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Cultural Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 3, 2020 | Original: November 9, 2009

The Cultural Revolution was launched in China in 1966 by Communist leader Mao Zedong in order to reassert his authority over the Chinese government. Believing that current Communist leaders were taking the party, and China itself, in the wrong direction, Mao called on the nation’s youth to purge the “impure” elements of Chinese society and revive the revolutionary spirit that had led to victory in the civil war 20 years earlier and the formation of the People’s Republic of China. The Cultural Revolution continued in various phases until Mao’s death in 1976, and its tormented and violent legacy would resonate in Chinese politics and society for decades to come.

The Cultural Revolution Begins

In the 1960s, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong came to feel that the current party leadership in China, as in the Soviet Union , was moving too far in a revisionist direction, with an emphasis on expertise rather than on ideological purity. Mao’s own position in government had weakened after the failure of his “ Great Leap Forward ” (1958-60) and the economic crisis that followed. Chairman Mao Zedong gathered a group of radicals, including his wife Jiang Qing and defense minister Lin Biao, to help him attack current party leadership and reassert his authority.

Did you know? To encourage the personality cult that sprang up around Mao Zedong during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, Defense Minister Lin Biao saw that the now-famous "Little Red Book" of Mao's quotations was printed and distributed by the millions throughout China.

Mao launched the so-called Cultural Revolution (known in full as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) in August 1966, at a meeting of the Plenum of the Central Committee. He shut down the nation’s schools, calling for a massive youth mobilization to take current party leaders to task for their embrace of bourgeois values and lack of revolutionary spirit. In the months that followed, the movement escalated quickly as the students formed paramilitary groups called the Red Guards and attacked and harassed members of China’s elderly and intellectual population. A personality cult quickly sprang up around Mao, similar to that which existed for Josef Stalin , with different factions of the movement claiming the true interpretation of Maoist thought. The population was urged to rid itself of the “Four Olds”: Old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

Lin Biao's Role in the Cultural Revolution

During this early phase of the Cultural Revolution (1966-68), President Liu Shaoqi and other Communist leaders were removed from power. (Beaten and imprisoned, Liu died in prison in 1969.) With different factions of the Red Guard movement battling for dominance, many Chinese cities reached the brink of anarchy by September 1967, when Mao had Lin send army troops in to restore order. The army soon forced many urban members of the Red Guards into rural areas, where the movement declined. Amid the chaos, the Chinese economy plummeted, with industrial production for 1968 dropping 12 percent below that of 1966.

In 1969, Lin was officially designated Mao’s successor. He soon used the excuse of border clashes with Soviet troops to institute martial law. Disturbed by Lin’s premature power grab, Mao began to maneuver against him with the help of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, splitting the ranks of power atop the Chinese government. In September 1971, Lin died in an airplane crash in Mongolia, apparently while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union. Members of his high military command were subsequently purged, and Zhou took over greater control of the government. Lin’s brutal end led many Chinese citizens to feel disillusioned over the course of Mao’s high-minded “revolution,” which seemed to have dissolved in favor of ordinary power struggles.

Cultural Revolution Comes to an End

Zhou acted to stabilize China by reviving educational system and restoring numerous former officials to power. In 1972, however, Mao suffered a stroke; in the same year, Zhou learned he had cancer. The two leaders threw their support to Deng Xiaoping (who had been purged during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution), a development opposed by the more radical Jiang and her allies, who became known as the Gang of Four. In the next several years, Chinese politics teetered between the two sides. The radicals finally convinced Mao to purge Deng in April 1976, a few months after Zhou’s death, but after Mao died that September, a civil, police and military coalition pushed the Gang of Four out. Deng regained power in 1977 and would maintain control over Chinese government for the next 20 years.

Long-Term Effects of the Cultural Revolution

Some 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation. The Cultural Revolution’s short-term effects may have been felt mainly in China’s cities, but its long-term effects would impact the entire country for decades to come. Mao’s large-scale attack on the party and system he had created would eventually produce a result opposite to what he intended, leading many Chinese to lose faith in their government altogether.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Cultural Revolution

Introduction, general overviews.

• Bibliographies, Primary Documents, and Reference Works
• Origins and Prelude
• Mass Politics and Red Guard Factionalism
• Violence and Political Victimization
• Education and Culture
• Mao Zedong and His Cult
• The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces

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Cultural Revolution by Yiching Wu LAST REVIEWED: 25 February 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 25 February 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0125

The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and ended with the close of the Mao era in 1976, was the most profound crisis that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has ever undergone. The sight of widespread rebel attacks on the party-state authorities, instigated by the head of the same apparatus, was extraordinary. Beginning in the late 1950s, Mao’s increasing dissatisfaction with the Soviet model of centralized, bureaucratic socialism was exemplified by his theory of “continuous revolution,” which stressed that taking state power was not the end point of the revolution. He had also lost faith in the methods of top-down mobilization that had been the hallmark of party campaigns. The ferocious movement erupted in 1966 with Mao mobilizing the country’s youth to attack the alleged “capitalist power-holders” in the ruling Communist Party and remnants of prerevolutionary elites, who he believed had corrupted the revolutionary ranks. Within months, party and state authorities across the country became paralyzed and virtually collapsed, and the Red Guard movement unleashed by Mao degenerated into rampant factional conflicts. Only slowly and painfully was demobilization of the divided mass movement, restoration of order, and political recentralization achieved by deploying the Chinese army, and by establishing the so-called “revolutionary committees” as new organs of local administrative power. While the freewheeling mass politics had been largely terminated by 1968–1969, militant ideological rhetoric continued, and radical educational and cultural policies were advocated until the end of the Mao era. In post-Mao China, scholarly and public discussion of the Cultural Revolution in particular and the Mao era in general is subject to severe restrictions. History textbooks continue to abide by the official view of party history originally formulated in the early 1980s (collected in Schoenhals 1996 , cited under Bibliographies, Primary Documents, and Reference Works ). Government archives from the mid-1960s onward remain largely inaccessible. That the Chinese government displays heightened sensitivities around the subject is indicative of its anxiety that academic probing and popular discussions may undermine the legitimacy of the ruling party in a rapidly changing country fraught with social and political tensions.

A number of scholarly works in both English and Chinese aim to provide an overview of the Cultural Revolution; its origins and causes; key figures, events, and developments; and consequences. Students and general readers new to the topic will gain the most by starting with Kraus 2012 , in which a veteran scholar of the Mao era provides the most concise and accessible account of the Cultural Revolution. Wang 2006 (originally published in 1988) is an early general account published in China. Even though it was authored more than a quarter of a century ago by a CCP party historian, this well-researched and detailed account still provides one of the best accounts in the Chinese language. MacFarquhar and Fairbank 1991 synthesizes the status of the field of Cultural Revolution scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006 and Bu 2008 provide the most detailed and authoritative general accounts of the Cultural Revolution to date, in English and Chinese, respectively. Esherick, et al. 2006 represents the new wave of scholarship on the Cultural Revolution that draws from a wide variety of recently available primary sources. Providing comprehensive coverage of the Mao era in its entirety, both Meisner 1999 and Walder 2015 also contain detailed discussions of key developments and events of the Cultural Revolution decade, as well as its aftermath and multifaceted legacies in post-Mao Chinese society and politics.

Bu Weihua 卜伟华. Zalan jiushijie: Wenhua dageming de dongluan yu haojie, 1966–1968 (砸烂旧世界：文化大革命的动乱与浩劫, 1966–1968). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2008.

A highly detailed account of the most turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution, authored by one of the most respected Cultural Revolution scholars in China. The best and most up-to-date general account of the Cultural Revolution published in the Chinese language.

Esherick, Joseph, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder, eds. The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

A collection of eight case studies that explore how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary people. The volume represents the wave of scholarship that draws from a wide range of newly available materials including local gazetteers, archival sources, biographies, and memoirs, as well as interviews of participants.

Kraus, Richard. The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Condenses the extraordinarily complex history of the Cultural Revolution into a slim, highly lucid volume. Offers readers a quick overview of topics ranging from Mao and elite politics, to changes in everyday life, culture and art, the economy, and foreign relations.

MacFarquhar, Roderick, and John King Fairbank, eds. The Cambridge History of China . Vol. 15, The People’s Republic , Part 2: Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Includes thirteen essays by veteran China scholars commissioned to synthesize the status of knowledge in the study of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. The volume is divided into four parts, examining, respectively, political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural and educational aspects of Mao’s last decade.

MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Based on extensive reading in primary sources, this 800-page book provides a comprehensive account of the entire Cultural Revolution decade, with a special focus on high-level politics around Mao and those close to him. Authored by two of the most respected experts of the Cultural Revolution.

Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic . 3d ed. New York: Free Press, 1999.

A widely used textbook on the history of the Mao era, covering the PRC’s early years, the Hundred Flowers movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution decade, and early post-Mao transitions. Part Four of the book (over 120 pages) provides a comprehensive and mostly balanced account of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.

Walder, Andrew. China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.4159/9780674286689

A synthesis of the scholarship on Mao’s China, authored by one of the most established experts in the field. More than one-third of the book (chapters 9–13) is devoted to the Cultural Revolution years, based on both secondary scholarship and the author’s own extensive research.

Wang Nianyi 王年一. Dadongluan de niandai (大动乱的年代). Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2006.

Originally published 1988. A chronologically arranged general history of the Cultural Revolution, authored by a prominent Chinese party historian. Based on research conducted and primary sources available in the first decade after the closure of the Mao era.

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The early period (1966–68)

• Rise and fall of Lin Biao (1969–71)
• Final years (1972–76)

What were the goals of the Cultural Revolution?

