ALL FORCES CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP (quanjun wenhua geming xiaozu). Established in June 1966, the group was responsible for directing the Cultural Revolution in the armed forces and military institutes. Liu Zhijian, deputy head of the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and one of the deputy heads of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), was appointed head of the All Forces Cultural Revolution Small Group. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded throughout the country, serious differences developed between several marshals in the Central Military Commission and the radical members of the CCRSG led by Jiang Qing concerning how the Revolution should be carried out in PLA units and military schools. Because Liu and his group sided with the marshals on the issue, Jiang Qing spoke against Liu as she met with rebels from military schools on 4 January 1967, accusing Liu of carrying out the bourgeois reactionary line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in the military. With the approval of Chairman Mao Zedong, Liu was replaced by Marshal Xu Xiangqian as head of the All Forces Cultural Revolution Small Group on 11 January 1967. Jiang Qing was appointed advisor of the reformed group. Xiao Hua, Yang Chengwu, Xie Tangzhong, Wang Xinting, Guan Feng, Xu Liqing, and Li Mancun were named deputy heads. Other members of the group include Yu Lijin, Liu Huaqing, Wang Hongkun, Tang Pingzhu, Ye Qun, Hu Chi, Gu Yan, Wang Feng, and Zhang Tao. In late March 1967, after Mao ordered Xu Xiangqian to go on leave for self-criticism for his role in the February Adverse Current, Xiao Hua, head of the PLA General Political Department, acted in Xu’s place to lead the All Forces Cultural Revolution Small Group. However, after a violent incident at the theater of Beijing Exhibition Hall between two rival mass organizations in the PLA art and literary circles during a performance on 13 May 1967, Lin Biao voiced support for one side, whereas Xiao Hua and the PLA General Political Department were accused of having been on the wrong side. Xiao was soon dismissed from office, and the All Forces Cultural Revolution Small Group ceased to function.
ALLUSORY HISTORIOGRAPHY (yingshe shixue). This term, coined during the mid-1970s and becoming widely known after the Cultural Revolution, refers to the practice of some high-powered writing teams in the service of the Jiang Qing group to attack Premier Zhou Enlai and praise Jiang Qing in numerous articles and books that took the form of historical studies. This kind of writing first appeared in late 1973 and continued to appear until early 1976. The topic was invariably “Confucianism versus Legalism.” Reflecting on an observation that Chairman Mao Zedong had made in mid-1973, these publications projected an image of a conservative or reactionary Confucius and Confucians in contrast to that of progressive or reformist Legalists in Chinese history. The present-day parallel, as suggested by allusions and innuendoes, to this highly innovative account of history was the opposition between the “backward-looking” Zhou Enlai and his supporters—ready to reverse the course of the Cultural Revolution at their first chance—and the radical cultural revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong who were determined to carry Mao’s program through to completion. See also CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS; PEKING UNIVERSITY AND TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY GREAT CRITICISM GROUP; SHANGHAI MUNICIPAL PARTY COMMITTEE WRITING GROUP.
ANTI-INTERFERENCE (1966). This was a campaign launched in late June and early July 1966 by the work groups in response to some students’ challenge to their authority in leading the Cultural Revolution movement on the campuses of Beijing’s middle schools and colleges. These students had accused the work groups of repressing their rebellion against teachers and school authorities, and they attempted to drive the work groups off campus. With the support of the Liu Shaoqi-led central leadership, the work groups accused the students of interfering with the implementation of the Cultural Revolution movement in their institutions. Some of these students were named Rightists and reactionaries and were struggled against at mass meetings. The Anti-Interference Campaign ended in late July and early August when Mao Zedong, upon returning to Beijing, decided to reverse the policies of the work groups and withdraw all work groups from the campuses.
ANTING INCIDENT (1966). This railway blockade, organized by the mass organization the Workers Command Post of Shanghai at the Anting station near Shanghai on 10 and 11 November 1966, marked the beginning of workers’ massive engagement in the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong welcomed such engagement as consistent with his efforts to pushing the Cultural Revolution beyond government agencies and cultural and educational circles.
On 9 November, a mass rally of about 10,000 people was held in Shanghai’s Culture Square to announce the establishment of the Workers Command Post and to denounce the “bourgeois reactionary line” that was allegedly being carried on by the Shanghai municipal party committee. After the Shanghai party committee refused to recognize the Workers Command Post in accordance with the stipulation of the central leadership that disallowed transindustry organizations, about 2,000 members of the Workers Command Post, led by Wang Hongwen, a member of the five-person presidium of the newly established organization, rushed into the Shanghai railway station on 10 November and boarded three trains. They declared that they would go to Beijing to present a petition for their organization. On orders of the Shanghai railway bureau, Wang’s train was halted at Anting and some members got off the train and lay down on the rails to protest. As a result, transportation between Shanghai and Nanjing was paralyzed for more than 30 hours. In response to the report from Shanghai, Chen Boda, head of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), sent telegrams to Shanghai and Anting supporting the municipal party committee’s position and asking the workers to go back. On 12 November, the CCRSG sent Zhang Chunqiao to Shanghai to work with the East China Bureau and Shanghai party committees to resolve the conflict at Anting. Zhang, however, negotiated directly with Wang Hongwen and other leaders of the mass organization at Anting as soon as he arrived.
On 13 November, Zhang attended a rally held by the Workers Command Post and, probably having already cleared the idea with Mao Zedong, agreed to the organization’s demands for recognition and power. The Shanghai party committee pleaded the case with the central leadership but to no avail. The legitimation of the Workers Command Post pushed Shanghai a step closer to the 1967 power seizure movement known as the January Storm. It also helped make Shanghai a base for the ultraleftist forces in the central leadership, especially the “Gang of Four,” which would form after Lin Biao’s downfall and of which both Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao would become part.
ANTONIONI’S CHINA (1974). With Premier Zhou Enlai’s special permission, the Italian film maker Michelangelo Antonioni visited China in spring 1972. His tour of the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing and the rural areas of Lin Xian County, Henan Province, resulted in a three and a half hour documentary film entitled China. Antonioni’s unflattering, realistic representation of various aspects of Chinese social life was seen by the CCP leadership as a deliberate distortion of reality “with a particular intention to vilify the great achievements of the Cultural Revolution.” The film was termed “anti-China” and “reactionary” and became the target of a propaganda campaign in early 1974. Considering Antonioni’s political affiliation with the Italian Communist Party, Yao Wenyuan saw him as associated with both Italian and Soviet “revisionists.” Attacking Zhou Enlai by insinuation, Chi Qun said that films like this were actually made by spies and traitors.
APRIL 5 MOVEMENT (1976). Taking place simultaneously in major cities across the nation around the Qingming Festival—traditionally a time to “sweep the graves” (saomu) and pay homage to the dead—this political event was at once a public mourning for the late Premier Zhou Enlai and a mass protest against the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership headed by Jiang Qing. Commemoration as a form of protest was the invention of the April 5 Movement. The widely shared discontent with Mao Zedong’s radical policies erupted for the first time, and this public outburst of grief and rage anticipated the swift ending of the Cultural Revolution soon after the death of Mao and the downfall of the Jiang Qing group. See also NANJING INCIDENT; TIANANMEN INCIDENT.
ARMED CONFLICT (wudou). Factional fighting among mass organizations became widespread in 1967 when those organizations began to take over provincial and local governments during the power seizure movement. In some places, especially where People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops took sides while on a “left-supporting” mission, military weapons were used in the fighting. In July and September 1967, Jiang Qing twice voiced support for the slogan “Verbal attack but armed defense,” which further intensified nationwide violence. Between summer 1967 and summer 1968, factional fighting escalated into large-scale armed conflicts in many provinces. In some provinces, army troops were split and fought among themselves. According to an official estimate, a million guns were in the hands of civilians at the time. This was a time that Chairman Mao Zedong referred to as a period of “all-round civil war” that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
To end factional violence and nationwide chaos, Mao made several decisive moves in July 1968. He authorized nationwide issuance of two party central documents (July 3 Public Notice and July 24 Public Notice) concerning armed conflicts in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Shaanxi Province and indicated the broader applications of these documents. He dispatched a workers propaganda team of over 30,000 members led by PLA officers to end a prolonged factional battle known as the One Hundred Day Armed Conflict on the Tsinghua Campus in Beijing. He sent all college students away from campuses and thus dissolved a major force of factional violence. Later in 1968, armed conflict gradually receded in the nation.
ARMED CONFLICT IN GUANGXI (1967–1968). One of the longest and deadliest factional battles in the country, the escalating armed conflict in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, caused the central leadership, with Mao Zedong’s endorsement, to issue a harshly worded July 3 Public Notice in 1968 to stop the violence. The nationwide issuance of this document was the first of a series of decisive steps that Mao took in summer 1968 to end what he called an “all-round civil war” in the country.
Beginning in April 1967, mass organizations in Guangxi split into two camps: the conservative Joint Headquarters, on the one hand, and the 4-22 rebel faction with its allies, on the other. Factional violence started in late 1967 and escalated in 1968. With the support of the former First Party Secretary of the Autonomous Region Wei Guoqing, army troops of the Guangxi Military District, and the local militia, the Joint Headquarters gained the upper hand in armed fighting. The 4-22 faction and its allies won support from the 141st Division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) field army and initially had much sympathy from central leaders in Beijing until mid-1968 when they began to storm military warehouses, clash with army soldiers, and stop cargo trains to seize military supplies that were being transported to Vietnam. They halted the major railway transportation system in Guangxi for more than a month.
Although the Public Notice of 3 July from Beijing did not mention any mass organization by name, the document was aimed apparently more at the 4-22 faction in its denunciation of the weapon-seizure, the clashes with the military, and the railway blockade as “counterrevolutionary crimes” committed by “a small handful of class enemies.” The harsh condemnation, then, was used by the Joint Headquarters and its supporters to justify another wave of persecution and killing of the members of its political rivals before the final end of violence and the establishment of the Guangxi Revolutionary Committee in late August 1968. The persecution in some cases also involved cannibalism. Throughout the armed conflict and persecution, tens of thousands—perhaps as many as a hundred thousand—people were killed in Guangxi. Most of the dead were members of the 4-22 rebel faction and those classified as the “Black Five Categories.”
