Politics16 May 1966 – October 1976

Cultural Revolution

Also called: Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, May 16 Notification, Down to the Countryside Movement

A political movement launched by Mao Zedong in May 1966, claiming that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had infiltrated the party. Red Guards and rebel factions attacked party organisations and fought one another, and leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were purged. Society and the economy were convulsed for ten years until the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.

Poster “The Sunshine of Mao Zedong Thought Illuminates the Path of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” — Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Press, 1967 (Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, UofT · CC BY 2.0 · Source

As the economy recovered after the Great Leap under the readjustment policies of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, Mao came to believe that “revisionism” was spreading through party and state. Beginning with Yao Wenyuan’s November 1965 attack on the historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, the “May 16 Notification” of an enlarged Politburo meeting on 16 May 1966 proclaimed the Cultural Revolution and set up the Central Cultural Revolution Group of Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Zhang Chunqiao and others. In August Mao wrote his own big-character poster, “Bombard the Headquarters”, aimed at Liu Shaoqi.

Red Guards set out to smash the “Four Olds”, destroying temples and cultural relics and assaulting teachers, intellectuals and the families of former landlords; in 1967 rebel factions seized party and government power across the country, as in Shanghai’s “January Storm”. The largest numbers died in armed fighting between factions and in purges such as the “Cleansing of the Class Ranks” carried out by the army and the new revolutionary committees in the name of restoring order. Liu Shaoqi was expelled from the party in 1968 and died in detention the next year; from late 1968 to 1980 more than 16 million urban youths were sent to the countryside (“up to the mountains and down to the villages”). The Ninth Party Congress of 1969 named Lin Biao Mao’s successor in the party constitution.

Estimates of the dead range from hundreds of thousands to several million; the sociologist Andrew Walder, compiling local gazetteers, puts the figure at about 1.1 to 1.6 million. The Communist Party’s 1981 Resolution on History called it “a domestic turmoil wrongly launched by a leader and exploited by counter-revolutionary cliques, which brought serious disaster to the party, the state and the people”.

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States and rulers at the time: People's Republic of China — Paramount leader Mao Zedong
Places: Beijing

People

Mao Zedong1893 – 1976
key figure · Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
Jiang Qing1914 – 1991
key figure · Wife of Mao Zedong, a former Shanghai actress who married him in Yan’an, led the Central Cultural Revolution Group and was arrested in 1976 as one of the “Gang of Four”
Lin Biao1907 – 1971
key figure · PLA marshal who led the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns and, as defence minister, spread the “Little Red Book”; named Mao’s successor in the 1969 party constitution, he died in a plane crash in Mongolia in 1971
Liu Shaoqi1898 – 1969
related figure · Chairman of the People’s Republic (1959–1968) who led economic readjustment after the Great Leap Forward, but was branded a “capitalist roader” in the Cultural Revolution, expelled from the party and died in detention
Deng Xiaoping1904 – 1997
related figure · General Secretary of the Communist Party (1956–1966), twice purged during the Cultural Revolution, and from 1978 China’s paramount leader who launched “reform and opening up”
Zhou Enlai1898 – 1976
related figure · First premier of the People’s Republic of China (1949–1976), long in charge of diplomacy, who arranged Nixon’s 1972 visit

4 parts of this event

1
1966 – 1968Red Guards
After Mao Zedong first received Red Guards in Tiananmen Square on 18 August 1966, the student Red Guard movement spread across China. By November eight rallies had drawn 11 to 13 million young people to Beijing, and the Red Guards turned to violence in the name of smashing the “Four Olds”.
2
1971Lin Biao Incident
On 13 September 1971 Lin Biao, Mao Zedong’s designated successor, fled China by air with his family; the plane crashed near Öndörkhaan in Mongolia, killing all on board. The Chinese government announced that he had fled after a coup plot was exposed, but much about the affair remains unclear.
3
1976Death of Zhou Enlai and the April Fifth Tiananmen Incident
After Premier Zhou Enlai died on 8 January 1976, wreaths and poems piled up at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square at the Qingming festival on 4–5 April. When the authorities removed the wreaths crowds protested, and on the night of the 5th militia and police cleared the square. The incident was declared “counter-revolutionary” and Deng Xiaoping was purged again.
4
1976Death of Mao Zedong and Arrest of the Gang of Four
Mao Zedong died on 9 September 1976, and a month later, on 6 October, Hua Guofeng, with Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, arrested the “Gang of Four” — Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen. The Cultural Revolution was effectively over.

Before and after

Earlier: 1960 Sino-Soviet Split
Later: 1972 Nixon’s Visit to China

Themes that include this event

From the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution1927 – 1976
From the collapse of the United Front in 1927, through rural bases, the Long March and Yan’an, to the Communists’ victory in the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic — then land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, up to Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, while the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan