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16 May 2026 will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of China’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. In launching the mass movement, Mao Zedong appeared to be challenging the dominance of stifling party bureaucracy under state socialism. According to Mao, the youth in particular were to be granted the historic opportunity to establish themselves as the “successors of the Revolution” in a new cycle of struggle, and were to prevent a “restoration of capitalism” as the old guard faded away. The rebellion of the masses devolved into factional struggles and bloody civil wars in the provinces. A new model of political representation, an emancipatory alternative to Leninist party dictatorship, was not brought about through the Cultural Revolution.
An Official and Definitive Interpretation
The People’s Republic of China has officially designated 16 May 1966 as the day the Cultural Revolution began. On that day, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) published an internal communiqué (the May 16 Circular) calling for a “cultural revolution” in the culture industry, schools, the media, and universities. According to the current official view, this was followed by ten years of chaos, which only ended with the 1976 arrests of the “Gang of Four”, the left-wing faction of the party leadership around Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. In 1981, a Central Committee resolution stated that the Cultural Revolution entailed the “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses” for the party, the state, and the people since the People’s Republic was founded in 1949. It concluded that the movement was a “comprehensive error”. By the mid 1980s, party leadership had rehabilitated millions of the victims.1 The “Gang of Four” and the generals of the “Lin Biao clique” were not the only ones held responsible for violent excesses and convicted in show trials; in the provinces, thousands of perpetrators were brought before courts.
The new party leadership around Deng Xiaoping nevertheless decided against comprehensive “de-Maoification”. They developed an explanation, officially accepted to this day, according to which Mao had made a serious strategic error in conceiving the Cultural Revolution; however, the mass executions by firing squad and the persecution of hundreds of thousands of party cadres were crimes committed by “two counter-revolutionary cliques” around Jiang and Lin. Like many rehabilitated cadres, Deng Xiaoping had himself been targeted (as had Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun). Nonetheless, the leadership around Deng deemed that criticizing the founder of party, army, and state too fundamentally would jeopardize the legitimacy of the entire system. Scapegoating the “Gang of Four” was never especially persuasive, however. Even during the Cultural Revolution it had been evident that its proponents only achieved their positions of authority by winning Mao’s favour.
For years now, there has been an official campaign to combat ‘historical nihilism’— which includes perspectives that, according to the party line, overemphasize the CCP’s historic ‘errors’.
The decision to “completely renounce” the Cultural Revolution was reiterated by Xi Jinping in a Central Committee resolution on the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the CCP. From the government’s perspective, certainly, the painful truth that factional struggles had brought the Chinese state to the brink of collapse makes it necessary to thoroughly repress the collective memories connected to these events.
An official interpretation of the party’s history from 2021 details the achievements of the People’s Republic at length, and only devotes a single paragraph to the Cultural Revolution. For years now, there has been an official campaign to combat “historical nihilism” — which includes perspectives that, according to the party line, overemphasize the CCP’s historic “errors”.
Sacks full of Documents
Ironically, there is no period in the history of the People’s Republic as well-documented as the early years of the Cultural Revolution, from mid-1966 to 1968. This is due to the character of the movement itself, and the state’s loss of control at the time. The central party leadership temporarily permitted the masses to create their own organizations and publish their own newspapers. This resulted in internal party struggles as well as broader social conflicts being played out in the open. There were even revolts against local party structures, with archives being stormed in order to seize material to incriminate cadres. At times, statements from the leadership in Beijing suggested that anyone was fair game for criticism, with the exception of Mao himself and Defence Minister Lin Biao. The new mass organizations overrode party discipline and the standard chain of command. They used their own distribution channels, circulating news, internal party documents, and statements from the leadership in Beijing throughout the country. Even unofficial remarks and unpublished speeches by Mao were disseminated without authorization and used to gain the upper hand in local political struggles.
After the Cultural Revolution officially came to an end in 1976, numerous documents from hundreds of different mass organizations ended up in the hands of private collectors. In the 1980s the authorities often paid little attention to this phenomenon. As recently as the early 2000s, if you were lucky you could still buy sacks full of valuable historical documents at flea markets for scrap-paper prices.
This enormous bulk of accessible material outside of CCP control promises a singular glimpse into the internal processes of the party apparatus and of Chinese society.