AUGUST 4 INCIDENT (1967). Also known as the “Shanghai Diesel [Engine Factory] United Headquarters” incident, the bloodshed of 4 August 1967 was the gravest case of factional violence in Shanghai. There were two mass organizations in the Shanghai Diesel Engine factory that had been in intense conflict with each other for the first half of 1967: the East-Is-Red (dongfang hong) Rebels Headquarters who had joined the citywide organization Workers Command Post led by Wang Hongwen, and the Workers United Rebels Headquarters who had been accusing Wang and the Workers Command Post of jeopardizing production, blockading transportation, and provoking violence. On 18 July 1967, a dispute among workers belonging to different factions turned violent and resulted in the death of a workshop party secretary.
In the capacity of vice-chairman of Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, the current municipal power organ, Wang Hongwen sided with the Workers Command Post and ordered the Workers United Headquarters to submit a list of murderers for interrogation. On 4 August, Wang mobilized 100,000 workers to carry out a battle plan against the Workers United Headquarters. Heavy fighting lasted more than 10 hours, leaving 18 people dead and 983 wounded. The factory was so badly damaged that production closed down for two months. Members of the Workers United Headquarters who were not in the factory on 4 August were forced to “make up” the beatings they missed. The incident of factional violence ended with a total victory of Wang Hongwen’s rebel faction and won the praise of Zhang Chunqiao as a “beautiful battle.”
AZALEA MOUNTAIN (Dujuanshan). One of the few modern Peking operas performed during the Cultural Revolution besides the eight model dramas, Azalea Mountain is about the transformation of a greenwood gang of uprising peasants into an orderly unit of Mao Zedong’s army in the Jinggang Mountain revolutionary base area during the early stages of the Chinese communist revolution. Originally a stage play, Azalea Mountain was adapted for the Peking Opera by the Peking Opera Troupe of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in 1963 and by the Peking Opera Troupe of Beijing in 1964. During 1968 and 1969, Jiang Qing began to be interested in making over the play according to her idea of model drama, especially the so-called three prominences principle. The new version, finally produced by the Peking Opera Troupe of Beijing in 1973 following Jiang Qing’s instructions, was much different from the 1963 and 1964 versions: the role of the male protagonist, the peasant leader, in earlier versions was modified in the later version to the extent that the heroine Ke Xiang (He Xiang in earlier versions), the female representative of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who wins the trust and respect of the peasant troops and leads them through struggles against both the armed local tyrants from without and a hidden class enemy—a traitor—from within, became the sole center of the play. She was elevated to such a height as to become a flawless, perfect, superhuman revolutionary stereotype.
BADGES OF CHAIRMAN MAO. Although badges carrying the image of Mao Zedong first appeared in the 1940s during the Rectification Campaign in Yan’an, it was not until late 1966 and early 1967 that wearing Mao badges became a fashion and a rage for the whole nation, marking the height of the personality cult of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, more than 90% of the Chinese population wore Mao badges. According to Premier Zhou Enlai, as he was speaking of economic planning in March 1969 and deploring the wasteful use of aluminum in producing larger and larger badges, some 2.2 billion Mao badges had been produced since the summer of 1966. About 2.5 to 5 billion badges in more than 20,000 different types were manufactured during the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution.
Most badges show a left profile of Mao’s head, some a frontal view, and still others his whole figure. The predominant background color of the badges is red. A common representation of Mao as the “red sun in the heart of the people” shows red or golden rays radiating from Mao’s portrait at the center. The badges often have as background a historical theme of Chinese revolution, which is sometimes labeled with a name or highlighted with a slogan. While the badges were considered a display of the wearer’s loyalty to Mao and enthusiasm for the revolution, wearing badges also served the purpose of protecting the wearer from suspicion of disloyalty, although in some places and at some times those who were said to have a bad family background were forbidden to wear them.
Noting the waste of industrial material in badge production, Mao protested in 1969, “Give our airplanes back to us!” After that, the CCP Central Committee issued the circular “Certain Issues Worthy of Attention concerning the Promotion of Chairman Mao’s Image” (dated 12 June 1969) to stop mass production of Mao badges. After the downfall of Lin Biao, who was the nation’s loudest advocate for Mao’s personality cult, in September 1971, the number of people wearing Mao badges declined rapidly. In the mid-1970s, only a handful of government officials and some farmers in the countryside still wore them.
In the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution, Mao badges were primarily obtained through one’s work unit or could be purchased at certain stores in urban areas. But production fell so short of the nation’s demand in both quantity and variety that in mid-1967 a black market for Mao badges sprang up in cities throughout China. These “illegal markets” were speedily banned by the government. After the Cultural Revolution, however, Mao badges were traded again on the market and became profitable items for collectors.
BAIYANGDIAN POET GROUP. A reading and poetry-writing group of educated youths in the Baiyangdian Lake District, Hebei Province. In January 1969, Meng Ke, Genzi, and Duoduo went with their classmates at the Beijing No. 3 Middle School to Baiyangdian to settle down and be reeducated by local peasants. Soon they organized a reading group. Their readings included some of the Grey Books and Yellow Books (foreign books translated into Chinese for ranking officials). Many of these books were part of the personal collection of Genzi’s parents. Others, especially books of foreign literature, were obtained from underground literary salons in Beijing. Sharing the same interest in literature and rejecting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propagandistic doctrine of art, the three young men wrote poetry and became readers and critics of each other’s work. Meng Ke and Duoduo agreed to exchange “yearbooks” of their poetry every New Year’s Eve. Close contact and frequent exchanges among the three poets resulted in some remarkable similarities in the early examples of their poetic composition, such as their embrace of free verse, the richness of often personified natural imagery, the occasional use of highly private symbolism, and their shared fondness for a grandiloquent and humorous tone. These affinities showed the distinct features of what scholars later called “experimental poetry.” Bei Dao and Jiang He, two prominent voices of the “obscure poetry” of the late 1970s and the early 1980s, visited the Beiyangdian district frequently to exchange materials and views on poetry with Meng Ke, Duoduo, and Genzi while enjoying the beauty of the lake district. These travels stimulated the writing of experimental poetry.
Despite political repression, young poets of the Baiyangdian group entered a golden season of artistic creation in the early 1970s while in the countryside. Most of their major poems were completed during this period, including some critically acclaimed works of modern Chinese poetry, such as Genzi’s “The Month of March and the End” (1971), Meng Ke’s “Sky” (1973), and Duoduo’s “When People Stand Up for Their Snoring” (1972). Meng Ke completed his three collections of poems in 1972, and Duoduo put together his first collection in the same year. Since no works of literature other than those of propaganda were produced during the Cultural Revolution, underground poetry, of which the works of the Baiyangdian group were part, shocked readers with its freshness when it began to surface in the late 1970s and created a new direction for Chinese poetry. See also UNDERGROUND READING MOVEMENT.
BAREFOOT DOCTORS (chijiao yisheng). Barefoot doctors were part farmer and part doctor, with minimal training in both Chinese and Western medicine. The idea of a farmer as a doctor originated in rural parts of Shanghai where peasants were usually barefoot while working in the wet rice fields; hence the term barefoot doctor. Although the first group of barefoot doctors was trained in 1958, they did not become popular until a report relating the “revolution in medical education” to barefoot doctors was published in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official organ Red Flag in March 1968. Along with the development of various kinds of collective health care in the countryside, the troops of barefoot doctors were enlarged rapidly nationwide from 1968 on—they became a million strong by 1973. Although they lacked professional skills, barefoot doctors helped alleviate the drastic shortage of professionally trained doctors in rural areas and contributed to the fairly limited improvement of health and hygiene in the countryside.
On the other hand, the success of barefoot doctors was often blown out of proportion by official media. Mao Zedong’s dismissal of the central government’s Ministry of Hygiene as an agency of “urban masters” led to the invention of a “medical revolution” policy called “post exchange” during the Cultural Revolution. Under this policy, a large number of urban medical professionals were sent to the countryside to be reeducated and reformed, many of them working in the fields, while some barefoot doctors were assigned work in urban hospitals that was well beyond their capacity. The system of employing barefoot doctors began to phase out after the Cultural Revolution. In January 1985, the Ministry of Hygiene delegitimized the use of the term “barefoot doctors”; in its place were “rural doctors” and “health workers,” depending on qualifications.
BEIJING PARTY COMMITTEE REORGANIZATION. One of the landmark decisions made by the central leadership at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966, at which the Cultural Revolution was officially launched. The reshuffle of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Beijing Municipal Committee was a major step Mao Zedong took to remove what he considered to be an obstacle to his Cultural Revolution program.
On 10 November 1965, Yao Wenyuan’s article “On the New Historical Drama Hairui dismissed from office,” which was soon to be known as the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural Revolution, appeared in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Daily. The article accuses Wu Han—the author of the historical play who was also a renowned historian and a deputy mayor of Beijing—of using a story of the past to criticize China’s communist policies. Peng Zhen, mayor and first party secretary of Beijing, called the municipal committee to a meeting on the same day to discuss Yao’s article. Almost all of the committee members disagreed with Yao’s charge. Without knowing Mao Zedong’s full support for Yao Wenyuan, Peng ordered Beijing’s newspapers not to reprint Yao’s article. A few days later, when the article was printed as a pamphlet by Shanghai People’s Press for nationwide distribution, Peng responded to an inquiry by the Beijing Xinhua Bookstore with an instruction that bookstores not order any copies. In early 1966, as the criticism of Wu Han and a few other “academic authorities” continued, the Peng-led Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group prepared a document that, despite its leftist-sounding rhetoric, stresses the importance of keeping criticism within the realm of academia. With approval from the Politburo, the document, known as the February Outline, was disseminated nationwide as a policy guide to the ongoing academic criticism and debate.