• Who was Mao Zedong?
• What is Maoism?
• How has China changed since Mao Zedong’s death?
• What is Mao Zedong's legacy?

Cultural Revolution

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• Table Of Contents

What was the Cultural Revolution?

The Cultural Revolution was an upheaval launched by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong during his last decade in power (1966–1976) to renew the spirit of the Chinese Revolution.

Why was the Cultural Revolution launched?

Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution because he feared that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet model, which he did not approve of, and because he was concerned about his own place in history.

Mao Zedong had four goals for the Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist.

When did the Cultural Revolution occur?

The Cultural Revolution took place from August 1966 to the autumn of 1976. It was officially ended by the Eleventh Party Congress in August 1977.

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Cultural Revolution , upheaval launched by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong during his last decade in power (1966–76) to renew the spirit of the Chinese Revolution . Fearing that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet model and concerned about his own place in history, Mao threw China’s cities into turmoil in a monumental effort to reverse the historic processes underway.

During the early 1960s, tensions with the Soviet Union convinced Mao that the Russian Revolution had gone astray, which in turn made him fear that China would follow the same path. Programs carried out by his colleagues to bring China out of the economic depression caused by the Great Leap Forward made Mao doubt their revolutionary commitment and also resent his own diminished role. He especially feared urban social stratification in a society as traditionally elitist as China. Mao thus ultimately adopted four goals for the Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. He initially pursued these goals through a massive mobilization of the country’s urban youths. They were organized into groups called the Red Guards , and led by students such as Song Binbin . Mao ordered the party and the army not to suppress the movement.

Mao also put together a coalition of associates to help him carry out the Cultural Revolution. His wife, Jiang Qing , brought in a group of radical intellectuals to rule the cultural realm. Defense Minister Lin Biao made certain that the military remained Maoist. Mao’s longtime assistant, Chen Boda , worked with security men Kang Sheng and Wang Dongxing to carry out Mao’s directives concerning ideology and security. Premier Zhou Enlai played an essential role in keeping the country running, even during periods of extraordinary chaos . Yet there were conflicts among these associates, and the history of the Cultural Revolution reflects these conflicts almost as much as it reflects Mao’s own initiatives .

Mao’s concerns about “bourgeois” infiltrators in his party and government—those not sharing his vision of communism—were outlined in a Chinese Communist Party Central Committee document issued on May 16, 1966; this is considered by many historians to be the start of the Cultural Revolution, although Mao did not formally launch the Cultural Revolution until August 1966, at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee. He shut down China’s schools, and during the following months he encouraged Red Guards to attack all traditional values and “bourgeois” things and to test party officials by publicly criticizing them. Mao believed that this measure would be beneficial both for the young people and for the party cadres that they attacked.

The movement quickly escalated; many elderly people and intellectuals not only were verbally attacked but were physically abused. Many died. The Red Guards splintered into zealous rival factions, each purporting to be the true representative of Maoist thought. Mao’s own personality cult , encouraged so as to provide momentum to the movement, assumed religious proportions. The resulting anarchy , terror, and paralysis completely disrupted the urban economy. Industrial production for 1968 dipped 12 percent below that of 1966.

During the earliest part of the Red Guard phase, key Politburo leaders were removed from power—most notably President Liu Shaoqi , Mao’s designated successor until that time, and Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping . In January 1967 the movement began to produce the actual overthrow of provincial party committees and the first attempts to construct new political bodies to replace them. In February 1967 many remaining top party leaders called for a halt to the Cultural Revolution, but Mao and his more radical partisans prevailed, and the movement escalated yet again. Indeed, by the summer of 1967, disorder was widespread; large armed clashes between factions of Red Guards were occurring throughout urban China.

During 1967 Mao called on the army under Lin Biao to step in on behalf of the Red Guards. Instead of producing unified support for the radical youths, this political-military action resulted in more divisions within the military. The tensions inherent in the situation surfaced vividly when Chen Zaidao, a military commander in the city of Wuhan during the summer of 1967, arrested two key radical party leaders.

In 1968, after the country had been subject to several cycles of radicalism alternating with relative moderation, Mao decided to rebuild the Communist Party to gain greater control. The military dispatched officers and soldiers to take over schools, factories, and government agencies. The army simultaneously forced millions of urban Red Guards to move to the rural hinterland to live, thus scattering their forces and bringing some order to the cities. This particular action reflected Mao’s disillusionment with the Red Guards because of their inability to overcome their factional differences. Mao’s efforts to end the chaos were given added impetus by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which greatly heightened China’s sense of insecurity.

Two months later, the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee met to call for the convening of a party congress and the rebuilding of the party apparatus. From that point, the issue of who would inherit political power as the Cultural Revolution wound down became the central question of Chinese politics.

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• Chinese Cultural Revolution Database (中国文化大革命文库) The most comprehensive source covering primary sources on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The database contains more than 10,000 Central Party documents, Communist party leaders' speeches, official newspaper articles from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, selections of some of the key Red Guard texts, and hard-to-reach archives that often buried within diverse Chinese newspapers many of which are not publicly available The database is updated annually. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users. Language: Chinese
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• Chinese Foreign Policy Database An online resource containing nearly 1,500 declassified documents on the international relations of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1949. Documents in the new database--the vast majority available with English translation--include diplomatic cables, high level correspondence, meeting minutes, and other internal documents retrieved from dozens of archives around the world. Over 600 records from the now-closed Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing are included. more... less... Access: No restrictions. Language: English, Chinese
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• Washington Post Historical Newspaper Offers hundreds of thousands of pages of full-text and full-image newspaper articles covering the entire publishing history of the newspaper from 1877 to 1990. Researchers and students can use the images to find not only news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements, but also historical photos, stock photos, and advertisements. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
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• Chinese Local Newspapers, pre-1966 This resource contains three newspapers, Anqing Daily《安庆报》, Huainan Daily《淮南日报》, and Wuhu Daily《芜湖报》 published in the Anhui Province, during 1951-1966. Local newspapers are primary materials for understanding local politics and social life during this period. more... less... Access: Onyen log in is always required for UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users. Coverage: 1949-1970 Language: Chinese

CR/10 (Cultural Revolution: 10) is an oral history project initiated by the University of Pittsburgh in 2015, which was developed as a crowd-sourcing project in 2016. UNC Library contributed to the source content with interviews of CR witnesses or family members who lived in North Carolina. You may visit The CR/10 Project site for more information. 

Here are three audio/video interviews that were conducted in person in Cary and Chapel Hill of North Carolina. The interviewees are asked to discuss the experiences that left the deepest impressions on them—what they most want to share with the audience. At the interviewee's request, some of the videos have been replaced with a still photo obscuring the interviewee's identity.

"You may not believe in me, you may doubt me, but you may not doubt the Communist Party."

The interview subject was born in the 1960s and lived in a small city in Anhui from 1966 to 1976. Her family background was classified as military and her occupation during the Cultural Revolution was a student. The highest level of education she has achieved is college.

"Each person carried a bit of dust when the Cultural Revolution ended."​

The interview subject was born in the 1950s and lived in an urban area of Heilongjiang from 1966 to 1976. His family background was classified as intellectual and his occupation during the Cultural Revolution was a student. The highest level of education he has achieved is college.

"[We] were all brainwashed."

The interview subject was born in the 1960s and lived in an urban area of Beijing from 1966 to 1976. His family background was classified as intellectual and his occupation during the Cultural Revolution was a student. The highest level of education he has achieved is graduate. 

Memorabilia (open access sites)

Cultural Revolution Posters

Photographs of the Cultural Revolution by Li Zhensheng

Cultural Revolution Propaganda Posters

Cultural Revolution Propaganda by Univ. of Washington

Cultural Revolution Propaganda

Images of Daily Life in China during the Cultural Revolution

Feature-length documentary: The Revolution They Remember (in English) 口述文革历史

The Revolution They Remember presents the Chinese Cultural Revolution era of 1966-1976 via the memories of those who experienced it and have reflected on its legacies. The Revolution They Remember is based on two video oral history projects: one by the EAL and the other by Dartmouth Library. Initiated by the EAL in 2015, The Cultural Revolution: 10 (CR/10) Project recorded, preserved, and published video interviews with Chinese citizens sharing their memories and impressions of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. 

The Revolution They Remember features selections from the interviews from these two projects, as well as images contributed by interview participants, archival footage, and photos. The film also comprises commentary by scholars of modern Chinese history.

Click this link to view the trailer .

Click this link to view the full documentary film.

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China’s Cultural Revolution, Explained

Mao’s cultural revolution.

View Slide Show ›

By Austin Ramzy

• May 14, 2016

Fifty years ago, Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long upheaval that had dramatic, often violent effects across China. Here is an overview of those tumultuous years:

What was the Cultural Revolution?

The movement was fundamentally about elite politics, as Mao tried to reassert control by setting radical youths against the Communist Party hierarchy. But it had widespread consequences at all levels of society. Young people battled Mao’s perceived enemies, and one another, as Red Guards, before being sent to the countryside in the later stages of the Cultural Revolution. Intellectuals, people deemed “class enemies” and those with ties to the West or the former Nationalist government were persecuted. Many officials were purged. Some, like the future leader Deng Xiaoping, were eventually rehabilitated. Others were killed, committed suicide or were left permanently scarred. Some scholars contend that the trauma of the era contributed to economic transition in the decades that followed, as Chinese were willing to embrace market-oriented reforms to spur growth and ease deprivation.

When did it take place?

On May 16, 1966, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a circular that outlined Mao’s ideas on the Cultural Revolution. But there were precursors in the months and years before that. The end is considered to be Mao’s death on Sept. 9, 1976, and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four , a radical faction of four political leaders including Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, in October. Although the Cultural Revolution lasted a decade, much of the most extreme violence occurred in the first few years.

How did it begin?

The Cultural Revolution had roots in the 1958-61 Great Leap Forward, the collectivization of agricultural and industrial output that precipitated a famine that left as many as 45 million dead . Mao was blamed and partly sidelined by Communist Party leaders who pulled back some of the most extreme collectivization efforts.

One of the key causes of the Cultural Revolution was a play , “The Dismissal of Hai Rui From Office,” about a Ming dynasty official who criticized the emperor. Mao saw the play as attacking him and supporting Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, who was dismissed for pointing out the failures of the Great Leap Forward.

China’s relations with the Soviet Union had grown increasingly tense, and Mao was worried about what the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 and Khrushchev’s removal from office in 1964 meant for himself as China’s leader.

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How China Remembers the Cultural Revolution

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50 years later, China still has yet to come to terms with Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Graduates dressed up as Cultural Revolution-era Red Guards pose for a picture in front of a statue of Mao Zedong at a university in Shanghai.

The 50th anniversaries of the opening salvoes of China’s Cultural Revolution, a frontal assault on Chinese values in which a million or more people died, are upon us. The salvoes were several, and it is not clear which should count as the beginning. On May 16, 1966, Mao Zedong suddenly indicted some of his rivals; on August 5 he published a call to “bomb their headquarters;” and on August 8 he announced the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” To associate all of the mind-boggling mayhem that followed with any particular day—in the way, for example, we use “June Fourth” as a tag for the massacre of unarmed protesters in 1989—seems almost trite. Individual dates are but flotsam on an ocean of suffering that seethed in China for several years and that has affected the national psyche ever since.

Chinese people, like most, understand the value of facing disasters squarely. Clear vision can help victims to come to terms with their losses and to move on; it can also bolster a nation’s resolve that no such thing happen again. The Chinese people’s will to examine the Cultural Revolution emerged very quickly after Mao died in 1976. From 1977 through 1980, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, allowed writers to explore at least part of the truth about what had happened during the 1966-76 decade, which by then Deng had dubbed “ten years of catastrophe.” Readers were ebullient, and the circulations of magazines that offered “scar literature” skyrocketed. Then, in late 1980, Deng suddenly ruled that exposure of the Cultural Revolution had gone far enough. Further probing might lead to public rejection not only of the late-Mao years but of the Communist Party itself—and that, most certainly, Deng did not want. He ordered an end to scar literature and instructed the Chinese people to “set aside residual fear” and “look forward.”

Painful memory cannot be so easily erased, however.  The actual effect of Deng’s order was not to halt memory but to drive it into private spaces—individual minds or the confidence of trusted friends—while a wall separating public and private memory grew taller.  In textbooks, classrooms, and the media, very little was said about the 1966-76 decade while the Party-packaged memory that reigned in public grew as cryptic as myth.

The Party’s version of events had its origins in the Cultural Revolution itself. I recall from my first visit to China, in May 1973, a visit to an art class at an elementary school. The children were drawing pictures of an airplane crashing in flames. It was the crash of Lin Biao, Mao’s deputy-turned-rival who was said to have died while trying to flee to the Soviet Union in 1971 after failing in a coup against Mao. Every child’s sketch was the same. Even the angle of the plane hitting the ground was the same. The children were drawing what they had been told, “exactly” as it happened. Today the teaching of young people in China is less regimented, but it remains true that when asked about the Cultural Revolution, some cannot go beyond one or two packaged phrases from textbooks.

In the 1980s the distinguished writer Ba Jin called for a Cultural Revolution museum, but to no avail. Government archives closed, and most remain closed today. A few determined Chinese historians have made progress nonetheless, but they may share their findings only among small groups of peers. When they compare themselves to German, Italian, or Japanese writers after 1945, or to South Africans after 1994, they complain of a major disadvantage. To write about a brutal regime that has fallen is one thing; to write under an altered form of that very regime is quite another.

Accounting for the Cultural Revolution is especially difficult because of the immense complexity of what happened. Mao’s Delphic directives from the top might seem simple, but the reverberations on the ground were incalculably various. Each locality has its own story to tell, but fifty years later still cannot—at least not in full.

With passing time, the accuracy of memory becomes a problem. Human memory not only fades with time but becomes more selective.  Stories re-told from memory tend to smooth out as the raw data of initial impressions either disappears or conforms to the stories.  A tendency toward self-protection distorts memory even in people who wish it were not so. People who behaved badly tend to erase details that make them look bad, and victims, too, tend to remember what they most need to remember. In a brilliant essay called, “Cultural Revolution, Memory, and Shame,” the Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng recalls a 1974 visit from police who came to his home demanding to know the name of a friend who had given him a piece of underground fiction. Under pressure, Shi divulged the name, putting his friend at serious risk. As he writes his essay 14 years later, though, Shi scours his memory and finds within it two versions of the crucial encounter with the police: in one, he is already aware that another friend, at another location, has leaked his friend’s name, making his own betrayal, at least in practical terms, irrelevant; in the second version, he learns about that separate leak only later. Which memory is accurate?  Aware of the penchant toward self-protection in human memory, Shi judges that version two is more likely the truth.

Personal struggle with conscious memory such as this is an immense and unfathomed (and perhaps by now unfathomable) part of the Cultural Revolution’s legacy. But it is not the most powerful part, in my view. For Chinese society as a whole, the two earthquakes of late Maoism (the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) were so fundamental and so pervasive in their consequences that people who are living through the continuing undulations are better described as still coping with the Cultural Revolution than as struggling to recall it. The Great Leap caused more deaths than the Cultural Revolution—at least 20 times more—but the Cultural Revolution’s assault on time-honored Chinese values (Denounce your parents!  Attack your teachers!  Destroy temples!) was far more devastating to the society’s shared values and social trust. Five decades later China’s social ethics have not recovered from Mao’s body-blow, and it may be several more decades before normalcy is possible.

As of the mid-1970s, the popular mood in China—repressed but widely-shared—was “Anything but this!”  Everyone from farmers in Anhui who wanted their land back to students in Shanghai who wanted their universities back was pressing for “reform.”  In the 1980s Deng Xiaoping was credited as the “architect of reform,” but this euphemism, which was designed to burnish Deng’s image, was misleading. Deng was hardly reform’s prime mover; he was, indeed, an “architect,” but an architect of policies on how to handle pressures from below while keeping the Communist Party on top.  If forced to say which Communist leader was most responsible for causing reform, one would have to name Mao, not Deng.

Mao’s contribution was unintended, of course—indeed, it was nearly the opposite of what he intended—but that, like a net-cord winner in tennis, did not make the effects less valuable. The great Chinese journalist Liu Binyan once observed that the strongest free-thinkers ever to emerge from China’s communist years came from the generation who missed school during the Cultural Revolution and spent time instead “making revolution” in the countryside.  Liu Xiaobo, Hu Ping, Su Xiaokang, Zheng Yi, Liao Yiwu and many other of the most effective critics of the Communist regime set out as ardent red youth eager to learn from the politically-advanced peasantry, were shocked by the poverty and oppression they actually found, suddenly saw communist theory as a fraud, and resolved from that moment on to think for themselves.

The main principle in Deng Xiaoping’s reform, especially after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, was to segregate the freedom to make money, which Deng allowed, from freedoms in politics, religion, and any other kind of “thought” that might give rise to independent organization. All this remained forbidden. The Chinese people, now allowed at least one outlet for their continuing rush out of the Mao era, pursued the money-making route with passion. How much they had left the Cultural Revolution can be measured by how Maoist notions of “bourgeois” life—fast cars, slick clothing, banquets, mansions—remained in their thinking conceptually, but now were a model not of iniquity but of success.

Riding a supply of workers so numerous, so eager, and (by international standards) so underpaid and underprotected, the Chinese economy boomed and the Communist Party took credit. Now, as the boom is receding, the Party is looking for another way to stay on top and seems to be exploring the possibility that chauvinistic nationalism might be that way. For cues on how to do it, Xi Jinping has been looking in part back to Mao and the Cultural Revolution: concentrate power in a single person; grow a personality cult; try to identify the Communist Party and its new great leader with a show of pride to the world.  How this will end is hard to say.

Two major conferences on the Cultural Revolution will be held in June of this year in Massachusetts and California. Scholars from China will attend, but will be understandably regretful that they cannot meet in China. Imagine, for a moment, what American historians might feel if they had to go to Paris or Sao Paulo for a retrospective on Nixon and Watergate, or on the U.S. Civil War.

Perry Link is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California at Riverside.

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The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style Essay

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In the year 1966, Mao Zedong felt that the leaders of the communist party in china were leading not only the party but the entire country in the wrong direction. 1 He, therefore, decided to initiate a revolution that would lead the country back to its traditional leadership style, where power is not with the bourgeoisie but with the people. His call was for the youth to eliminate all the foreign and new elements in Chinese society and bring back the spirit that had won them the civil war decades before. 2 With the help of other radical leaders such as Lin Biao, he mobilized the youths to form paramilitary groups, which they called the Red Guards, to fight against the bourgeoisie mentality perpetrated by the then leaders of the CCP, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping. 3

The Red Guards formed by the youths later disintegrated into different factions, all of which fighting for supremacy. This forced Mao to bring in the army to help in restoring order in the country. The army pushed all the youth paramilitary groups to the rural areas, subduing the movement. 4 Out of these groups, there emerged a radical group that envisioned a new thought of the revolution. They called themselves Shengwulian and were based in Hunan Province. 5 They were opposed to both the ideologies of Mao and the other leaders of the party. According to them, the revolution was about one class overthrowing the other. 6 They also added that “the revolution had turned the relationship between the people and party leaders from that of leaders and the led to that of rulers and the ruled and between exploiters and the exploited.” 7

I think Mao’s intentions were good but his approach was dictatorial. He envisioned a nation where all the citizens are equal. He detested the leadership that was in power at the time for their bourgeoisie spirit and wanted all the citizens to live as one equal community. However, his use of the military in the suppression of the Red Guards was uncalled for. That was very autocratic.

