The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was an effort to fulfill the radical promise of the 1949 revolution and rid the nation of class inequalities.

The Cultural Revolution was an intergenerational civil war in which young people expressed their anger and frustration through violence.

The Cultural Revolution was a power struggle among the nation’s leaders following the failure of the Great Leap Forward.

Conflicting Interpretations?

1942- Mao’s Talks on Literature and the Arts1949- Revolution triumphs1953- First Five-Year Plan 1957- The Anti-Rightist Campaign1958- The Great Leap Forward1959- Lushan Conference (exit Peng Dehuai)1960- “Right opportunist” approach 1961- Wu Han’s Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (play) 1962- Sino-Soviet split goes public

Sino-Indian War“Learn from the People’s Revolutionary Army” campaign

Chronology of Key Antecedents

Major Players in the CCP, 1965

Mao ZedongJiang Qing, former

actress and Mao’s wife, ardent supporter of Cultural Revolution

Lin Biao, Defense Minister, supervised de-russification and Maoist indoctrination in the PLA

Liu Shaoqi, CCP Deputy Chairman, presided over the right turn after the Great Leap Forward

Deng Xiaoping, General Secretary, emphasized economic pragmatism

Zhou Enlai, Premier, moderate, well-regarded diplomat who was careful not to criticize Mao

Lei Feng, manufactured hero“Follow Lei Feng’s

example: Love the Party, Love Socialism, Love the People”

An unheralded 21-year-old soldier when he died in 1962, his “diary” made him an icon of selfless devotion to the CCP.

Quotations from Chairman Mao

First distributed to soldiers in the PLA, the “little red book” became ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution, in part because anyone found not to be carrying a copy risked being beaten.

Red GuardsIn August 1966 Mao

called on young people to defend the revolution against bourgeois intellectuals and “capitalist roaders.”

Young people heeded the call, striking out with a violent rage that Mao and the CCP were unable to control.

“Smash the old world, establish a new world”

“Let the new socialist performing arts occupy every stage.”- Jiang Qing

In June 1966 our great leader Chairman Mao himself launched the great proletarian cultural revolution, a revolution unprecedented in history. Revolutionary teachers and students responded at once and rose up to rebel against the capitalist roaders, exposing and denouncing their crimes. For 17 years, in the literature and art world and in our school, these traitors had tried to create public opinion for the restoration of capitalism in China by protecting, fostering and spreading decadent, bourgeois and revisionist literature and art, and opposing Chairman Mao's revolutionary line on literature and art.

China's Khrushchev and his followers were by no means willing to take defeat. They tried to put out the first flames of the cultural revolution by sending out work teams to suppress the growing mass movement. One such work team came to our school. But after a short while we felt there were things seriously wrong with it, so we stuck up dazibao (big-character posters) against it. The work team promptly retaliated by branding us "counterrevolutionaries." We were only a tiny minority, but we were confident that this was only a temporary situation, that the capitalist r oaders could not crush revolutionary fighters armed with Mao Zedong’s thought.- from a statement of the Red Guards of the Central Music Conservatory,

Killing China’s KrushchevLin Baio replaced Liu

Shaoqi as Deputy Chairman of the CCP in July 1966.

Liu Shaoqi was under house arrest the following year and dead two years after that.

Deng Xiaoping survived, but Red Guards tortured and crippled his son.

“The renegade, traitor, and scab Liu Shaoqi must forever be expelled from the Party.”

The Red Guards humiliated and tortured thousands of intellectuals, including teachers, party leaders, the elderly, and their own parents.

Red Guards ransacked monasteries and destroyed symbols of Chinese traditions.

For a few months the PLA stood aside and let the students rampage. However, Red Guards in the summer of 1967 began to challenge the PLA and even Mao himself.

“Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages”

The Fall of Lin BiaoLin Biao, head of the

PLA, rose in prominence as the PLA suppressed the Red Guards.

He and his family were killed in a plane crash trying to flee to the Soviet Union in 1971.

Mao and Jiang Qing then launched a campaign to discredit Lin Biao, who had been regarded as a national hero.

The Fall of Jiang QingPower struggles

continued as Jiang Qing led the leftist Gang of Four against the moderate Zhou Enlai and his protégé, the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping.

After both Zhou and Mao died in 1976, Deng maneuvered his way into power and the Gang of Four were branded as traitors.