Peng’s series of actions appeared to Mao to be a conscious resistance to his developing Cultural Revolution program. In March 1966, Mao criticized the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee and the Five-Person Group on several occasions, calling the Beijing party committee an “impenetrable and watertight independent kingdom.” Mao also threatened to dismiss the Beijing committee should it continue to “protect bad people.” In April, Mao chaired an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee at which decisions were made to abrogate the February Outline and dismiss the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group. At the Enlarged Politburo Sessions held in Beijing in May 1966, Peng Zhen was denounced as a member of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique, and a motion was adopted that the Beijing party committee be reorganized. On 4 June, People’s Daily announced the central leadership’s appointment of Li Xuefeng, first secretary of the CCP North-China Bureau, and Wu De, first party secretary of Jilin Province, as first and second secretaries of Beijing’s new municipal party committee. In the meantime, many officials of the old municipal committee and municipal government were condemned as members of Peng Zhen’s “black gang” and were subjected to brutal physical abuse by the masses at struggle meetings.
Before long, however, the reorganized Beijing municipal committee ran into trouble, too. Because of its decision to dispatch work groups, first to Peking University and then to many other schools in Beijing, the committee was criticized in autumn 1966 for carrying out a bourgeois reactionary line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. It was sidelined from power until April 1967 when it was finally replaced by the new power organ Beijing Revolutionary Committee.
BIAN ZHONGYUN (1916–1966). A native of Wuwei, Anhui Province, Bian joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1941 and graduated from Qilu University in 1945. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Bian was deputy principal of the prestigious Beijing Normal University Female Middle School, where she had worked since 1949. On groundless charges, she was denounced and struggled against by the students in late June 1966. On 5 August 1966, five days after the Red Guards organization was formed at the school, she, along with four other school officials, was attacked by the Red Guards. Bian died after several hours of humiliation and brutal beating. This was Beijing’s first case of the killing of education workers by the Red Guards. Many cases followed, and violence and brutality escalated especially after the Mass Rally of 18 August 1966. At this rally, Mao Zedong received a Red Guard armband from a student from this school, whereupon he recommended that her name be changed from genteel “Binbin” to the overtly militant “Yaowu,” which means in Chinese “be valiant.” In 1978, Bian’s name was officially cleared at a memorial service organized by the CCP committee of Beijing’s Xicheng District, but the legal proceedings that Bian’s widower brought in 1979 against the killers were rejected by the district People’s Procuratorate on the grounds that the actionable period had already expired.
BIG-CHARACTER POSTERS (dazibao). Written in black ink with pen-brushes on large sheets of paper and pasted on walls or specially made poster boards for a standing crowd to read, big-character posters were the major form of mass communication during the Cultural Revolution. While the government controlled major media channels, such as newspapers and radio broadcasting, the masses used big-character posters as effective vehicles with which to express their views. The designated areas for posting and reading posters on school campuses and in factories and government agencies became centers of activity and information gathering and networking places for visitors as well.
Chairman Mao Zedong used the big-character posters of the masses as a weapon against his political enemies in the party leadership. The nationwide broadcasting and publication of what Mao called the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster” by Nie Yuanzi and her colleagues at Peking University on 1 June 1966 marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution for the public. To mobilize the masses against Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, Mao attempted to identify himself with the masses by calling his militant piece, Bombarding the Headquarters, “my own big-character poster.”
After the Cultural Revolution, big-character posters remained popular as a method of expressing dissent, especially during the Democracy Wall Movement in the late 1970s. In September 1980, the National People’s Congress outlawed big-character posters in a revised Constitution.
BIGGEST CAPITALIST-ROADER WITHIN THE PARTY. Along with “China’s Khrushchev,” this was a reference to President Liu Shaoqi in official media in 1967 and 1968. Liu’s name was not mentioned in officially published denouncements until after the Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (13–31 October 1968). See also CAPITALIST-ROADERS; LIU SHAOQI.
BLACK FIVE CATEGORIES (hei wulei). A pejorative label commonly used in the Cultural Revolution, the “Black Five Categories” refers to people who were classified as landlords and rich peasants during the Communist-led Land Reform in the late 1940s and the early 1950s and to those labeled as counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists in a series of political campaigns after the founding of the PRC. Already seen as “targets of the proletarian dictatorship” before the Cultural Revolution, people in these categories were invariably persecuted and repressed during the entire 10-year period of the Revolution. They were subject to public humiliation, physical abuse, forced labor, confiscation of personal property, exile from the cities, and, in a number of isolated cases, even massacre. Their children and even grandchildren—especially in the countryside, where the CCP class identification criteria were often applied to the third generation—were discriminated against and were often forced to declare a “clean break” with their parents. Many of them, like their parents, were also subject to humiliation and abuse, especially at the hands of the Red Guards from families of the “Red Five Categories” in the beginning months of the Cultural Revolution.
BLACK GANG (heibang). This pejorative term was initially used in summer 1966 to refer to the so-called Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique of Deng Tuo, Wu Han, and Liao Mosha. The reference soon extended to the old CCP Beijing Municipal Committee led by Peng Zhen. Anyone who was then associated with the Municipal Committee was called a member or an element of the “black gang.” As the Cultural Revolution evolved, “black gang element” became a label for any denounced academic authority or party official. The term continued to be used until 1968 when the central leadership began to distinguish between “unrepentant” and “corrigible” capitalist-roaders, associating “black gang” only with the former.
BLACK SEVEN CATEGORIES (hei qilei). A commonly used pejorative, the “Black Seven Categories” refers to persons who were labeled as landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, Rightists, capitalists, and “black gang” members. The last two categories were an addition to the “Black Five Categories” during earlier stages of the Cultural Revolution.
BLACK WIND IN NOVEMBER (shiyiyue heifeng). Also known as the “Black Wind in December,” this officially sanctioned pejorative refers to a series of big-character posters that appeared in Beijing in the last two months of 1966 criticizing the Cultural Revolution faction of the CCP central leadership—the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) in particular. Although most of the student authors acted independently, they were part of a general reaction of conservatives—usually those with a “red” family background—against the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, they had either supported or tolerated the blood lineage theory and abused students from politically disadvantaged families. Politically, they sympathized with the old party establishment represented by Liu and Deng. The CCRSG became their main target due to its sweeping denunciation of party veterans, its support for the emerging rebel faction, and its encouragement of the politically disadvantaged students to criticize their abusers in the Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign.
The better-known posters representing this conservative reaction include “Kick aside the CCRSG and Closely Follow Chairman Mao in the Revolution” (2 December) by a number of student organizations at Beijing Institute of Forestry and the four installments of “Question the CCRSG” (late November and early December) by the August 1 Column of the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics Red Guards. The former questions the legitimacy of the CCRSG by evoking the “Sixteen Articles,” which demands that power organs to lead the Cultural Revolution be established through a democratic process of a broad election under the CCP leadership.
Also prominent among the posters labeled “reactionary” was a voice of students of rebel faction, such as the “Open letter to Comrade Lin Biao” (15 November) by two high school students assuming the penname Yilin Dixi, which criticized Lin Biao for his formulation of a “peak theory” and for his promotion of the personality cult of Mao Zedong. By the end of December 1966, the massive protest of the rebel faction in defense of the CCRSG and the arrest of most of the student authors by the authorities put to an end the so-called Black Wind.
BLOOD LINEAGE THEORY (xuetonglun). This popular variation of the CCP’s long-time organizational policy known as “class line” or “class status” was embraced by some Red Guards, especially those who came to be known as the Old Red Guards, in the initial stage of the Cultural Revolution. According to the blood lineage theory, one’s family background determines and defines who one is. People who belong to the Red Five Categories, especially children of ranking officials, are “born-reds” (zilaihong). They are trusted as successors to the revolutionary cause and enjoy political privileges. By contrast, people who belong to the Black Seven Categories are deemed politically untrustworthy. Already deprived of equal opportunity for college education, employment, and promotion in the regular practice of the official CCP class policy, they were dismissed as “sons of dogs” (gouzaizi) by many Old Red Guards on the grounds of the “bad” blood in them. The CCP organizational policy required authorities to “consider family class status, but not just family class status, and stress the importance of political behavior.” Although more moderate than its popular version, this policy was never seriously implemented.
In June and July 1966, a couplet (duilian) that would become the most popular expression of the blood lineage theory was circulating among students at the Peking University Middle School. The parallel lines read, “If the father is a hero, the son is a real man” and “If the father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard.” The work group on a mission to direct the Cultural Revolution at the school was critical of the couplet. But after Mao Zedong dismissed the work groups as a repressive force in late July, the couplet began to be circulated rapidly and widely on middle school campuses all over Beijing. On 29 July 1966, some students posted the couplet at the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics Middle School, with the original two parallel lines running vertically in the form of traditional Chinese calligraphy scrolls and an added “It is basically like this, making demons anxious” placed horizontally on top. The couplet, along with its several variations, became a subject of heated debate among students in Beijing. Those who embraced the idea represented by the couplet, including a majority of ranking officials’ children, made it a fundamental basis for admitting fellow students into their own Red Guard organizations, keeping out whoever was not a “born-red.” The couplet served as both a prompt and a justification for the humiliation, torture, and killing of innocent people of the Black Seven Categories and their children during Beijing’s Red August—a brutal act perpetrated mostly by Old Red Guards whom Chairman Mao Zedong received for the first time at the Mass Rally of 18 August 1966. At a debate on 20 August 1966, Tan Lifu, a leader of Red Guards at Beijing Industrial University and the son of a ranking official, gave a long speech in support of the couplet. Tan’s speech, printed and widely distributed, helped make the blood lineage theory and its controversy well-known across China.
The blood lineage theory became a political issue in the central leadership in late 1966 during the campaign against the so-called bourgeois reactionary line allegedly carried out by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. To win support of the students from nonproletarian families, Chen Boda dismissed “born-redism” as reactionary at the CCP Central Committee Work Sessions on 9–28 October 1966 and linked it to the bourgeois reactionary line. Chen’s speech outlawed the controversial couplet and made the blood lineage theory officially a target of criticism.
A majority of students who had opposed the theory at the outset now became much more vocal with their views. The best-known critic was the young worker Yu Luoke, who was to present a point-by-point refutation of the blood lineage theory in his article “On Family Background.” However, since Yu’s criticism went so far as to repudiate the system of political discrimination underlying the CCP class policy and to embrace the idea of equality and human rights, he was eventually named a counterrevolutionary and was put to death by the authorities.