He should have listened to all their grievances and consolidated them into a philosophy that would help him lead them as a united group. Worse still, his betrayal of a former ally, Liu Biao, portrayed him as a very selfish individual whose only interest was power. He interpreted Liu’s actions as a way of usurping his position. As a result, he decided to go after him, causing his death. Liu was involved in a fatal plane crash while fleeing from Mao.

Mao’s course was both ill and well-intentioned. His good intentions are seen in his struggle to rid the country of capitalistic and bourgeoisie mentality. According to him, the country was better off with communism, where they lived as one community with no superior and inferior citizen, and not with a set up where leaders want to get rich at the expense of the majority of the citizens.

He wanted the change to happen in the shortest time possible. Hence, he had to use radical means to ensure that this happened as fast as he wanted it. However, a critical view of the revolution shows that he might have used the revolution as an avenue to restore his power and influence, having lost it six years earlier. 8 Besides, the use of the army in suppressing the Red Guards and his former ally, Liu, shows that his interests were not in the equality he claimed to stand for, but in getting power.

Blum, Susan Debra, and Lionel M Jensen. China off Center . Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2006.

Wu, Yiching. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, London: Harvard University Press, 2014.

• Yichang Wu. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, London: Harvard University Press, 2014, 146.
• Ibid., 147.
• Ibid., 148.
• Ibid., 149.
• Ibid., 152.
• Ibid., 166.
• Susan Debra Blum and Lionel M Jensen. China off Center . Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2006, 120.
• Ibid., 125.
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What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for Our Current Moment?

On September 24, 1970, the Rolling Stones interrupted their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris to invite a French Maoist called Serge July onstage. News of an earthshaking event called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been trickling out of China since 1966. Information was scarce, but many writers and activists in the West who were opposed to the United States and its war in Vietnam were becoming fascinated with Mao Zedong , their earlier infatuation with Soviet-style Marxism having soured. Jean-Paul Sartre hawked copies of a banned Maoist newspaper in Paris, and Michel Foucault was among those who turned to China for political inspiration, in what Sartre called “new forms of class struggle in a period of organized capitalism.”

Editors at the influential French periodical Tel Quel learned Chinese in order to translate Mao’s poetry. One of them was the feminist critic Julia Kristeva , who later travelled to China with Roland Barthes . Women’s-liberation movements in the West embraced Mao’s slogan “Women hold up half the sky.” In 1967, the Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale financed the purchase of guns by selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book. In 1971, John Lennon said that he now wore a Mao badge and distanced himself from the 1968 Beatles song “Revolution,” which claimed, “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.” But the Rolling Stones’ Paris concert was Maoism’s biggest popular outing. July, who, with Sartre, later co-founded the newspaper Libération , asked the throng to support French fellow-Maoists facing imprisonment for their beliefs. There was a standing ovation, and then Mick Jagger launched into “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Western intellectuals and artists would have felt much less sympathy for the Devil had they heard about the ordeals of their counterparts in China, as described in “ The World Turned Upside Down ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a thick catalogue of gruesome atrocities, blunders, bedlam, and ideological dissimulation, by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng. Yang mentions a group of elderly writers in Beijing who, in August, 1966, three months after Mao formally launched the Cultural Revolution, were denounced as “ox demons and snake spirits” (Mao’s preferred term for class enemies) and flogged with belt buckles and bamboo sticks by teen-age girls. Among the writers subjected to this early “struggle session” was the novelist Lao She, the world-famous author of “ Rickshaw Boy .” He killed himself the following day.

There were other events that month—“bloody August,” as it came to be called—that might have made Foucault reconsider his view of Maoism as anti-authoritarian praxis. At a prestigious secondary school in Beijing, attended by the daughters of both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping , students savagely beat a teacher named Bian Zhongyun and left her dying in a handcart. As detailed in a large-character poster that was adopted by cultural revolutionaries across China, one of the indictments against Bian was her inadequate esteem for Mao. While taking her students through an earthquake drill, she had failed to stress the importance of rescuing the Chairman’s portrait.

Red Guards—a pseudo-military designation adopted by secondary-school and university students who saw themselves as the Chairman’s sentinels—soon appeared all over China, charging people with manifestly ridiculous crimes and physically assaulting them before jeering crowds. Much murderous insanity erupted after 1966, but the Cultural Revolution’s most iconic images remain those of the struggle sessions: victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks. Such pictures, and others, in “ Forbidden Memory ” (Potomac), by the Tibetan activist and poet Tsering Woeser, show that even Tibet, the far-flung region that China had occupied since 1950, did not escape the turmoil. Woeser describes the devastation wrought on Tibet’s Buddhist traditions by a campaign to humiliate the elderly and to obliterate what were known as the Four Olds—“old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes.” The photographs in Woeser’s book were taken by her father, a soldier in the Chinese military, and found by her after he died. There are vandalized monasteries and bonfires of books and manuscripts—a rare pictorial record of a tragedy in which ideological delirium turned ordinary people into monsters who devoured their own. (Notably, almost all the persecutors in the photographs are Tibetan, not Han Chinese.) In one revealing photo, Tibet’s most famous female lama, once hailed as a true patriot for spurning the Dalai Lama, cowers before a young Tibetan woman who has her fists raised.

Closer to the center of things, in Xi’an, the Red Guards paraded Xi Zhongxun, a stalwart of the Chinese Communist Revolution who had fallen out with Mao, around on a truck and then beat him. His wife, in Beijing, was forced to publicly denounce their son— Xi Jinping , China’s current President. Xi Jinping’s half sister was, according to official accounts, “persecuted to death”; most probably, like many people tortured by the Red Guards, she committed suicide. Xi spent years living in a cave dwelling, one of sixteen million youths exiled to the countryside by Mao.

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According to estimates quoted by Yang, as many as a million and a half people were killed, thirty-six million persecuted, and a hundred million altogether affected in a countrywide upheaval that lasted, with varying intensity, for a decade—from 1966 to 1976, when Mao died. Mao’s decrees, faithfully amplified by the People’s Daily , which exhorted readers to “sweep away the monsters and demons,” gave people license to unleash their id. In Guangxi Province, where the number of confirmed murder victims reached nearly ninety thousand, some killers consumed the flesh of their victims. In Hunan Province, members of two rival factions filled a river with bloated corpses. A dam downstream became clogged, its reservoir shimmering red.

In 1981, the Chinese Communist Party described the Cultural Revolution as an error. It trod carefully around Mao’s role, instead blaming the excesses on his wife, Jiang Qing, and three other ultra-Maoists—collectively known, and feared, as the Gang of Four. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader supervising this pseudo-autopsy, had been maltreated during the Cultural Revolution, but he had also abetted it, and was eager to indefinitely postpone close scrutiny. He urged the Chinese to “unite and look forward” ( tuanjie yizhi xiang qian kan ). As class struggle gave way to a scramble for upward mobility, the sheer expediency of this repudiation of the past was captured in a popular pun on Deng’s slogan: “look for money” ( xiang qian kan ).

In the four decades since, China has moved from being the headquarters of world revolution to being the epicenter of global capitalism. Its leaders can plausibly claim to have engineered the swiftest economic reversal in history: the redemption from extreme poverty of hundreds of millions of people in less than three decades, and the construction of modern infrastructure. Some great enigmas, however, remain unsolved: How did a well-organized, disciplined, and successful political party disembowel itself? How did a tightly centralized state unravel so quickly? How could siblings, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates turn on one another so viciously? And how did victims and persecutors—the roles changing with bewildering speed—live with each other afterward? Full explanations are missing not only because archives are mostly inaccessible to scholars but also because the Cultural Revolution was fundamentally a civil war, implicating almost all of China’s leaders. Discussion of it is so fraught with taboo in China that Yang does not even mention Xi Jinping, surely the most prominent and consequential survivor today of Mao’s “chaos under heaven.”

Notwithstanding this strategic omission, Yang’s book offers the most comprehensive journalistic account yet of contemporary China’s foundational trauma. Memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, first appearing in the nineteen-eighties, belong by now to a distinct nonfiction genre—from confessions by repentant former Red Guards (Jung Chang’s “ Wild Swans ,” Ma Bo’s “ Blood Red Sunset ”) to searing accounts by victims (Ji Xianlin’s “ The Cowshed ”) to family sagas (Aiping Mu’s “ The Vermilion Gate ”). The period’s outrages animate the work of many of China’s prominent novelists, such as Wang Anyi, Mo Yan , Su Tong, and, most conspicuously, Yu Hua , whose two-volume novel “ Brothers ” includes an extended description of a lynching, with details that seem implausible but that are amply verified by eyewitness testimony.