In the United States, Song Yongyi, a former Red Guard, created a database on the Cultural Revolution that is publicly accessible and contains over 10,000 documents. The “Maoist Legacy” database at the University of Freiburg, Germany, hosts documents related to legal proceedings in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution that can be used free of charge. This enormous bulk of accessible material outside of CCP control promises a singular glimpse into the internal processes of the party apparatus and of Chinese society. It is precisely for this reason that the Cultural Revolution continues to be so politically explosive as a topic.
Historical eyewitnesses remain very active both within and outside China. Many of them had responded with youthful enthusiasm to Mao’s call to rebel. For some, the experience of repression or of transfer to the countryside induced a lifelong process of critical reflection. One example is the group around the online journal Jiyi (“Memory”). Until a few years ago, Jiyi was allowed limited online circulation in China; more recently, the editorial team had to leave the country. A further challenge in coming to terms with the past is the fact that the surviving active participants in the early Cultural Revolution are now 80 or older.
Attacking the Power of “Capitalist Roaders”
Current academic research primarily focuses on the radical shifts that occurred during the various stages of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the significant regional variations in its impact.2 The internal circular of 16 May 1966 sparked a drive to purge the education, media, and cultural sectors. The movement barely distinguished itself from the campaigns organized by party leadership in previous years. Those labelled enemies included intellectuals and artists who had been educated under the old nationalist regime, as well as alleged “representatives of the bourgeoisie” within the party, the state, and the army. These were said to lack resoluteness in the struggle against “reactionary bourgeois ‘authorities’”.
In academic research on the period today, there are debates as to whether Mao’s primary concern was a campaign in the realm of cultural policy, or whether this rather served to camouflage a strategic maneuver intended to oust President Liu Shaoqi. Tensions already existed within the party leadership over how China ought to develop following the Great Famine (1959–1961). Liu and Deng supported the “de-collectivization” of agriculture and extending local markets in order to stabilize supply. Mao, on the other hand, wanted to intensify class struggle once the 1962 crisis had been overcome.
The Cultural Revolution first began to diverge from the pattern of the usual campaigns when in June 1966 Red Guards began forming in Beijing middle schools and universities. They took the initiative to criticize school and university staff at meetings and in wall newspapers, the so called “big-character posters”. Liu, in charge of the day-to-day administration of the party apparatus, sent work teams comprising more than 7,000 cadres out to the universities with the aim of bringing the movement back under control. Many activists were criticized and threatened with repression.
A radical reversal occurred when Mao returned to Beijing from his Wuhan summer residence. On 5 August, he used his own big-character poster to call for action: “Bombard the headquarters!” He denounced the “oppression” of students as “white terror”. The central government issued instructions to withdraw all of the work teams. When this news was disseminated by the national media, there were attacks on senior staff at schools and universities across the country. In the capital, in particular, the violent clashes temporarily spiraled out of control. According to later official accounts, during “Red August” and into early September, in Beijing alone over a thousand people are said to have died, mostly at the hands of the Red Guards, including many teachers at the country’s most prestigious elite schools.3 Some scholars claim that the final break between Mao and Liu came over the question of whether to give free rein to the masses or to implement a controlled campaign led by party committees and work teams.
There were many sons and daughters of high-ranking cadres from the party and the army among the earliest Red Guard groups in Beijing. They advocated the so-called blood-line theory, according to which they were entitled to lead the movement due to their “red ancestry”. During “Red August”, Red Guards searched the residences of “class enemies” and publicly pilloried them in “struggle and critique sessions”. Many of the victims attempted suicide in order to escape humiliation and torture. The Red Guards also spearheaded the destruction of temples, churches, imperial architecture, graves, ancient books, and anything else they considered connected to “feudal” culture. The authorities turned a blind eye for several weeks and instructed the police not to intervene.
Yet the question whether Mao’s actual goal was to attack old “class enemies” and “feudal” culture remains controversial. On 8 August 1966, the Central Committee of the CCP attempted to give the movement a new direction by issuing a 16-point Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. There, it was stated: “The main target of the present movement is those within the party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road.” Names were not named, leaving it to the masses to autonomously expose enemies from among the party cadres. The document gave school and university students the right to put up their own big-character posters and engage in “great debates”.