BO YIBO (1908– ). Deputy premier of the State Council (SC) since 1956, Bo was denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a member of the so-called Sixty-One Traitors Clique, a major case fabricated by the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership to incriminate President Liu Shaoqi.
A native of Dingxiang, Shanxi Province, Bo Yibo joined the CCP in 1925 and soon became a leader in the CCP’s underground work in north China. In 1931, Bo was arrested in Beijing by the Nationalist government. In 1936, the North China Bureau of the CCP—with the support of Liu Shaoqi, who was then in charge of the work of the bureau, and the approval of the central party leadership—instructed Bo to sign an anticommunist declaration prepared by the Nationalists to earn his release. After the founding of the PRC, Bo became one of the most influential leaders on economic matters: first as minister of finance (1949–1953) and then director of the State Economic Commission (since 1956).
In fall 1966, as Mao Zedong’s intention to bring down Liu Shaoqi became clear, Kang Sheng began to gather material from newspapers of 1936 as incriminating evidence against Bo Yibo and others as members of a “traitors clique” formed by Liu Shaoqi. Soon after Mao approved Kang’s work in February 1967, Bo was arrested and imprisoned. The 20,000-word appeal that Bo wrote in prison in the summer of 1967 was of no avail. Bo Yibo’s name was not cleared until late 1978 when the CCP Organization Department finally issued an investigative report on the “Case of the Sixty-One,” dismissing the charges against Bo and 60 others as groundless.
In 1979, Bo was reappointed deputy premier of the SC and became a member of the CCP Central Committee. In 1982, he was elected deputy director of the Central Advisory Committee, a newly established body of retired ranking leaders. In his retirement, Bo Yibo still exerted considerable, mostly conservative influence on the CCP decision-making process. He was also one of the few ranking CCP leaders to produce substantive, and often revealing, memoirs.
BOMBARDING THE HEADQUARTERS (paoda silingbu). This was a big-character poster that Chairman Mao Zedong wrote on 5 August 1966 during the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee to attack President Liu Shaoqi. The poster was originally a long note Mao put down on the margin of the 2 June 1966 issue of the Beijing Daily. Mao’s secretary proofread the note and made a clear verbatim transcription of the original. Mao then added the title “Bombarding the Headquarters—My Own Big-Character Poster.” The final version of the poster contains 205 Chinese characters.
In the poster, Mao denounces the leadership of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, without naming either, as a “bourgeois headquarters” that has been hostile and repressive toward the Cultural Revolution since early June. In strong terms, he accuses them of persecuting the dissenters and imposing a “white terror” of the bourgeois dictatorship. Mao also connects the current situation with what he calls a right deviation of 1962 and the wrong tendency of 1964 that was “‘Left’ in form but Right in essence,” both implicating Liu Shaoqi. The former points to the critical measures taken by the CCP leadership—especially at an enlarged Politburo meeting chaired by Liu in late February 1962—to adjust the radical policies of the late 1950s that caused the great famine of 1959–1962. The latter refers to the earlier guidelines for the Socialist Education Movement based on Liu Shaoqi’s ideas.
On 7 August, copies of Mao’s big-character poster were printed and distributed to all participants of the plenum. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping immediately became targets of attack. On the following day, the Central Committee (CC) passed the Resolution of the CCP Central Committee concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the “Sixteen Articles.” On 17 August, Mao’s big-character poster was issued across China by the CC as a central party document. From then on, the title of the big-character poster, “Bombarding the Headquarters,” became a popular slogan for rebels attacking party officials at various levels.
One year after Mao wrote his big-character poster, the People’s Daily published the entire text in its 5 August 1967 issue with an editorial entitled “Bombarding the Bourgeois Headquarters.” Another editorial, “Completely Destroy the Bourgeois Headquarters—Commemorating the First Anniversary of the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee,” came out in the Red Flag on 17 August. Both editorials consider Mao’s big-character poster to be his bugle call to the campaign to overthrow Liu Shaoqi.
BOMBARDING ZHANG CHUNQIAO. This phrase refers to the efforts of some rebel organizations in Shanghai to bring down Zhang Chunqiao, first in January 1967 and again in April 1968. During the January Storm of 1967, four attempts to seize power in Shanghai by different mass organizations—none of them was Zhang Chunqiao’s choice—were delegitimized by Zhang. The College Red Guards Revolutionary Committee of Shanghai in particular, which had been used by Zhang before, felt betrayed when its own attempts to take over the municipal power met Zhang’s opposition. On 28 January, some college Red Guards challenged Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan in a six-hour debate. In the meantime, in reaction to Zhang’s order to send army troops to Fudan University where his close associate Xu Jingxian was detained by two rebel organizations, thousands of students took to the streets, with big-character posters, leaflets, and banners condemning Zhang for his double dealings with mass organizations and for his attack on the revered modern Chinese writer Lu Xun in the 1930s. The protest came to be known as the “28 January bombardment.”
The preparation for another anti-Zhang rally and demonstration was underway on the early morning of 30 January when the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), following instructions from Chairman Mao Zedong, sent an emergency missive that identified Zhang as part of Mao’s “proletarian headquarters” and forbade demonstrations against him. With the full support of the powerful CCRSG and the largest local mass organization the Workers Command Post, Zhang, Yao, and their close associates in Shanghai were now able to eliminate opposition and further consolidate their power in China’s most populous city. Since the bombarding was denounced as “counterrevolutionary action” in the telegram sent by the CCRSG, thousands of participants of the “bombardment” were mistreated, and at least 2,500 people were persecuted. Interrogation and torture left five persons dead.
On 12 April 1968, big-character posters and hand-written slogans with the same charges against Zhang appeared again on the main streets of Shanghai. The action was planned by Hu Shoujun and some other students at Fudan University. Also involved were rebels at the Second Army Medical College, who had been supported by Lin Biao. The protest was again put down. The two protests were said to have involved rebel organizations with some 100,000 to 200,000 members altogether, most of them students. After the events, they were mistreated and persecuted. The best known case is that of the Hu Shoujun Clique in 1970; the number of deaths resulting from such persecution was said to amount to several hundred.
“BORN-REDS” (zilaihong). This term started as a proud self-reference of the Old Red Guards embracing the blood lineage theory. It first appeared in August 1966 in “The Born-Reds Have Risen,” a big-character poster by the Peking University Middle School Red Flag Combat Team, one of the earliest Red Guard organizations. “Born-reds” later became a popular term referring to anyone from any of the Red Five Categories of families in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. The group of Red Guards who invented and first used the term were mostly children of ranking CCP and PLA officials. Already of a privileged class above those of workers, peasants, and soldiers, which were also “red,” they regarded themselves as natural successors to China’s revolutionary cause; that is, natural successors to the power acquired by their parents’ generation. They humiliated and abused students from politically disadvantaged families, especially those of Black Seven Categories, provoking much protest and creating much antagonism among students. This abuse took various forms, including the use of the pejorative “born-blacks,” “born-yellows,” and “sons-of-dogs” in contrast to “born-reds.”
BOURGEOIS REACTIONARY LINE. This is a pejorative phrase that Chairman Mao Zedong adopted in autumn 1966 to designate the party policies that had been implemented in the summer of 1966 and, in Mao’s view, deviated the thrust of the ongoing mass movement away from what he had intended to be the main target of the Cultural Revolution—the capitalist-roaders in the party leadership. Consequently, a campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line was launched in late 1966 against the alleged framers of these policies, President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping.
In the early summer of 1966 when student revolt erupted on college campuses and in middle schools in Beijing, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the CCP. With the approval of Mao Zedong, who was away from Beijing, the Liu-Deng leadership adopted an old party policy for leading a political campaign and for dealing with extraordinary situations: it dispatched work groups to most chaotic places to lead the mass movement and keep it under the control of the party. When disputes took place on a college campus, the work group there would typically protect party officials and denounce their challengers. In the meantime, the work groups allowed persecution of the so-called Black Seven Categories, which included those associated with the already fallen “black gang” of the old CCP municipal committee of Beijing.
Upon returning to Beijing, however, Mao began to criticize of the work group policy. He wrote a short piece entitled “Bombarding the Headquarters—My Own Big-Character Poster” on 5 August, accusing some unnamed central and regional leaders of taking a “reactionary bourgeois stand” against the proletarian Cultural Revolution. However, in August and September, Mao’s idea of getting at “those in power” (dangquanpai) and shaking up the party leadership from bottom to top was still not carried out, while student Red Guards began to focus their attention on a movement called “Destroy the Four Olds,” targeting alleged class enemies mostly outside the party. Mao was contemplating a new move, and finally he settled on a Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign.
The term “bourgeois reactionary line” appeared for the first time in an editorial of the party organ Red Flag published on 2 October 1966 (issue number 13). On 6 October 1966, the “Third Command Post” of college Red Guards in Beijing held a mass rally at the Workers’ Stadium to declare war against the bourgeois reactionary line. With the attendance of Premier Zhou Enlai and members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) along with a hundred thousand people, this was arguably the most celebrated event of the campaign. In a speech delivered on 16 October at a work session of the CCP Central Committee, Chen Boda, head of the CCRSG, defined Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line against the bourgeois reactionary line on the basis of their attitudes toward the masses: Mao’s line encouraged the masses to educate themselves and liberate themselves, Chen said, while the reactionary line carried out by the work groups was self-righteous and repressive. Chen also attempted to clarify Mao’s “class line” while associating the bourgeois reactionary line with the controversial blood lineage theory that was in fact more akin to Mao’s own ultraleftism.
Chen’s interpretation of Mao’s mass and class policies generated much enthusiasm among students from families other than those of the “Red Five Categories.” These students had been discriminated against in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. Now that the “Red Guard” was no longer a patent for those from the so-called “red families,” these students, as part of the rebel faction of Red Guards that had been more tolerant of their family backgrounds than the Old Red Guards, were able to join Mao’s crusading army against the party establishment from Liu and Deng down to grassroots levels. The campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line continued well into 1967 and prepared the way for the turbulent nationwide power seizure movement. This campaign also led to rehabilitations of some ordinary citizens who had been denounced under the work groups and of a still greater number of people who had been condemned and tortured under the “mass dictatorship” after the withdrawal of the work groups. See also CENTRAL COMMITTEE WORK SESSIONS ON 9–28 OCTOBER 1966; WORK GROUPS.