Yang provides the larger political backdrop to these granular accounts of cruelty and suffering. At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, he was studying engineering at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, and he was one of the many students who travelled around the country to promote the cause. In 1968, he became a reporter for Xinhua News Agency, a position that gave him access to many otherwise unreachable sources. This vantage enabled him to write “ Tombstone ” (2012), a well-regarded history of the Great Famine, caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The new book is almost a sequel, and Mao remains the central figure: China’s unchallenged leader, as determined as ever to fast-forward the country into genuine Communism. With the Great Leap Forward, Mao had hoped to industrialize China by encouraging household steel production. With the Cultural Revolution, he seemed to sideline economic development in favor of a large-scale engineering of human souls and minds. Social equality, in this view, would come about by plunging the Chinese into “continuous revolution,” a fierce class struggle that would permanently inflame the political consciousness of the masses.

Yang describes the background to Mao’s change of direction. The spectacle of Khrushchev denouncing Stalin, in 1956, only to be himself removed and disgraced, in 1964, made Mao increasingly prone to see “revisionists” at every turn. He feared that the Chinese Revolution, achieved at tremendous cost, risked decaying into a self-aggrandizing, Soviet-style bureaucracy, remote from ordinary people. Mao was also smarting from the obvious failure of his economic policies, and from implicit criticism by colleagues such as Liu Shaoqi, China’s de-jure head of state from 1959 onward. Yang describes, in often overwhelming detail, the intricate internal power struggle that eventually erupted into the Cultural Revolution—with Mao variously consulting and shunning a small group of confidants, including his wife, a former actress; China’s long-standing Premier, Zhou Enlai; and the military hero Lin Biao, who had replaced Peng Dehuai, a strong critic of Mao, as the Minister of Defense in 1959, and proceeded to turn the People’s Liberation Army into a pro-Mao redoubt.

Sensing political opposition in his own party, Mao reached beyond it, to people previously not active in politics, for allies. He tapped into widespread grievance among peasants and workers who felt that the Chinese Revolution was not working out for them. In particular, the Red Guards gave Mao a way of bypassing the Party and securing the personal fealty of the fervent rank and file. As the newly empowered students formed ad-hoc organizations, and assaulted institutions and figures of authority, Mao proclaimed that “to rebel is justified,” and that students should not hesitate to “bombard the headquarters.” In 1966, he frequently appeared in Tiananmen Square, wearing a red armband, with hundreds of thousands of Red Guards waving flags and books. Many of his fans avoided washing their hands after shaking his. Mao’s own hands were once so damaged by all the pressing of callow flesh that he was unable to write for days afterward. Predictably, though, he soon lost control of the world he had turned upside down.

Late in 1966, the younger Red Guards were challenged by an older cohort, who formed competing Red Guard units; they, in turn, were challenged by heavily armed “rebel forces.” All factions claimed recognition as the true voice of the Chairman. By early 1967, workers had joined the fray, most significantly in Shanghai, where they surpassed Red Guards in revolutionary fervor. Mao became nervous about the “people’s commune” they established, though he and his followers had often upheld the Paris Commune, from 1871, as a model of mass democracy. So ferocious was one military mutiny, in Wuhan, that Mao, who had arrived in the city to mediate between rival groups, had to flee in a military jet, amid rumors that a swimmer with a knife in his mouth had been spotted in the lake by Mao’s villa. “Which direction are we going?” the pilot asked Mao as he boarded the plane. “Just take off first,” Mao replied.

Growing alarmed by the sight of continuous revolution, Mao tried to restore order in the cities, exiling millions of young urban men and women to the countryside to “learn from the peasants.” He purged Liu Shaoqi, who died shortly thereafter, and Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor-repair factory in a remote rural province. Mao increasingly turned to the People’s Liberation Army to establish control. He replaced broken structures of government with “revolutionary committees.” These committees, dominated by Army commanders, were effectively a form of military dictatorship in many parts of China. Partly in order to keep the military on his side, Mao named his Defense Minister, Lin Biao, as his official successor, in October, 1968. But a border conflict with the Soviet Union the following year further expanded the military’s power, and a paranoid Mao, soon regretting his move, sought to isolate Lin. In an extraordinary turn of events, in 1971, Lin died in a plane crash in Mongolia with several of his family members; allegedly, he was fleeing China after failing to assassinate Mao.

Prompted, even forced, by internal crises and external challenges, Mao opened China’s doors to the United States and, in early 1972, received Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Beijing, much to the bewilderment of those in the West who had seen China as leading a global resistance to American imperialism. (When Kissinger flattered Mao, saying that students at Harvard University had pored over his collected works, he demurely replied, “There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.”) The following year, Mao brought back Deng Xiaoping, entrusting him with China’s ailing economy. Then he changed his mind again, once it became apparent that the lingering malevolence of the Gang of Four was causing people to rally behind Deng. Mao had just re-purged Deng and launched a new campaign against Deng’s “capitalist roading” when, in September, 1976, he died. Within a month, the Gang of Four was in prison. (Jiang Qing, given a life sentence, spent her time in jail making dolls for export, until authorities noticed that she embroidered her name on all of them; she killed herself in 1991.) The Cultural Revolution was over, and Deng was soon ushering China into an era of willed amnesia and “looking for money.”

The surreal events of the Cultural Revolution seem far removed from a country that today has, by some estimates, the world’s largest concentration of billionaires. Yet Xi Jinping’s policies, which prioritize stability and economic growth above all, serve as a reminder of how fundamentally the Cultural Revolution reordered Chinese politics and society. Yang, although obliged to omit Xi’s personal trajectory—from son of Mao’s comrade to China’s supreme leader—nonetheless leaves his readers in no doubt about the “ultimate victor” of the Cultural Revolution: what he calls the “bureaucratic clique,” and the children of the privileged. Senior Party cadres and officials, once restored to their positions, were able to usher their offspring into the best universities. In the system Deng built after the Cultural Revolution, a much bigger bureaucracy was conceived to “manage society.” Deeply networked within China’s wealthy classes, the bureaucratic clique came to control “all the country’s resources and the direction of reform,” deciding “who would pay the costs of reforms and how the benefits of reform would be distributed.” Andrew Walder, who has published several authoritative books on Maoist China, puts it bluntly: “China today is the very definition of what the Cultural Revolution was intended to forestall”—namely, a “capitalist oligarchy with unprecedented levels of corruption and inequality.”

Yang stresses the need for a political system in China that both restricts arbitrary power and cages the “rapaciousness” of capital. But the Cultural Revolution has instilled in many Chinese people a politically paralyzing lesson—that attempts to achieve social equality can go calamitously wrong. The Chinese critic Wang Hui has pointed out that criticisms of China’s many problems are often met with a potent accusation: “So, do you want to return to the days of the Cultural Revolution?” As Xi Jinping turns the world’s largest revolutionary party into the world’s most successful conservative institution, he is undoubtedly helped by this deeply ingrained fear of anarchy.

Outside China, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is even more complex. Julia Lovell, in her recent study, “ Maoism: A Global History ,” demonstrates how ill-informed Western fervor for Mao eventually helped discredit and divide the left in Europe and in America, enabling the political right to claim a moral high ground. Many zealous adepts of Maoism in the West turned to highlighting the evils of ideological and religious extremism. Sympathy for nonwhite victims of imperialism and slavery, and struggling postcolonial peoples in general, came to be stigmatized as a sign of excessive sentimentality and guilt. This journey from Third Worldism to Western supremacism can be traced in the titles of three books from the past four decades by Pascal Bruckner, one of the French dabblers in Maoism—“The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt” (1983), “The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism” (2006), and “An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt” (2017).

Misperceptions of China abound in this sectarian discourse. As the Soviet Union imploded after a failed experiment with political and economic reform, China, the last surviving Communist superpower, was presumed to have no option but to embrace Western-style multiparty democracy as well as capitalism. But China has managed to postpone the end of history—largely thanks to the Cultural Revolution. In the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his hopeful plans for perestroika and glasnost, the Communist Party and the military had faced little domestic challenge to their authority since the death of Stalin; along with bureaucratic cliques that had serenely fattened themselves during decades of economic and political stagnation, they were able to contest, and finally thwart, Gorbachev’s vision. In China, by contrast, such institutions had been greatly damaged by the Cultural Revolution, with the result that Deng, setting out to rebuild them in his image, faced much less opposition. Class struggle during the Cultural Revolution had left the old power holders as well as the revolutionary masses utterly exhausted, desperate for stability and peace. Deng shored up his authority and appeal by reinstating purged and disgraced officials and by rehabilitating many victims of the Red Guards, including, posthumously, the novelist Lao She.

During the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had rejected all emendations to his economic playbook. Even when China seemed on the verge of economic collapse, he railed against “capitalist roading.” Deng not only accelerated the marketization of the Chinese economy but also strengthened the party that Mao had done so much to undermine, promoting faceless officials known for their administrative and technical competence to senior positions. China’s unique “model”—a market economy supervised by a technocratic party-state—could only have been erected on ground brutally levelled by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

“History,” E. M. Cioran once wrote, “is irony on the move .” Bearing out this maxim, cultural revolutions have now erupted right in the heart of Western democracies. Chaos-loving leaders have grasped power by promising to return sovereignty to the people and by denouncing political-party apparatuses. Mao, who was convinced that “anyone who wants to overturn a regime needs to first create public opinion,” wouldn’t have failed to recognize that the phenomenon commonly termed “populism” has exposed some old and insoluble conundrums: Who or what does a political party represent? How can political representation work in a society consisting of manifold socioeconomic groups with clashing interests?

The appeal of Maoism for many Western activists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies came from its promise of spontaneous direct democracy—political engagement outside the conventional framework of elections and parties. This seemed a way out of a crisis caused by calcified party bureaucracies, self-serving élites, and their seemingly uncontrollable disasters, such as the endless war in Vietnam. That breakdown of political representation, which provoked uprisings on the left, has now occurred on an enlarged scale in the West, and it is aggravated by attempts, this time by an insurgent ultra-right, to forge popular sovereignty, overthrow the old ruling class, and smash its most sacred norms. The great question of China’s Maoist experiment looms over the United States as Donald Trump vacates the White House: Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?

The Trumpian assault on the West’s “olds” has long been in the making, and it is, at least partly, a consequence of political decay and intellectual ossification—akin to what Mao diagnosed in his own party. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, a consensus about the virtues of deregulation, financialization, privatization, and international trade bound Democrats to Republicans (and Tories to New Labour in Britain). Political parties steadily lost their old and distinctive identities as representatives of particular classes and groups; they were no longer political antagonists working to leverage their basic principles—social welfare for the liberal left, stability and continuity for the conservative right—into policies. Instead, they became bureaucratic machines, working primarily to advance the interests of a few politicians and their sponsors.

In 2010, Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through “mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties”—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.” Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments.

Trump failed to purge all the old élites, largely because he was forced to depend on them, and the Proud Boys never came close to matching the ferocity and reach of the Red Guards. Nevertheless, Trump’s most devoted followers, whether assaulting his opponents or bombarding the headquarters in Washington, D.C., took their society to the brink of civil war while their chairman openly delighted in chaos under heaven. Order appears to have been temporarily restored (in part by Big Tech, one of Trump’s enablers). But the problem of political representation in a polarized, unequal, and now economically debilitated society remains treacherously unresolved. Four traumatic years of Trump are passing into history, but the United States seems to have completed only the first phase of its own cultural revolution. ♦

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The chinese cultural revolution: dynamic times, dramatic lessons for today’s kids.

The lesson plans presented here could be used in a high school World History course as part of a larger unit on the People’s Republic of China. Prerequisite understandings would include: 1) basic concepts of comparative governments, 2) the impact of Western imperialism on China, 3) an overview of twentieth-century Chinese history from the collapse of the Qing or Manchu dynasty in 1911 to the establishment of the PRC in 1949, and 4) the successes and failures of Maoist China prior to 1966.

Mindful of various teaching styles and the differences in student populations, the attached handouts can be used in a number of ways in your classroom. Each handout explains one aspect of the Cultural Revolution and presents a firsthand account of its impact. When examined as a set, an overview should emerge. Hopefully, one of the lesson plans below will be successful in your classroom, provoking discussion and promoting understanding.

At the conclusion of these activities, students will be better able to:

1. Address specific knowledge outcomes of the National Standards for World History: Era 9, 1B—Assess the benefits and costs of Communist policies under Mao Zedong, including the . . . Cultural Revolution

2. Demonstrate critical skills in Historical Thinking, as outlined in the National Standards for World History, including: 2E—Read historical narratives imaginatively, taking into account what the narrative reveals of the humanity of the individuals and groups involved. 2F—Appreciate historical perspectives, describing the past in its own terms, through the eyes and experiences of those who were there. 3B—Consider multiple perspectives of various peoples in the past by demonstrating their differing motives, beliefs, interests, hopes, and fears. 3C—Analyze cause-and-effect relationships. 3F—Compare competing historical narratives.

Procedure and Materials

Divide students into five groups. Each group will become “experts” about a single topic. Prepare enough copies of the five different handouts for each student to have one.

Option 1: Jigsaw Lesson

Assign each “expert” group a different topic. Pass out handouts so that each group has a separate topic and every student in each group has a handout. Ask students to read and discuss the information and be able to respond to all questions in the “Be able to . . .” section at the end of the handouts. Advise them to take notes on a separate sheet of paper. Allow approximately twenty minutes for them to become experts. Have students count off within each group to prepare to rotate to new groups.

Then ask students to move to their “jigsaw” group, all ones in one group, twos in the next, and so on, creating five new groups, each composed of experts on different topics. Direct students to fold the handout page with the Chinese name printed on it in half, and then in half again, to produce a name placard for the person whose point of view they will present. For five minutes, each student will then teach his or her topic to the other students, referring only to his or her notes—“bringing the jigsaw pieces together.”

To extend the group to full-class discussion, refer to the “Suggested Discussion Questions” below.

Option 2: Reader’s Theater

All first-person accounts in the five handouts are “action packed.” Arrange students into five groups and assign each a separate topic. Allow the groups half a class period to plan their presentations, which could include making props suggested by the reading (e.g., posters, hats, pins, armbands). The following day, have each group introduce its presentation, explaining the setting and important concepts, then act out the experiences of the person profiled.

It is important to impress upon students the gravity of these events and that their reader’s theater presentation should be a serious handling of the subject matter. Following the presentations, the teacher can conduct a full-class discussion, referring to the questions below.

Suggested Discussion Questions:

1. What political and economic conditions set the stage for the Cultural Revolution? What philosophy was behind each program?

2. Discuss the experiences of the person profiled in your reading. What did he or she sacrifice? What did he or she learn?

3. Can the events in your reading be compared to other events you’ve studied in World History or to events ongoing today?

Origins of the Cultural Revolution

Dai hsiao-ai.

China became communist in 1949 when forces led by Mao Zedong defeated the Chinese Nationalists after a civil war that had lasted more than ten years. For the next twentyseven years, Mao remained the supreme leader of China, despite serious economic problems and tragic errors in leadership. In 1966, Mao was on the defensive, fearing that opposition to his leadership was growing. He believed that certain people in the government wanted to replace him. To prevent this from happening, he declared a “Cultural Revolution.” This would complete the process of communizing the country by exposing those he termed “reactionary bourgeois authorities,” “capitalist roaders,” or “revisionists”—and by destroying all remnants of China’s pre-communist past. Then, to create a revolutionary atmosphere and the upheaval it brings, Mao encouraged young people to organize themselves to carry out his policies.

The following excerpts are recollections of seventeen-year-old student Dai Hsiao-ai, soon to become a Red Guard. In May 1966, the principal of his school was asked to suspend all classes and direct his students to make “big character posters” (handmade posters used to criticize people) and to write essays denouncing certain “revisionist” writers Mao considered enemies.

At first, big character posters were fun. We would write our individual posters together and exchange ideas about the best kinds of criticisms. There was a kind of competition to see who could write the best one. However, we knew nothing about (these writers); they seemed distant and few of us had even read their essays. All of our information came from the newspapers. We just copied phrases and accusations from them and incorporated them into our posters. Discussions of our essays were the same. . . . After 10 days of this, even the most active among us grew tired. We began to tell jokes in our meetings. Some people stopped attending entirely and dozed instead. We continued for about eight more days but nobody was deeply involved any more. We thought the end was in sight. Everything changed with the denunciation of the two teachers. We became more active than before. Since we were all about eleven or twelve during the anti-rightist campaign in 1957, we had never before had the opportunity to participate personally in a political movement. We were therefore very eager and full of enthusiasm. On the day after the principal denounced the two teachers at an all-school meeting, every wall of the school was covered with big-character posters. This time, we were not as indifferent as we were when the target was (a writer). Each of us wrote at least ten posters on that day.

The struggle was always very intense. We forced the teachers to wear caps and collars, which stated things like “I am a monster.” Each class confronted and reviled them in turn with slogans, accusations, and injunctions to reform their ways. We made them clean out the toilets, smeared them with black paint, and organized “control monster teams” to see that it was done properly. We would charge them with specific mistakes and not relent until they admitted they were true. It took nearly a week of constant struggle to make the man admit he had said “Mao was wrong” in conversation with one of his fellow teachers. They had little rest and were forced to sleep apart from their fellow teachers. We would join into informal groups, raid their quarters, and begin to work on them again. They could not escape us.

After about two weeks, we were afraid that the literature teacher would kill herself. We kept her under constant surveillance and even wrote a poster and attached it to her mosquito net over her bed reminding her that she was being watched and could not succeed in committing suicide. . . .

In the beginning, I had mixed emotions. I was particularly close to the literature teacher and had always thought that she was a good person and an excellent teacher. At first I was unwilling to criticize or to struggle against her, but my classmates accused me of being sentimental and warned me that I was becoming like her. They even told me that I was headed for trouble. I gradually realized that they were right. The Party could not be wrong and it was my duty to join the struggle. I did so and eventually with enthusiasm.

Be able to . . .

1. Explain Mao’s goals in starting the Cultural Revolution and the role that young people would play in carrying out his policies.

2. Introduce your character to the other students, pronouncing his name correctly (somewhat like ‘Die-she-ao-eye’), and tell what you know about him.

3. In your words, describe the events explained by this young man.

The Cult of Mao

For the first eighteen years of the People’s Republic of China, children were raised to revere Chairman Mao. He was their George Washington. In many ways, he was also considered their spiritual leader, guiding their society toward a communist utopia. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1967, the political powers behind the movement tapped into this existing respect for Mao and encouraged fanaticism, which was especially powerful among the adolescents who would later be placed at the forefront of the Cultural Revolution. The following are accounts by a twelve-year-old boy, Liang Heng. Though younger than most of the youths involved, he experienced the excitement of participating in two pilgrimages to honor Chairman Mao. The first recollection is of setting off on the “New Long March,” a 240-mile hike retracing the path of the Red Army’s march during the 1949 Communist Revolution.