The Central Committee remained ambivalent regarding the outbreaks of violence. On the one hand, it called on the masses to “struggle with words, not with fists”. On the other hand, except in cases of “active counterrevolution”, no measures were to be taken against school and university students in response to “problems” in the context of the mass movement. The establishment of Cultural Revolutionary committees was also announced, to be elected according to the principles of the 1871 Paris Commune. However, the chaotic situation made institutionalizing the movement and holding orderly elections mostly impossible.
The early Red Guards increasingly came in for criticism by new groups, who suspected them of wanting to protect their privileges as the children of party cadres. Articles in publications of mass organizations fiercely attacking the “blood-line theory” met with a tremendous response. New groups called for letting all of the youth participate in the Cultural Revolution, regardless of their “family background”. At times, national media outlets also backed this criticism of the “blood-line theory”. This helped to foster a dynamic that led to large sections of the youth creating their own Red Guards groups. Rather than the old “class enemies”, their criticism tended to target “capitalist roaders” in positions of authority within the party apparatus.4
In the second half of 1966, schools and universities suspended teaching. The central government ordered the authorities to let young people travel on trains for free throughout the country and provide them with local accommodation. As a result, the movement spread like wildfire. In many places, conflicts broke out between loyalist groups that defended the local party committees and “rebels” who wanted to overthrow the local cadres. Once Mao had publicly sided with the rebels again in early November 1966, no one wanted to be considered a loyalist. The situation increasingly spiraled out of control in the skirmishes among the various mass organizations. In Beijing, factional struggles between the Red Guards at the universities escalated violently, severely diminishing their prestige as the vanguard of the movement.
Proletarian Rebellion and Containment
So as not to endanger economic planning and the supply of goods, the central government initially did not allow industrial workers to create their own mass organizations and take part in the movement during working hours. By occupying a section of railroad in 1966, workers in Shanghai, the country’s most important industrial centre, won the central government’s permission to start their own rebel groups.
By then various parts of the population were using the official rhetoric of rebellion as a means to express their discontent. In Shanghai, for example, labourers on precarious contracts demanded the same rights as core industry workers on permanent contracts. People whom the government had sent to the countryside returned to the cities without permission. Party cadres who had been demoted prior to 1966 demanded rehabilitation. Everyone was trying to link their particular problems to the alleged power of “capitalist roaders”. This moment of the “People’s Cultural Revolution” would not last long, however.
At the beginning of January 1967, with Mao’s blessing, a coalition of workers’ rebel groups seized power in Shanghai. The previous city government was no longer able to carry out its administrative duties. The new government immediately began a campaign against “economism”. This meant criminalizing all attempts to use the Cultural Revolution to advance particular economic interests. In Shanghai the situation was complicated by the fact that not all of the rebel groups were included in the new order. The new leadership repressed rival organizations, resulting in violent factional battles on the streets. This show that Mao had no problem with factional violence, as long as his side was victorious and able to stabilize the new order. Mao also banned the use of the term “Shanghai Commune”, to avoid the impression that the CCP’s leadership had come to an end.
Civil War in the Provinces
After the “January Storm” in Shanghai in 1967 the national media called on the “proletarian left” to “seize power” throughout the country, with the aim of creating a new order. Collapsed local party apparatuses were to be replaced by revolutionary committees, made up of delegates from among the old cadres, the People’s Liberation Army, and the mass organizations. At the end of January, Mao ordered the army to actively support the insurgent movement. They were, however, only successful in four out of the 22 provinces and five autonomous regions. Instead, civil war broke out across large swathes of the country. Xinjiang and Tibet, bringing up the rear, were only able to establish revolutionary committees recognized by Beijing at the end of 1968.
Political debates over social conditions or the evaluation of family background, as they had occurred in the second half of 1966, barely played a role in 1967–1968. Now it was mainly a question of power struggles between different factions in the effort to establish the new order. There were often struggles at a local level over which of the mass organizations actually represented “the left”, which the army was meant to support. In extreme cases, factions even developed within the armed forces and the factions then supplied weapons to antagonistic mass organizations.