BREAKING (juelie). Directed by Li Wenhua and produced by Beijing Film Studio in 1975, this film is based on a story about how the Communist Labor University of Jiangxi Province was built in 1958. Its intention, however, is to attack the so-called revisionist line in education of both the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. The protagonist—Long Guozheng, president of the university—is a hero going against the tide of the “revisionist line.” Long bases college admission decisions not on test scores but on the number of callouses on the palms of the candidate. He regards college professors as bourgeois intellectuals. In a comic episode, a professor with a foreign academic degree is ridiculed for specializing in “the function of a horse’s tail.” In short, the film epitomizes the Cultural Revolution’s belittling of knowledge and politicizing of education. When the film was almost completed in October 1975, the conflict between the Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping intensified. Following orders from Gang of Four supporters at Beijing Film Studio, the crew added episodes to meet the needs of current politics. The veteran revolutionary and Long’s political rival Cao Zhonghe, for instance, was labeled an “unrepentant capitalist-roader” in the party, a term soon to be associated with Deng Xiaoping in the campaign to counterattack the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend. Shortly after its release, the film became a popular tool for political education across China. With theatre tickets distributed by party branches, people were obligated to watch it. The film was also praised by official media as an excellent work taking after the Eight Model Dramas and reflecting a complete break with the “revisionist line in education.” In the post-Mao era, critics dismissed the film as a notorious piece of “conspiratorial literature.”
BRITISH CHARGÉ INCIDENT (1967). In a mass protest against the arrest of Chinese journalists by British colonial authorities in Hong Kong, some Red Guards set fire to the office building of the British chargé d’affaires in Beijing on 22 August 1967. Tensions in Hong Kong started in early May 1967 when a labor dispute took place and strikers and demonstrators clashed with the police. Partly due to the interference of members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) Wang Li and Guan Feng, China’s reaction to the Hong Kong crisis was so highly confrontational that about a million Beijing citizens, inspired by the official reaction, demonstrated in front of the British chargé office on 15 June 1967. In Beijing, chaos in foreign affairs escalated after Wang Li told rebels in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 7 August that it was all right to “collar” Minister Chen Yi (here Wang was actually rephrasing Mao Zedong’s instructions) and to seize power at the Foreign Ministry.
The subsequent arrest of journalists in Hong Kong triggered another angry response from the masses in Beijing: On 22 August, Red Guards from the Beijing Foreign Language Institute, Beijing Normal University, Tsinghua University, and other schools, as well as many factory workers, held a “Mass Meeting of the Capital Proletarian Revolutionary Rebels Denouncing British Imperialist Crimes against China.” in front of the British chargé office. Despite Premier Zhou Enlai’s specific directive forbidding violence against diplomatic establishments in China, the participants of the rally crashed into the offices of the British chargé that night, beating, smashing, confiscating, and burning automobiles and documents. They also burned the office building and struggled against the chargé d’affaires. In late August, Zhou Enlai reported to Mao on the chaotic state of foreign affairs. The British chargé incident and Zhou’s report prompted Mao to take drastic measures for the first time against his trusted cultural revolutionaries: he named Wang Li’s 7 August speech a “poisonous weed” and ordered the detention of Wang Li and Guan Feng.
BYSTANDERS (xiaoyaopai). This term refers to a large number of people who were neither rebels nor conservatives and who were not engaged in factional fighting during the Cultural Revolution. Bystanders usually did not have their own organizations. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, they were mostly students with undesirable family backgrounds who were either lacking revolutionary zeal or shunning dangerous Chinese politics. The setback for the conservative faction during the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line and in the process of the power seizure movement turned some of its members into bystanders. As nationwide violent sectional fighting escalated in 1967 and 1968, more and more people, including a large number of rebels, became disillusioned with the revolution; they began to withdraw from their organizations and stay away from armed conflicts. The mass of bystanders grew larger and faster as the Cultural Revolution continued to unfold.
CANNIBALISM IN GUANGXI. In the spring and summer of 1968, factional violence in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region became so fierce that hatred of the rival faction led to cannibalism in several counties. The victims of this horrific crime also included those classified as the Black Five Categories (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists). The perpetration of cannibalism against this group was often seen as evidence of one’s rightful indignation at class enemies and of one’s acute proletarian class sentiment. According to a number of unofficial investigative reports, several hundred people were cannibalized in a 6-month period from March to August 1968 in the autonomous region.
CAPITAL RED GUARD PICKETS (shoudu hongweibing jiuchadui). Established by some Red Guard organizations in Beijing in summer 1966, the Pickets were meant to prescribe rules for Red Guards and to exercise control over the chaotic situation created by the Red Guards themselves. Except for a brief period immediately after the establishment of the Pickets, however, some picket members acted even more self-righteously and more violently than other Red Guards against innocent people in the second half of 1966.
During the movements to destroy the Four Olds and to sweep away “cow-demons and snake-spirits” in summer 1966, especially during the terrifying Red August, lawlessness and violence escalated. Humiliation and physical abuse were commonplace on the streets of Beijing. Red Guards struggled against and tortured school teachers, the so-called Black Gang members from academic institutions, art and literary circles, and party and government organs, and the people of the “Black Five Categories.” They searched and ransacked private homes and confiscated personal belongings in the name of revolution. In the face of the widespread chaos, 31 Red Guard organizations of Beijing’s middle schools formed the Xicheng District Branch of the Capital Red Guard Pickets on 25 August 1966. In support of what appeared to be the Red Guards’ self-regulating effort, leaders of the Beijing party committee and the State Council acknowledged the organization and maintained frequent contact with it for some time. Before long, Red Guards in Dongcheng District and Haidian District also formed their Pickets. During its brief existence, the Xicheng District Pickets issued 13 decrees forbidding the searching of government offices and the abuse of ranking officials. According to these decrees, Red Guards were to notify the local authorities before searching a residence of anyone labeled under the Black Five Categories or a capitalist and make every effort to avoid violence. These decrees were largely in line with the policies of the central leadership at the time and helped contain violence and lawlessness to some extent but not for long. As the rage of the war on the “Four Olds” reached its height, physical abuse including whipping, torturing, even downright killing, surged again.
As Mao Zedong launched the battle against those in power and moved to shake up the party and state apparatus, parents of many Picket members came under attack. Some members of the Pickets and Old Red Guard organizations became increasingly resistant to the new move; they willingly went back to attack traditional “class enemies,” mostly outside the party. To the Cultural Revolution faction of the central leadership, the Pickets now represented roadblocks to the Revolution. On 16 December 1966, at a mass rally of Beijing middle school students and teachers to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line, the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group announced a decision by the central leadership to disband the Red Guard Pickets; the Pickets were accused of serving as the “military police of the bourgeois reaction line.” After the rally, various picket offices were ransacked and closed. A number of picket members were arrested. Despite several attempts to regenerate, the Pickets and the Old Red Guards they represented were never able to come back again as an effective political force.
CAPITAL RED GUARDS (shoudu hongweibing). A major Red Guard newspaper, the Capital Red Guards made its debut on 13 September 1966 as a publication of the Capital Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters of College Red Guards (popularly known as the Third Command Post). This was a prominent mass organization supported by Mao Zedong and the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) during the Criticizing the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign. Since the headquarters sent its members throughout the country to promote rebel activities, the paper was distributed across China and had great influence on mass movements far beyond the capital. In February 1967, when college Red Guards in Beijing came together to form a grand alliance known as the Capital Congress of College Red Guards, the Capital Red Guards became the official newspaper of the new organization after its 32nd issue. As the publication continued—totaling nearly 70 issues from March 1967 to September 1968—it carried the CCP’s policy announcements and the central leaders’ speeches, publicized the stories of Red Guards, and reported on major events on college campuses both in Beijing and in the provinces. In July 1968, Mao Zedong and the Central Committee of the CCP began to dispatch workers propaganda teams and PLA propaganda teams to all college campuses in Beijing. This decisive move of the central leadership soon put to an end the college Red Guard movement as well as the publication of the Capital Red Guards.
CAPITALIST-ROADERS (zouzipai). When first used by Mao Zedong in January 1965 in a party policy guideline for the Socialist Education Movement, “capitalist-roaders”—literally “those in power within the party who take the capitalist road”—apparently referred to the party officials who implemented certain pragmatic economic policies in the countryside in response to the disaster of Mao’s Great Leap Forward policies and hence, in Mao’s view, betrayed socialism. In the “Sixteen Articles,” a party resolution adopted at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee in August 1966, “capitalist-roaders” refers to the party officials who opposed the Cultural Revolution. According to Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, capitalist-roaders were representatives of the bourgeoisie within the ruling communist party; they had either “wormed their way into the party” or had become corrupted while in power; they were China’s Khrushchevs aiming to restore capitalism in China. And yet, since the term was never clearly defined, and since virtually no party leader advocated capitalism, “capitalist-roader” became a catchphrase in political witch-hunting.
Mao used this criminal title effectively to mobilize the masses and shake up the party establishment, especially in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. In the central leadership, those whom Mao considered to be his political rivals or their followers were almost invariably dismissed as capitalist-roaders, as in the case of President Liu Shaoqi, a dedicated communist who was named “the number one capitalist-roader in the party.” Elsewhere, it was used to label any party official who was not completely in line with Mao’s ultra-leftist politics. In spring 1968, after some formerly denounced party officials were admitted into the new power organ, the revolutionary committee, at various levels, the modifier “unrepentant” was prefixed to “capitalist-roaders” in official media to distinguish them from the “majority of corrigible capitalist-roaders.” In 1976, when Deng Xiaoping, who had earlier been named “the number two capitalist-roader,” fell from power the second time, he was dismissed as “unrepentant” and was named a “capitalist-roader who is still on the road.” After the Cultural Revolution, the CCP leadership abandoned the term “capitalist-roader.”
