

Throughout 1967 and early 1968, pitched battles between competing Red Guard factions using weapons seized from military depots killed tens of thousands in provinces including Guangxi, Sichuan, and Yunnan. In Guangxi province, where factional fighting was especially brutal, investigations conducted after 1978 documented approximately 100,000 deaths from political violence during the Cultural Revolution, including documented cases of cannibalism committed in the context of factional attacks.

In July 1968, Mao summoned Red Guard leaders and effectively ended the Red Guard movement, ordering student factions to disband. Beginning that year, approximately 16 million urban youth—the “sent-down generation”—were dispatched to the countryside in the shangshan xiaxiang (up to the mountains, down to the countryside) movement, ostensibly to learn from the peasants. This mass displacement effectively removed the Red Guards from the cities and reasserted Party control.

Lin Biao and the Turn (1969–1971)

The Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 officially incorporated Mao Zedong Thought into the Party constitution and named Lin Biao as Mao’s designated successor—the only time a successor was so explicitly designated in CCP history. Lin Biao’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (the “Little Red Book”), which Lin had promoted as a PLA political education tool since 1964, had by this point been distributed in more than a billion copies, becoming one of the most printed books in history.

Relations between Mao and Lin deteriorated from 1970 onward, as Lin apparently sought to consolidate personal power in ways Mao viewed as threatening. On September 13, 1971, Lin Biao, his wife Ye Qun, and his son Lin Liguo, allegedly fleeing after a failed coup attempt, boarded a Trident aircraft at Shanhaiguan Airport. The aircraft crashed in Öndörkhaan, Mongolia, killing all aboard. The exact circumstances of the “Lin Biao Incident” remain disputed, but the official CCP account accuses Lin of planning to assassinate Mao.

Lin’s death stripped the Cultural Revolution of its most prominent military advocate and deeply damaged the movement’s legitimacy. For many Chinese, learning that Mao’s designated successor had been declared a traitor—and that the Little Red Book they had waved at rallies had been championed by a traitor—was deeply disillusioning.

Zhou Enlai’s Stabilizing Role

Throughout the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai occupied an ambiguous but crucial position. As Premier, he remained at his post throughout the decade, working to protect key state institutions, individual officials, and cultural artifacts from destruction. Zhou used his personal authority and relationships with PLA commanders to shield some victims of persecution—including scientists, foreign-policy specialists, and industrial managers whose expertise he viewed as essential to state functions.

Zhou was also instrumental in managing the international diplomacy that ultimately brought the Cultural Revolution’s foreign-policy radicalism under control. Beginning in 1969, as Chinese and Soviet forces clashed along the Ussuri River border, Zhou advocated engagement with the United States as a counterweight to Soviet pressure. His secret meetings with U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in July 1971 and his management of President Nixon’s February 1972 visit to Beijing redirected China’s diplomatic energy toward constructive international engagement at the height of the domestic upheaval.

The Gang of Four and the End (1972–1976)

In the final years of the Cultural Revolution, power crystallized around two factions: the radical “Gang of Four”—Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife), Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan—who sought to maintain radical policies; and a loose coalition of moderate survivors including Zhou Enlai and the twice-rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping.

Zhou Enlai was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1972. As his health declined, he worked with Mao’s support to rehabilitate Deng Xiaoping, who returned to Beijing in 1973 and was restored to multiple leadership posts. Deng used his position to push for what he called “the four modernizations”—in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science—a concept originally articulated by Zhou in a 1964 speech.

Zhou Enlai died on January 8, 1976. His death triggered a massive public outpouring of grief that the Gang of Four attempted to suppress. On April 5, 1976 (the Qingming Festival), hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents gathered at Tiananmen Square to lay wreaths and poems in Zhou’s memory—and implicitly, to express discontent with the Gang of Four and support for Deng. The “April Fifth Movement” or Tiananmen Incident was violently dispersed by security forces; Deng Xiaoping, blamed by the Gang for organizing the protests, was stripped of his posts for the second time.

Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976. Within a month, on October 6, 1976, Hua Guofeng—Mao’s chosen interim successor—orchestrated the arrest of the Gang of Four. Jiang Qing and her allies were accused of orchestrating the Cultural Revolution’s excesses and placed on trial in 1980–1981. The formal arrest of the Gang of Four is conventionally taken as the end of the Cultural Revolution era.

Human and Institutional Costs

Estimating the Cultural Revolution’s death toll is complicated by the suppression of documentation and by the diverse forms of violence. Frank Dikötter’s archival research (2016) estimates 1.5–2 million killed in political violence. The 1981 CCP resolution on the period describes it as having caused “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” Key losses included:

• Education: Universities were closed for periods ranging from two to six years; an entire cohort—the “Lost Generation”—entered adulthood without secondary or higher education. The number of university graduates produced in China during 1966–1976 was nearly zero.
• Cultural heritage: Thousands of temples, shrines, ancient manuscripts, and artworks were destroyed. The Confucian temple complex at Qufu, Shandong—the ancestral home of Confucius—was ransacked in November 1966; more than 6,000 artifacts were destroyed.
• Scientific capacity: The Chinese Academy of Sciences was effectively shut down; many of China’s top scientists were sent to labor camps or killed, setting back nuclear, aerospace, and medical research by years.
• Economic stagnation: Per capita GDP growth slowed significantly during the decade, and China fell further behind South Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian economies that grew rapidly during the same period.

Legacy

The Cultural Revolution’s legacy remains politically sensitive in contemporary China. The 1981 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” adopted by the CCP placed primary responsibility for the Cultural Revolution on Mao Zedong, while maintaining that Mao’s “contributions are primary and his errors are secondary”—a formula that preserved the Party’s revolutionary legitimacy while acknowledging the catastrophe.

Public discussion of the Cultural Revolution in China has oscillated: there was substantial retrospective literature in the 1980s (“scar literature”), followed by greater restriction in the 1990s and 2000s. Under Xi Jinping, direct comparisons between current policies and the Cultural Revolution have become politically sensitive. Nevertheless, the period left deep marks on Chinese political culture: the imperative of maintaining social stability, the dangers of mass mobilization outside Party channels, and the value of technocratic economic competence over ideological purity are lessons that post-Mao Chinese leaders have explicitly drawn from the decade of upheaval. It was precisely the memory of the Cultural Revolution’s chaos that made Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, Special Economic Zones, and the subsequent prioritization of economic growth politically legitimate and broadly supported.

Related

• Mao Zedong — initiator and supreme authority during the Cultural Revolution
• Zhou Enlai — premier who attempted to limit chaos and maintain state functions
• Deng Xiaoping — victim of the Cultural Revolution; later reversed many of its policies
• The Communist Party of China — organization torn apart and rebuilt by the upheaval
• Economic Reform & Opening-up — reform program that partly addressed Cultural Revolution’s damage
• Special Economic Zones — post-Cultural Revolution market experiment enabled by the upheaval’s discrediting of radical Maoism
• The Great Leap Forward — the earlier Maoist campaign whose catastrophic failure and the intra-party criticism it provoked helped drive Mao to launch the Cultural Revolution
• The Long March — the founding revolutionary ordeal repeatedly invoked as inspirational precedent during the Cultural Revolution

Sources

• Dikotter, Frank. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976. Bloomsbury Press, 2016. Comprehensive history based on archival research and oral histories documenting the scope and impact of the period.
• MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2006. Detailed political history of the Cultural Revolution’s origins, progression, and legacy within CCP politics.
• Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Context for the political conditions that produced the Cultural Revolution.
• CCP Central Committee. “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China.” June 27, 1981. The Party’s official evaluation of the Cultural Revolution.