There were eight people on our team, including Peng Ming’s younger brothers and sisters and several other neighbor children, all of them much older than I. We prepared for three days, learning how to fold our things inside our blankets in a neat little square of army green, how to tie our Red Army-style straw sandals and wrap our leggings around our calves. We prepared a red flag with yellow characters in imitation-Chairman-Mao calligraphy reading “Long March,” fitted placards on our bundles with Quotations so the people walking behind us could see them and take inspiration, collected a first-aid kit, a map, and canteens. My proudest moment was when Peng Ming pinned on my red armband, not a makeshift paper one, but one of finest red silk, with the shining snow-white words “Red Guard” painted onto it. Then he attached a beautiful Chairman Mao button on my jacket, a noble yellow profile with metallic red rays emanating from it and Tien An Men Square in red relief below. I think I grew ten inches. . . . Father and the other parents saw us off, anxious but not regretful, proud but afraid to show their feelings before the small gathering of onlookers. Tears were controlled on my part as well, for I was determined not to show my age. I marched proudly and quickly, without looking back even once.

The people of the Changsha streets stared at us with respect and envy, and this made us walk even taller and faster. We had soon passed through the suburbs and entered the countryside itself. Within a half a day we began to encounter other New Long March teams, some from as far away as Guangxi and Guandong provinces, and I felt prouder than ever to be from Hunan, Chairman Mao’s home province and the fountainhead of the whole Communist movement. Some of these groups had better costumes than we, with real uniforms and caps with red stars, and most of the teams were larger than ours, but our excitement and purpose were the same. We struck up an instant camaraderie, singing songs together, encouraging each other, exchanging information about what lay ahead. The walls of the peasants’ houses had been painted with slogans like . . . REVOLUTION TO THE END, so we felt more than ever that we were all engaged in a common pilgrimage, that we were all part of an exalted tide being pulled inexorably toward some sacred moonlight.

By the end of 1967, eleven million young people had traveled to Peking (now called Beijing) to proclaim their loyalty to Chairman Mao. This second excerpt recounts this same boy’s experiences.

If there was a single thing that meant ecstasy to everyone in those days, it was seeing Chairman Mao. Ever since I had been in Peking, the possibility had been in the back of my mind, and, like every other Red Guard, I would have laid down my life for the chance. . . . On May 1st Peng Ming was planning to go with a small group to conduct performances of Revolutionary songs at the Summer Palace during the day . . . and I was sometimes asked to carry drums and other instruments, so I went with Peng Ming’s group to the park. We were completely unprepared for what happened.

In the middle of singing a song that Peng Ming had composed himself, we heard the great news: Chairman Mao was in the park! Gathering our instruments together hastily, we ran gasping to the spot, but it was too late. He was gone. All that remained of him was the touch of his hand on the hands of a few who had been lucky enough to get close to him. But we didn’t leave in disappointment. That trace of precious warmth in the palms of others seemed to us a more than adequate substitute for the real thing. Those Chairman Mao had touched now became the focus of our fervor. Everyone surged toward them with outstretched arms in hopes of transferring the sacred touch to their own hands. If you couldn’t get close enough for that, then shaking the hand of someone who had shaken the hands with Our Great Saving Star would have to do.

1. Explain why the people of China revered Mao and how young people would be especially involved with the cult of Mao.

2. Introduce your character to the other students, pronouncing his name correctly (as the spelling suggests), and tell what you know about this boy.

3. In your own words, describe the events explained by this boy.

Destroy the Four Olds

In August of 1966, the Red Guard units were authorized to set out to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) by raiding the homes and shops of members of the “backward” classes. These classes were often referred to as the black elements, and included former landlords, former merchants, former rich peasants, and persons perceived to be counterrevolutionaries, rightists, or criminals. The provincial party authorities assisted the Red Guards in finding targets for their raids. The students carried out this assignment with great enthusiasm, marching through the streets with banners, singing revolutionary songs, and shouting slogans.

The following account is taken from the memoirs of a woman named Nien Cheng who was fifty-one years old at the time. She was the wealthy widow of a former diplomat who had worked for the previous Chinese government, overthrown by the communists back in 1949. A week after these events she would be arrested and kept in prison in solitary confinement for almost seven years.

From the direction of the street, faint at first but growing louder, came the sound of a heavy motor vehicle slowly approaching. I listened and waited for it to speed up and pass the house. But it slowed down, and the motor was cut off. I knew my neighbor on the left was also expecting the Red Guards. Dropping the book on my lap and sitting up tensely, I listened, wondering which house was to be the target.

Suddenly the doorbell began to ring incessantly. At the same time, there was furious pounding of many fists on my front gate, accompanied by the confused sound of hysterical voices shouting slogans. The cacophony told me that the time of waiting was over and that I must face the threat of the Red Guards and the destruction of my home. . . .  The Red Guards pushed open the front door and entered the house. There were thirty or forty senior high students, aged between fifteen and twenty, led by two men and one woman much older. Although they all wore the armband of the Red Guard, I thought the three older people were the teachers who generally accompanied the Red Guards. . . .

The leading Red Guard, a gangling youth with angry eyes, stepped forward and said to me, “We are the Red Guards. We have come to take revolutionary action against you!”

Though I knew it was futile, I held up the copy of the Constitution and said calmly, “It’s against the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China to enter a private house without a search warrant.”

The young man snatched the document out of my hand and threw it on the floor. With his eyes blazing, he said, “The Constitution is abolished. It was a document written by the Revisionists within the Communist Party. We recognize only the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao.”

The students then went about the business of smashing the woman’s mirrors, furniture, porcelain dishes and priceless antiques. Her curtains, fur coats, evening dresses, and silk robes were cut up with a scissors. Books and papers were ripped up and strewn. They made it a point to collect and turn over to party officials items like cameras, watches, clocks, binoculars, and silverware. While their attention was focused on another part of the house, Nien Cheng climbed the stairs to survey the damage on the third floor.

In the largest guest room, where the Red Guards had carried out most of their destructive labor of cutting and smashing, a radio set was tuned to a local station broadcasting revolutionary songs based on Mao’s quotations. A female voice was singing, “Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: revolution is justifiable.” There was a note of urgency in her voice that compelled the listener’s attention. This song was to become the clarion call not only for the Red Guards but also for the Proletarian Revolutionaries when they were organized later on. I thought of switching off the radio, but it was out of my reach unless I climbed over a mountain of debris in the middle of the room.

I looked at what had happened to my things hopelessly but indifferently. They belonged to a period of my life that had abruptly ended when the Red Guards entered my house. Though I could not see into the future, I refused to look back. I supposed the Red Guards had enjoyed themselves. Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal in each of us. If I were young and had had a working-class background, if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infallible, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?

Be able to . . . .

1. Explain the campaign to Destroy the Four Olds. What were they? How was the plan carried out?

2. Introduce your character to the other students, pronouncing her name correctly (as the spelling suggests), and tell what you know about her.

3. In your own words, describe the events explained by this woman.

The Attack on the Arts

Music and other performing and visual arts were a major focus during the Destroy the Four Olds campaign and throughout the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao’s wife, who had been an actress during her younger years, used her influence to shape a new style of drama, music, dance, and visual arts that reflected the ideals of Maoist China and rejected traditional Chinese styles. All Western music was banned, since it was linked with “bourgeois capitalism.” Classical musicians, because of their expertise and appreciation of music that originated in Europe, were detained and persecuted by unruly mobs. The following excerpts are the recollections of a famous violinist from China, Ma Sitson, who had escaped only months before and who shared this account with the readers of Life Magazine.

In May last year I had no idea how far this new movement would go, nor did anyone else. Conditions were tense, but in the past they had been even more tense . . . . I was used to it. You had to get used to it. In early June, however, I got word that tatzepao (big character posters) attacking me had been put up at the Music Academy. Such posters are the hallmark of the Great Cultural Revolution. Scrawled on newspaper or butcher paper, they carry news, accusations, confessions, announcements, or simply praise for Chairman Mao.

A friend suggested that my wisest move would be to write a self-criticism before things went any further. My wife and daughter Celia agreed. I hesitated; I had nothing to confess, and besides I didn’t like the idea of putting myself forward. Finally my daughter wrote a statement for me. It said that I supported the Cultural Revolution enthusiastically and, though I did not admit to specific wrongdoing, that I was willing to accept reform.

Ma Sitson’s efforts to insulate himself from criticism and punishment were futile. He was detained by authorities for fifty days, and then he and a few others were loaded onto a truck and returned to the Central Music Academy where he had formerly been the president.

As we entered the big gate we saw a great crowd of people— students, workers, soldiers, even children. We were prodded off (the truck) and no sooner had I set foot on the ground than someone dumped a bucket of paste over my head. Others stuck tatsepao on my body and rammed a tall dunce cap labeled “Cow Demon” on my head. A cardboard plaque around my neck said, “Ma Sitson, agent of the bourgeois opposition.” Later another sign calling me “vampire” was added. Finally they gave each of us a copper basin—a “death bell”—and a stick to beat it with. . . . It was a wild scene. Our assailants acted as if they had gone crazy. We were paraded across the campus to the din of shouted slogans. All the way people hit out at us and spit upon us, especially the children. I recognized the distorted faces of some of my own students. . . . This was only the beginning of months of degradation and harassment.

Every morning and evening we had to sing together—and sometimes alone—a disgusting song composed by the son of the professor of conducting. It was called The Howl of the Black Gangsters and it went:

I am a cow-headed monster

I have sinned, I have sinned

I must come under the people’s dictatorship

Because I am an enemy of the people.

I must be very frank,

If I am not, smash me to bits!

It ended on the seventh note with a crescendo to make it sound ugly.

None of this was pleasant, but the most nerve-wracking thing was the random harassment. At any time revolutionary students, who by the middle of August were calling themselves Red Guards, could order us out of our rooms. “Come out!” they would say. “Bow your head!” Then, because I had been labeled “vampire” for ill-treating workers (namely my ex-chauffeur) they would force me to recite my “crimes” over and over. The children were the fiercest of all. They made me crawl on my hands and knees. On several occasions they tore up my room, pulled the bedding apart and scattered my books. One boy took my quilt and threw it up on the roof, remarking, “So long as it is revolutionary, no action is a crime.”