CCP CENTRAL SPECIAL COMMITTEE HANDBILL. On 8 October 1967, copies of a handbill in the form of an open letter to all CCP members appeared on the streets of Beijing. Assuming the authorship of a CCP Central Special Committee, the handbill was critical of the Cultural Revolution. The Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) listed this incident as a major counterrevolutionary case. On 20 November 1967, Shen Jianyun, a worker at a briquette factory in Tianjin, and 14 others involved in the handbill case were arrested. Both their confessions and all of the evidence indicated that they had made the handbill on their own and that the “CCP Central Special Committee” was fake. However, apparently for the purpose of attacking their political rivals within the CCP leadership, the CCRSG did not want the case to be closed. Chen Boda insisted that there must be a connection between the handbill and the February Adverse Current. Xie Fuzhi, minister of public security, attempted to link the incident with a long list of ranking leaders including Deng Xiaoping. A special investigation group was formed to search for “black backstage bosses,” which led to the notorious fabrication of the Chinese Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) case implicating dozens of top-ranking veteran leaders including Zhu De, Chen Yi, and Li Fuchun.
CENTRAL COMMITTEE WORK SESSIONS IN JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1962. Also known as the “meeting of seven thousand,” these were a series of enlarged Central Committee work sessions in which CCP leaders at both central and provincial levels reflected critically upon the radical policies of the party in the 1950s, especially those of the 1958 Great Leap Forward, that led to the great famine of 1959–1961 (commonly known by the euphemism of the “three years of natural disasters” or “three difficult years”) in which 20 million peasants starved to death. The adoption of certain remedial policies by the central government following the self-reflection and self-criticism at these work sessions was cited as a case of “Right deviation” in Mao Zedong’s August 1966 big-character poster “Bombarding the Headquarters.” See also LIU SHAOQI.
CENTRAL COMMITTEE WORK SESSIONS ON 9–28 OCTOBER 1966. The work meeting was held in Beijing at Mao Zedong’s suggestion to “sum up our experience and perform political-ideological work [on party leaders].” Mao’s words, from a speech he gave at the meeting, indicated that there was still much resistance among central and provincial party officials to the Cultural Revolution that had begun a few months before. The purpose of the meeting, then, was to criticize a so-called bourgeois reactionary line represented by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and to educate those party officials who allegedly followed this line and did not support the mass movement. In his speech “Two Lines in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” Chen Boda distinguished between the proletarian revolutionary line of Mao and the bourgeois antirevolutionary line of Liu and Deng in terms of their attitudes toward the masses and criticized Liu and Deng for repressing the mass movement with a work group policy. Lin Biao, who also spoke at the meeting, pointed out that the Liu-Deng line dominated the nation until Mao’s timely reversal of the trend at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee. In Lin’s view, the ongoing and widespread violations of legality and human rights were a small element of chaos within a mass movement and were necessary for preventing China from changing its revolutionary color.
Having approved Chen’s and Lin’s views, Mao instructed that the two speeches be distributed to every party branch and to every Red Guard organization in order to push forward the movement to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line. Chen Boda’s speech proved to be influential largely due to its reproach of ranking officials’ children for their self-righteousness, its criticism of the controversial “blood lineage theory,” and its call for redressing the wrongs done to ordinary people during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. These points were made in the name of criticizing the bourgeois reactionary line.
CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP (zhongyang wenhua geming xiaozu; also known as zhongyang wenge). The Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) was established on 28 May 1966 to replace the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group as an organ under the Politburo Standing Committee to direct the Cultural Revolution. The replacement was suggested by Mao Zedong, approved by the Politburo at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966, and documented in the May 16 Circular. Chen Boda was made head of the CCRSG. Kang Sheng was appointed advisor. Jiang Qing, Wang Renzhong, Liu Zhijian, and Zhang Chunqiao were named deputy heads. Other members of the group include Yao Wenyuan, Wang Li, Guan Feng, Qi Benyu, Xie Tangzhong, Mu Xin, and Yin Da. According to the May 16 Circular, the CCRSG would have an additional member from each of the North, Northeast, Northwest, and Southwest regions, but these turned out to be members in name at best and only for a short period before they were dismissed from office locally. On 2 August 1966, Tao Zhu was added to the CCRSG as another advisor.
As the Cultural Revolution continued to unfold, the CCRSG began to act as a top decision-making office of the party, directly answerable to Mao; it virtually ruled over the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, and, to a large extent, the Central Military Commission (CMC), especially after Mao launched an offensive against the so-called February Adverse Current and made powerless the old marshals in the CMC and the vice-premiers in the Zhou Enlai-led State Council. In the first three years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao used the CCRSG to mobilize the country for the movement, guide the Cultural Revolution in the direction he desired, and exercise his control of the country largely independent of the traditional party apparatus, which made the CCRSG the most powerful and influential organization of the country for the period.
At the same time, a number of politically moderate members, including Wang Renzhong, Liu Zhijian, Xie Tangzhong, Yin Da, Mu Xin, and Tao Zhu, were purged from the group. Some radical members of the group were also expelled—Wang Li and Guan Feng in August 1967 and Qi Benyu in January 1968. The three were generally considered to be scapegoats; that is, they rather than the CCRSG as a whole were made to bear the blame for creating chaos in the armed forces, in the area of foreign affairs, and in the nation in general. After the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in April 1969 when the new party apparatus was established and power redistributed, the CCRSG ceased to function. See also EXTENDED CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP ROUTINE MEETINGS.
CENTRAL MILITARY COMMISSION ADMINISTRATIVE CONFERENCE OFFICE (junwei bangong huiyi). Established on 3 October 1971 to replace the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, the Central Military Commission Administrative Conference Office was in charge of the daily business of the CCP Central Military Commission (CMC). The Administrative Group was dissolved because its members were mostly Lin Biao’s close associates, who were all removed from power after the death of Lin in the September 13 Incident in 1971. The newly formed Administrative Conference Office consisted of Ye Jianying, Xie Fuzhi, Ji Dengkui, Li Xiannian, Zhang Chunqiao, Li Desheng, Wang Dongxing, Zhang Caiqian, Chen Shiju, and Liu Xianquan. Ye Jianying was named head of the Conference Office. On 5 February 1975, exactly one month after Deng Xiaoping was appointed a vice-chairman of the CMC and chief of general staff of the PLA, the CCP Central Committee decided to dissolve the CMC Administrative Conference Office and resume the function of the standing committee of the CMC. The standing committee, with both old and new members, included Ye Jianying, Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian, Liu Bocheng, Xu Xiangqian, Nie Rongzhen, Zhang Chunqiao, Su Yu, Chen Xilian, and Wang Hongwen, with Ye as chairman.
CENTRAL MILITARY COMMISSION ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP (junwei banshizu). In 1967, when most of the vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission (CMC) were openly criticized by mass organizations and were virtually forced out of power largely due to their involvement in the February Adverse Current, the executive office of the CMC, its standing committee, stopped functioning. With Lin Biao’s support, the Central Military Commission Administrative Group was formed in August 1967. General Wu Faxian, commander of the air force, was appointed head of the group. Other members of the group included Qiu Huizuo, Ye Qun, and Zhang Xiuchuan. Ye was Lin Biao’s wife. Both Wu and Qiu were Lin’s close associates. In September 1967, Wu became deputy head when General Yang Chengwu, chief of general staff of the PLA, was appointed head of the Administrative Group at the recommendation of Premier Zhou Enlai and with the approval of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group. At the same time, Li Zuopeng, another supporter of Lin Biao, replaced Zhang Xiuchuan as a member of the group. In March 1968, Yang Chengwu was dismissed from all of his positions because of his involvement in the so-called Yang-Yu-Fu Affair. General Huang Yongsheng, again a close associate of Lin Biao, soon took Yang’s place as head of the Administrative Group. Now the Group was made up of Lin’s wife and his “four guardian warriors.”
Soon after Huang’s appointment, Chairman Mao Zedong suspended the already-irregular meetings of the standing committee of the CMC. Thus, the CMC Administrative Group virtually replaced the CMC standing committee as the leading body in charge of military affairs—a significant victory for Lin Biao and his supporters. In April 1969, the First Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee approved a move to add five more members to the CMC Administrative Group: Liu Xianquan, Li Tianyou, Li Desheng, Wen Yucheng, and Xie Fuzhi. After the Lushan Conference of 1970 (23 August–6 September), at which the conflict between the Lin Biao group and the Jiang Qing group surfaced, Mao no longer trusted Lin Biao and, in April 1971, recommended Ji Dengkui and Zhang Caiqian as additional members of the CMC Administrative Group to weaken Lin’s influence and control. Finally, after Lin Biao’s death in the September 13 Incident (1971), the CMC Administrative Group was dissolved, and a new Central Military Commission Administrative Conference Office was formed to take its place.
CENTRAL ORGANIZATION AND PROPAGANDA GROUP. This was an outcome of the power reshuffle after the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee (23 August–6 September 1970) when Chen Boda, one of the most influential figures in the area of theory and propaganda and an ally of Lin Biao, was purged. With Mao Zedong’s approval, the CCP Central Committee (CC) announced on 6 November 1970 the dissolution of its Department of Propaganda, an alleged stronghold of Chen Boda, and the establishment of the Central Organization and Propaganda Group so that, according to the announcement, the leadership of the CCP’s organization and propaganda work would be more unified. Directly answerable to the Politburo, the Group was charged with overseeing the operation of the CC’s Department of Organization, the Xinhua News Agency, the Bureau of Broadcasting Affairs, the All-China Labor Union, the All-China Women’s Federation, and a host of official propaganda agencies and organs including People’s Daily and Red Flag. Members of the Group included Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Ji Dengkui, and Li Desheng. Mao made the move to assure the control of these key party apparatuses by those he trusted and to contain the power of Lin Biao and his followers after their differences with Mao surfaced during the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee. Kang Sheng was appointed head of the Group though he did not really assume the responsibility due to poor health. Li Desheng did not become substantially involved in the Group mainly because of his other official duties. The Central Organization and Propaganda Group, therefore, was essentially controlled by Jiang Qing and her close associates.