Everywhere the rebel groups were splitting up into opposing factions. They supported or combatted the new provincial governments, particularly when the latter had not yet been recognized by the central government. Often it was impossible to establish consensus as to which of the old cadres counted as revolutionaries and should therefore stand as delegates in the Revolutionary Committees. Ultimately all but 6 of the Revolutionary Committees ended up being run by the army. Some provinces and important parts of national infrastructure came under direct management by the military; some provinces were even placed under martial law.
Mao’s last great campaign could neither bring sustainable new forms of mass representation into the political system, nor erect an alternative to Leninist party dictatorship.
The army implemented the new order through repression from above. During the campaigns to “Cleansing the Class Ranks” (1968–69), to “Expose the Counterrevolutionary Clique of May Sixteenth”, and “One Strike - Three Anti” (1970)5, there were mass arrests and executions. Confessions and denunciations extracted under torture, as well as suicides following “struggle sessions”, were a daily occurrence.
The American sociologist Andrew Walder has analysed over 2,000 official local chronicles. Based on these statistics, he estimates the death toll from the Cultural Revolution at between 1.1 and 1.6 million people.6 A large majority of these lost their lives after the establishment of the new order under the leadership of the army. As a result, there were far more victims of the “Green Terror” (referring to the colour of the army uniform) than there were of the “Red Terror” perpetrated by the Red Guard mob in August 1966 or of the armed factional clashes in 1967.
Restoring the Party Apparatus
In the summer of 1968, Mao had summoned the Beijing universities’ Red Guards leaders to tell them that their great moment was over. “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams of Workers and Soldiers” marched into the universities to take control. According to the new official version, the “petit bourgeois” students were to be “re-educated”. This measure was hardly different from the work teams that Liu had ordered to enter the universities in 1966. With millions of middle school graduates being sent to the countryside from the second half of 1968, the movement of the Red Guards in the schools had effectively been crushed.
After the last Revolutionary Committees were established in the winter of 1968, Mao pushed to convene the 9th Party Congress of the CCP the following year. Steps were taken to restore party committees at all levels. The escalating border dispute with the Soviet Union prompted a reestablishment of state monopoly on the use of force. By the time the Congress was held in April 1969, the government had dissolved the mass organizations. In many of the Revolutionary Committees, soldiers and party cadres had already sidelined the delegates drawn from the masses anyway.
Ultimately, the experiences of the Cultural Revolution meant that after the death of the ‘Great Chairman’ the groundwork had been laid for many Chinese people to welcome a departure from Maoism.
Mao eventually had no choice but to recognize that he could not govern the country without the old cadres. A large number of these were reinstated to leadership positions before and after the Congress. President Liu Shaoqi fared differently. He was kept alive in prison so that at the Congress he could officially and publicly confirm his exposure as a “traitor”. On 12 November 1969, he died in prison after being repeatedly tortured and denied medical assistance.
The 9th National Congress announced the victory of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, but by then the phase of the people’s active and autonomous participation had largely been brought to an end. The revolution had either devoured its children or sent them to the countryside. Instead of becoming the “successors of the Revolution”, many of the activists of 1966 were left disillusioned — not least after they had seen the poverty of the rural population with their own eyes.
Mao’s last great campaign could neither bring sustainable new forms of mass representation into the political system, nor erect an alternative to Leninist party dictatorship. Ultimately, the experiences of the Cultural Revolution meant that after the death of the “Great Chairman” the groundwork had been laid for many Chinese people to welcome a departure from Maoism and respond positively to the policy of “Reform and Opening-Up”.
[Translated by Sam Langer and Marty Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.]
- ^ For a discussion of the numbers, see Daniel Leese, Maos langer Schatten: Chinas Umgang mit der Vergangenheit, Munich 2020, p. 245f.
- ^ For a detailed account, see Felix Wemheuer, A Social History of Maoist China: Conflict and Change, 1949–1976, Cambridge 2019, pp. 196–206.
- ^ Wang Nianyi, Dadongluan de niandai, Beijing 2009, p. 53.
- ^ For a comprehensive account, see Yiching Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis, Cambridge, Mass. 2014, chapter 3.
- ^ The latter meant strikes against the “counterrevolution” as well as combatting “corruption and embezzlement”, “greed for profit”, and “profligacy”.
- ^ Andrew Walder, Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, Mass. 2019, pp. 186–89.