These Red Guards had no leaders, and we were fair game for any of them. It was anarchy .

1. Why were the arts a target of the government during the Cultural Revolution? What types of art and music did this campaign seek to wipe out? How?

2. Introduce your character to the other students, pronouncing his name correctly (as the spelling suggests), and tell what you know about his life.

3. In your own words, describe the events explained by this man.

The Rustication of Urban Youths

In 1968, a new program sent millions of people from urban areas to the countryside to be “re-educated.” Mao’s rationale was called “thought reform through labor.” The city dwellers would learn first-hand the essential dignity of rural life and work, and the peasants would benefit by being brought up-to-date on the Cultural Revolution’s revolutionary thought and activities. In reality, this forced relocation, or “rustication,” of many thousands of people and severely disrupted the lives and families of those involved. Often careers and educations would not be resumed. Many splintered families never reunited. The program’s unstated purpose was to provide a means of ridding the cities of the hundreds of thousands of young people roaming about with little to do, and to provide a means of exiling adults who were believed to hold questionable political beliefs. The following recollections are from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old girl, Jung Chang.

In January 1969, every middle school student in Chengdu was sent to a rural area somewhere in Sichuan. We were to live in villages among the peasants and be “re-educated” by them. What exactly they were supposed to educate us in was not made specific, but Mao always maintained that people with some education were inferior to illiterate peasants, and needed to reform to be more like them. One of his sayings was: “Peasants have dirty and cow manure-sodden feet, but they are much cleaner than intellectuals.”

Everything in Ningnan was done manually, the way it had been for at least 2,000 years. There was no machinery—and no draft animals, either. The peasants were too short of food to be able to afford any for horses or donkeys. For our arrival the villagers had filled an earthenware water tank for us. The next day I realized how precious every drop was. To get the water, we had to climb for thirty minutes up narrow paths to the well, carrying a pair of wooden barrels on a shoulder pole. They weighed ninety pounds when they were full. My shoulders ached agonizingly even when they were empty. . . .

. . . Now I began to learn to cook the hard way. The grain came unhusked, and had to be put into a stone mortar and beaten with all ones’ might with a heavy pestle. Then the mixture had to be poured into a big shallow bamboo basket, which was swung with a particular movement of the arms so that the light shells gathered on top and could be scooped away, leaving the rice behind. After a couple of minutes my arms became unbearably sore and soon were shaking so much I could not pick up the basket. It was an exhausting battle every meal.

Then we had to collect fuel. It was two hours’ walk to the woods designated by the forest protection regulations as the area where we could collect firewood. We were only allowed to chop small branches, so we climbed up the short pines and slashed ferociously with our knives. The logs were bundled together and carried on our backs. I was the youngest in our group, so I only had to carry a basket of feathery pine needles. The journey home was another couple of hours, up and down mountain paths. I was so exhausted when I got back that I felt my load must weigh 140 pounds at least. I could not believe my eyes when I put my basket on the scales: it came to only five pounds. This would burn up in no time: it was not enough even to boil a wok of water.

On our first day working with the peasants, I was assigned to carry goat droppings and manure from our toilet up to the tiny fields which had just been burned free of bushes and grass. The ground was now covered by a layer of plant ash that, together with the goat and human excrement, was to fertilize the soil for the spring plowing, which was done manually.

I loaded the heavy basket on my back and desperately crawled up the slopes on all fours. . . When I finally arrived at the field I saw the peasant women skillfully unloading by bending their waists sideways and tilting the baskets in such a way that the contents poured out. But I could not make mine pour. In my desperation to get rid of the weight on my back I tried to take the basket off. I slipped my right arm out of its strap, and suddenly the basket lurched with a tremendous pull to the left, taking my left shoulder with it. I fell to the ground into the manure. Some time later, a friend dislocated her knee like this. I only strained my waist slightly.

Hardship was part of the “thought reform.” In theory it was to be relished, as it brought one closer to becoming a new person, more like the peasants. Before the Cultural Revolution, I had subscribed wholeheartedly to this naïve attitude, and had deliberately done hard work in order to make myself a better person. . . . Now, scarcely three years later, my indoctrination was collapsing. With the psychological support of blind belief gone, I found myself hating the hardship in the mountains of Ningnan. It seemed utterly pointless.

1. Explain the reasons given for the rustication program that sent so many urban youths to the countryside. What other problems did they hope to solve?

2. Introduce your character to the other students, pronouncing her name correctly (as the spelling suggests), and tell what you know about her life.

3. In your own words, describe the events explained by this young woman.

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NOTES ON SOURCES

The excerpts for Handout 1 are from Gordon A Bennett’s and Ronald N. Montaperto’s Red Guard, the Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai (34–40).

The excerpts for Handout 2 are from Liang Heng’s and Judith Shapiro’s Son of the Revolution (102–103, 121 –123).

The excerpts for Handout 3 are from Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai (70–71, 78–79).

The excerpts for Handout 4 are from Ma Sitson’s “In the Hands of the Red Guard,” Life Magazine, June 2, 1967 (28–29).

The excerpts for Handout 5 are from Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China (379, 381, 384–386).

CULTURAL REVOLUTION BIOGRAPHIES

Bennett, Gordon A. and Ronald N. Montaperto. Red Guard, the Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971). Out of print. More scholarly than most biographies. Thorough discussion.

Da Chen. China’s Son, Growing Up in the Cultural Revolution (New York: Random House, Inc., 2001). Easy reading level. Suitable for high school students. Ji Li Jiang. Red Scarf Girl (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997). Designed for younger adolescents, but conceptually advanced. Suitable for high school students.

Jung Chang. Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1991). Memorable story covering the scope of twentieth-century Chinese history. Too intense for student readers. A “must read” for teachers.

Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro. Son of the Revolution (New York: Random House, Inc., 1983). Perhaps the best prospect for a high school outside reading assignment.

Nien Cheng. Life and Death in Shanghai (New York: Grove Press, 1986). Reads like a novel. A different, more adult perspective.

Ma Sitson. “In the Hands of the Red Guard, Torture and Degradation,” Life Magazine , Vol. 62, No 22 (Chicago: Time, Inc., June 2, 1967), 26–29, 63–66.

OTHER LESSON IDEAS

China and the World in 2010 . Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), 1998, 17–21.

Cingcade, Mary, Marco de Martino, and Kelly Long. Revolutionary China , Social Science Education Consortium (SSEC), 2002.

VIDEO CLIPS

The Red Violin. Universal Studios, 1998. (Set counter at 12510, show 6 or 17 minutes.)

To Live. Hallmark Home Entertainment, 1995. (Set counter at 12644, “1960s.” Runs 50 minutes from there.)

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Turning Point in China. An Essay on the Cultural Revolution and Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University

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Andrew J. Watson, Turning Point in China. An Essay on the Cultural Revolution and Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University, International Affairs , Volume 49, Issue 3, July 1973, Pages 492–494, https://doi.org/10.2307/2616896

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Chinese Revolution

Chinese revolution topics.

The Kingdom of Heaven Introduction to China The Mandate of Heaven and Confucianism The Manchu and the Qing Dynasty

The late Qing period Dowager Empress Cixi: the ‘Dragon Lady’ The Self-Strengthening Movement Foreign imperialism The Hundred Days reforms The Boxer Rebellion

The early republic The 1911 Xinhai Revolution Sun Yixian: father of Chinese republicanism Yuan Shikai: the first warlord The Warlord Era

Nationalist China The Guomindang The Generalissimo: Jiang Jieshi May Fourth Movement The Shanghai Massacre The Nanjing Decade

Chinese communism The Chinese Communist Party The rise of Mao Zedong The Jiangxi Soviet The Long March The Yan’an Soviet The Rectification Movement

The struggle for China The Sino-Japanese War The Second United Front The Chinese Civil War

Remaking China Agrarian reform ‘Speak Bitterness’ Social reforms The First Five Year Plan The Great Leap Forward The great famine

The People’s Republic Forming a new government Dealing with opposition The Hundred Flowers campaign The Korean War Sino-Soviet relations

The struggle for control Economic recovery The ‘Learn from’ campaigns The Cultural Revolution begins The Red Guards The Cult of Mao ‘Down to the Countryside’ The Gang of Four

Information and resources on this page are © Alpha History 2018-23. Content on this page may not be copied, republished or redistributed without the express permission of Alpha History. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use . This website uses pinyin romanisations of Chinese words and names. Please refer to this page for more information.

Home — Essay Samples — History — Mao Zedong — The Chinese Cultural Revolution And Its Impact On Society

The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Its Impact on Society

• Categories: Chinese Culture Mao Zedong

About this sample

Words: 1049 |

Published: Nov 8, 2021

Words: 1049 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Chan, A. (2014). Mao's Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China's Great Leap Forward. Oxford University Press.
• Chen, J. (2019). Mao's China and the Cold War. The Journal of Contemporary China, 28(115), 187-203.
• Clark, P. (2008). The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976. Random House.
• Dikötter, F. (2010). Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Gao, M. (2008). The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Pluto Press.
• MacFarquhar, R., & Schoenhals, M. (2006). Mao's Last Revolution. Harvard University Press.
• Roderick, M. (2017). The Transformation of Chinese Socialism. Routledge.
• Schoppa, R. K. (2016). The Columbia Guide to Modern Chinese History. Columbia University Press.
• Spence, J. D. (1999). The Search for Modern China. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Yang, D. L. (2008). Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford University Press.

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