CHEN BODA (1904–1989). Head of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) and a top aide to Chairman Mao Zedong in theoretical and ideological matters, Chen was elected to the Standing Committee of the CCP Politburo in August 1966 and became one of the few veteran cadres who were entrusted with the new task of leading an unprecedented mass movement. However, his gradual alienation from Jiang Qing and her close associates in the CCRSG and his developing alliance with the Lin Biao group eventually led to his dismissal in September 1970 at the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee.
A native of Huian, Fujian Province, Chen was born on 29 July 1904 and worked as an elementary school teacher before he joined the CCP in 1927. Upon finishing his political training at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, Chen returned to China and went to Yan’an in 1937. Serving as Mao’s political secretary and drafting speeches and theoretical essays for Mao, Chen rose to prominence as a leading theorist of the CCP and was elected to the Central Committee in 1945. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Chen served as deputy director of the CCP Propaganda Department, director of the Political Research Institute of the CCP Central Committee, editor-in-chief of the CCP theoretical organ Red Flag, and vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Science. He became an alternate member of the CCP Politburo in 1956.
Appointed head of the CCRSG in May 1966 upon the recommendation of Premier Zhou Enlai, Chen began to play an important role in articulating Mao’s radical policies and directing the student movement in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. Following his instructions as leader of the work group for the People’s Daily, the newspaper published an editorial entitled Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake Spirits on 1 June 1966. This article, edited and revised by Chen himself, served publically to inaugurate the Cultural Revolution. During the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line, he attempted to explain CCP class policies against a politically discriminatory blood lineage theory and became a leading supporter of the emerging rebel faction that included many students from politically disadvantaged families. As the Cultural Revolution further unfolded, however, personal and political conflicts began to develop in the CCRSG, especially between Chen and Jiang Qing, deputy head of the CCRSG, and her close associates Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. The conflicts intensified when Chen began to work on the party’s political report in preparation for the Ninth National Congress of the CCP and to discuss the content of the report with Lin Biao. Mao criticized Chen’s first draft for its “productionist” tendencies and entrusted Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan instead with the task of redrafting and revision, which virtually ended Chen’s cooperation with his colleagues in the CCRSG and pushed him further toward an alliance with the Lin Biao group. Later, Chen made an ironic comment on the Zhang-Yao version of the political report: “all movement and no goal.”
In August 1970, at the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee, Chen joined Lin Biao and the majority of CCP leaders in proposing that the PRC state presidency be restored. He was also involved in a strategic move, with the full support of the veteran leaders attending the plenum, against Zhang Chunqiao. Opposing both moves, Mao wrote a short piece entitled “Some Views of Mine” in which he singled out Chen Boda as the leader creating chaos. Chen was dismissed from office and was imprisoned. After Lin Biao’s downfall, the CCP leadership denounced Chen Boda as a leader in the “Lin-Chen Anti-Party Clique.” The CCP’s investigation report dated 2 July 1972, named Chen a “Kuomintang anti-Communist, Trotskyite, renegade, spy, and revisionist,” most of which turned out to be baseless charges. In 1980, Chen was tried as one of the leading members of the “Lin Biao, Jiang Qing Counterrevolutionary Clique” and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Chen was released in October 1988 for health reasons and died on 20 September 1989.
CHEN ERJIN (1945– ). A worker in Xuanwei, Yunnan Province, Chen read a great deal of political literature, particularly works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and wrote between 1974 and 1976 a long treatise entitled On Proletarian Democratic Revolution, advocating a democratic reform of the socialist system. Adhering to what he believed to be true Marxist principles and borrowing much from what he understood as the American political system, Chen argued for a communist two-party system with a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Although he quotes Mao Zedong frequently, his essay seems to imply strong criticism of personality cult, persecution, and the authorities’ abuse of power during the Cultural Revolution: “No criticism of a president should constitute a crime,” Chen wrote, “much less for anyone to be brutally executed for saying no to a president.” According to his proposal, an elected president should serve for only four years, and there should be no prayer of “long live” for any president. Chen also proposed that systems of legal counsel, people’s jury, and public trial be implemented, and that secret trial be abolished. He called for recognition of personal liberty and human rights under a proletarian dictatorship.
Chen’s treatise was widely circulated among underground reading groups toward the end of the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution, it was carried in the underground democratic journal Forum of April 5 in June 1979 and was published in English translation as China: Crossroads Socialism in 1984. Chen has resided in Thailand since 2000.
CHEN LINING (1933– ). A low-level party functionary at the Xiangtan city government, Hunan Province, and a mental patient with a political paranoia about President Liu Shaoqi, Chen emerged in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution as a new star known as “a madman in a new era,” a name echoing Lu Xun’s well-known story “A Madman’s Diary.”
While still a young clerk in 1957, Chen began to worry about Liu Shaoqi’s opposition to Chairman Mao Zedong although he did not have any evidence. The ultraleftist theory of class struggle that Mao put forth in 1960s, however, intensified Chen’s suspicion of Liu. From 1962 to 1964, Chen sent about 30 letters to Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, and party newspapers in which he raved against Liu’s speeches and works, including his well-known Cultivation of a Communist. At first, the local government treated Chen as a lunatic and sent him to a psychiatric hospital three times. As soon as he was out of the hospital, however, Chen began to send letters to other leaders of the CCP Central Committee. In 1965, he was finally arrested by the authorities on a counterrevolutionary charge.
When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Chen was in Beijing’s Anding Psychiatric Hospital for a check of his mental state. During this period, he wrote several letters to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) to appeal his case. Some of these letters were totally illogical, while others were lucid. When Liu Shaoqi clearly became the main target of the Cultural Revolution, some psychiatrists of the rebel faction in the hospital began to see Chen not as a madman but as a political prisoner. With much help from their allies at Tsinghua University, they managed to send the CCRSG a proposal for rehabilitating Chen. On 7 January 1967, Wang Li and Qi Benyu, both members of the CCRSG, went to the hospital to meet Chen, his psychiatrists, and the Red Guards from a number of colleges working on his rehabilitation. Wang and Qi regarded Chen as a victim of persecution by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping; they redressed his case and called him “a new madman in the socialist revolution era.” On 17 January, the major Red Guard newspaper Capital Red Guards published a four-page report on Chen’s heroic deeds. The report claims that Mao also spoke well of Chen’s act upon reading a note from Jiang Qing. Chen thus burst onto the political stage of the Cultural Revolution and began to give speeches everywhere about his battles against Liu Shaoqi. And two stage adaptations of his story, Dairy of a Madman and A Madman in the New Era, were soon produced.
After Mao decided to remove Wang Li in August 1967, however, the debate about Chen’s case resumed in Anding Hospital, and Chen became a pawn of the two rival mass organizations there and a hindrance to a grand alliance that Mao had been calling for. The one faction of psychiatrists somehow managed to present enough evidence—contrary to the earlier diagnosis of their rivals—to show that Chen was indeed a mental patient and that he even criticized Mao’s works. On 21 October 1967, Xie Fuzhi, minister of public security, finally pronounced Chen a madman, but Xie also said that further investigation was still needed because Chen was right to attack Liu Shaoqi but wrong to oppose Chairman Mao. On the same day, Chen was arrested again by the security forces and disappeared from China’s political scene.
CHEN SHAOMIN (1902–1977). A veteran communist, Chen was the only member of the CCP Central Committee (CC) who refused to support the party’s resolution to denounce and expel President Liu Shaoqi in 1968.
Formerly named Sun Zhaoxiu, Chen was a native of Shouguang County, Shandong Province. She joined the CCP in 1928 and soon distinguished herself as a leader of women’s and labor movements and was later a high-level political commissar in the communist army. In 1945, she became an alternate member of the CC. Chen led the Textile Workers’ Union after 1949 and became deputy chair of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions in 1957. She gained full membership of the CC in 1956 and became a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in 1965.
When a discussion session was held concerning the “Investigative Report on the Crimes of the Traitor, Spy, and Renegade Liu Shaoqi” during the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee (13–30 October 1968), Chen resorted to silence as a way of expressing her disagreement with the fabricated charges against Liu and was therefore criticized by other attendants. An official briefing of the 23 October meeting accused Chen of not drawing a clear line between herself and Liu Shaoqi and of opposing the party’s decision. When votes were taken concerning the adoption of the anti-Liu report and the resolution to expel Liu permanently from the CCP, Chen alone did not raise her hand. Later, in response to the reproach by Kang Sheng who had also tried to force her to go along with the majority before the voting session, Chen answered: “That was my right [to vote in favor of Liu].” Chen was soon sent to the Henan countryside for reeducation, where the harsh living conditions and the lack of proper medical care made her already poor health deteriorate rapidly. Chen died on 14 December 1977. Ironically, however, the official obituary honored her as “a proletarian revolutionary who firmly opposed Liu Shaoqi and his bourgeois reactionary line.”
CHEN XILIAN (1915–1999). A native of Huang’an, Hubei Province, and a member of the CCP from 1930, Chen was a veteran Red Army soldier and a well-known military general. He served as commander of the Shenyang Military Region from 1959 to 1973, became chairman of the revolutionary committee of Liaoning Province in 1968, and was elected to the Politburo of the CCP 9th, 10th, and 11th Central Committees. Chen was transferred to Beijing in late 1973 and became commander of the Beijing Military Region. He was also made vice-premier of the State Council in January 1975 and an executive member of the Central Military Commission (CMC) in February 1975. Politically Chen stayed rather close to the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership, which led to his appointment in February 1976 as the person in charge of the day-to-day work of the CMC, replacing Marshal Ye Jianying. In February 1980, Chen resigned from all his responsible positions. In the remainder of his life, Chen was given a number of honorary titles, including executive member of the CCP Central Advisory Commission.
CHEN YI (1901–1972). A senior leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chen Yi played a significant role in the CCP’s internal politics as well as its battle against the Kuomintang before 1949 and in the foreign affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after 1958. In the Cultural Revolution, Chen was one of the veteran officials involved in the 1967 February Adverse Current.
Born in Lezhi County, Sichuan Province, Chen initally became engaged in the communist movement while studying in France from 1919 to 1921. He joined the CCP in 1923. A veteran of the Northern Expedition and a leader of the 1927 Nanchang Uprising, he served in such prominent military posts as party secretary of the front committee of the Fourth Red Army (1930s), commander of the New Fourth Army in the war of resistance against Japan, and commander of the Third Field Army of the People’s Liberation Army (1947–1948). After the founding of the PRC, Chen served as mayor of Shanghai (1949–58), minister of foreign affairs and vice-premier of the State Council (1958–1972), and vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (1961–1972). In 1955, he was named one of the 10 marshals of the PRC. Chen was elected to the Seventh Central Committee of the CCP in 1945 and became a member of the Politburo in 1956.
At the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966, Chen supported Mao’s decision to purge the so-called Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique. He also joined a number of ranking officials in attacking Marshal Zhu De for his alleged ambition to surpass Mao and attempt a coup. As the Cultural Revolution continued to unfold, Chen himself became a major target of the mass movement manipulated by members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) who wanted to take over foreign affairs. In February 1967, Chen, along with Tan Zhenlin, Xu Xiangqian, and a few other senior party and military leaders, sharply criticized the radicals of the CCRSG at a top-level meeting in Zhongnanhai. The outburst of their anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment was denounced by Mao as a February Adverse Current. Mao approved struggles against Chen by the masses but protected him from further humiliation and removal. Chen retained his seat in the Central Committee at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP (1–24 April 1969) because Mao, apparently in an attempt to balance factional power in the central leadership, called for all delegates to vote for him as a representative of the “Right side” of the party. But Chen was nevertheless removed from actual power and sent to a factory for reeducation. At Mao’s request, he held a symposium in 1969 on the international situation with Ye Jiangying and other marshals and made a suggestion that China establish diplomatic relations with the United States.
After Lin Biao’s demise in 1971, Mao began to seek support from the “old government” faction of the central leadership and sent friendly signals to Chen and other senior party and military leaders. However, Chen was already gravely ill; he died on 6 January 1972. Two days later, Mao, to everyone’s surprise, made a last-minute decision to attend Chen’s memorial service, at which he spoke of Chen as “a good man and a good comrade.”
CHEN YONGGUI (1914–1986). Born in Xiyang County, Shanxi Province, Chen joined the CCP in 1948. A hardworking farmer and party secretary of Xiyang’s Dazhai village and later Dazhai production brigade, Chen contributed much to the transformation of his poor home village into a highly productive farming community. While Chen Yonggui earned numerous medals as a model worker, Mao Zedong’s words, “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai,” made Dazhai the nation’s best known village. Chen also became a positive example in Mao’s belittlement of intellectuals in favor of the “uncouth” (dalaocu) in the mid-1960s. During the Cultural Revolution, Chen was promoted as an “uncouth” leader and the peasant element in the leadership: he became chairman of the revolutionary committee of Xiyang County in 1967, vice-chairman of the revolutionary committee of Shanxi Province in 1969, secretary of the CCP Shanxi provincial committee in 1971, and vice-premier of the State Council in 1975. He was elected to the CCP 9th, 10th, and 11th Central Committees and the CCP 10th and 11th Central Committee Politburos. After the Cultural Revolution, Chen’s essentially ceremonial position in the party central leadership declined: his vice-premiership ended in 1980, and in 1983, he was appointed advisor of the Dongjiao State Farm east of the city of Beijing. He died on 26 March 1986.
CHEN ZAIDAO (1909–1993). A native of Macheng, Hubei Province, a member of the CCP from 1928, and commander of the Wuhan Military Region from 1955 to 1967, General Chen was accused by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing of a mutiny because of his support for the mass organization Million-Strong Mighty Army when factional battles started in Hubei in the spring and summer of 1967. Dismissed from office on 27 July 1967, he was seen as the most prominent of “that small handful (of capitalist-roaders) within the armed forces.” After the downfall of Lin Biao, Chen was appointed to various positions including deputy commander of the Fuzhou Military Region, CMC adviser, and member of the CCP Advisory Committee. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Fifth People’s National Congress and a member of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP. See also JULY 20 INCIDENT.
CHI QUN (1932– ). A native of Rushan, Shandong Province, Chi was deputy chief of the propaganda section of the CCP central leaders’ security troop unit 8341. In July 1968, Chi left Zhongnanhai, the CCP Central Committee headquarters, for the prestigious Tsinghua University as a member of the PLA propaganda team. By the time he became party secretary and revolutionary committee head of Tsinghua University, a close alliance had been formed between him and Xie Jingyi, a member of the workers propaganda team and deputy head of the Tsinghua revolutionary committee. Chi and Xie, both closely associated with the Jiang Qing group, became the two most powerful officials at Tsinghua and remained as such—and the two were almost always mentioned together—until their arrest after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.
Together, they turned both Tsinghua University and Peking University into models of repression and strongholds of ultraleftism. During the Rectify the Class Ranks campaign, 1,228 of Tsinghua’s 6,000 staff members were suspected of being class enemies and were investigated. In the fall of 1973, Chi and Xie started a campaign at Tsinghua against what they considered the rightwing resurgence in education; hundreds of people were implicated. In January 1974, Chi and Xie led the effort at the two universities to compile the material for the nationwide Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius campaign. Also in January 1974, they followed Jiang Qing’s orders and investigated a student suicide case in Mazhenfu middle school, Henan Province. Their investigation report led to widespread persecution of school teachers and school officials nationwide. In March 1974, they put together a writing team called the Peking University and Tsinghua University Great Criticism Group, better known by its penname Liang Xiao (a homophonic reference to “two schools”).
Following directions from Jiang Qing and her faction via Chi and Xie, this writing group published dozens of articles between 1974 and 1976, making insinuations against Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. In late 1975, Mao spoke in favor of Chi and Xie in his comments on a letter from Liu Bing and three other veteran cadres at Tsinghua that criticizes Chi and Xie. Following Mao’s comments, Chi and Xie led a “great debate on the revolution in education” on the Tsinghua campus, directly attacking Minister of Education Zhou Rongxin and implicitly aiming at Deng Xiaoping. This “debate” turned out to be the prelude to the nationwide anti-Deng campaign known as Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend. After Mao’s death in September 1976, Chi and Xie urged staff and students at Tsinghua University and Peking University to pledge loyalty to Jiang Qing in writing. In October, within a month of Mao’s death, however, they were arrested with the Gang of Four. The verdict was announced officially in November 1983 that Chi Qun was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
CHINA’S KHRUSHCHEV. Along with the “biggest capitalist-roader within the party,” this was a reference to President Liu Shaoqi during the Cultural Revolution. He was labeled as such in official media in 1967 and 1968, but his name was not mentioned until after the Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (13–31 October 1968).
CHINA–SOVIET DEBATE. A significant prelude to the Cultural Revolution, the heated ideological battle between the world’s two largest communist parties broke out in 1963. Although the conflict between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union began in 1956 when General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev delivered a destalinization speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the differences between the two parties were not publicized until 4 April 1963 when the People’s Daily, following directions from Mao Zedong and the Standing Committee of the CCP Politburo, published the letter of 30 March from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Central Committee of the CCP. Then the CCP sent out a carefully composed letter of dispute in mid-June, while the Soviet leadership issued “An Open Letter to Soviet Party Organizations at All Levels and to All Party Members” on 14 July criticizing China. The CCP’s response to this letter and to the subsequent Soviet propaganda campaign took the form of a series of polemics, commonly known as the “nine commentaries” (jiuping), published between September 1963 and July 1964, in the name of the editorial departments of the CCP official organs People’s Daily and Red Flag. The authors of these articles included Chen Boda, Peng Zhen, and Wang Li. Mao Zedong also contributed to the second and ninth commentaries. Deng Xiaoping was in charge of the entire project.
These articles criticized the Soviet leadership for creating a split in the international communist movement and promoting revisionism, a deviation from the “basic principles of Marxism and its universal truths.” Major issues of difference between the two communist parties as laid out in the nine commentaries included the following: the post-Stalin Soviet leadership had imposed on the international communist movement a policy of “peaceful coexistence” of socialist and capitalist states which was based on the belief that socialism would eventually win the battle against capitalism worldwide by its higher productivity in a “peaceful competition” in the economy; China, on the other hand, supported a more radical, and supposedly Marxist, “united front” and a violent proletarian revolution against colonialism and imperialism. The Soviets proposed an “all-people party” and “all-people state” against Stalin’s proletarian state, whereas the Chinese charged Khrushchev and his comrades with not only abandoning the Leninist proletarian dictatorship but also denying and covering up the class conflicts in the Soviet Union between the working people and a new breed of bourgeoisie consisting of privileged bureaucrats and technocrats. And finally, the Soviets and the Chinese were sharply divided over the issue of Joseph Stalin: Khrushchev called Stalin a dictator and a tyrant and accused him of promoting a personality cult and violating socialist legality, while the CCP leadership considered Stalin to be a great proletarian revolutionary on the world stage who made some mistakes but nevertheless upheld the revolutionary course of Marxism developed and defended by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; therefore, destalinization in the home of the October Revolution meant betraying the Marxist-Leninist legacy in the Soviet Union as well as reversing the rightful course of the international communist movement at large.
The political thaw in the post-Stalin Soviet Union alerted the CCP leaders, especially Mao Zedong, to the danger of a capitalist restoration after the communists took power. The last of the nine commentaries, which includes Mao’s own writing, concludes on a note about the historical lesson of the proletarian dictatorship: Not hostile forces from the outside but political deterioration and moral corruption of the party and state leadership itself pose the greatest threat to a socialist state. As Stalin should have done but failed to do, the Chinese communists must “watch out for careerists and conspirators like Khrushchev and prevent such bad elements from usurping the leadership of the party and the state at any level.” In order to prevent Khrushchev’s revisionism from being reenacted in China and to dash the “hopes of the imperialist prophets for China’s ‘peaceful evolution’” into capitalism, Mao writes, “we must everywhere give constant attention to the training and upbringing of successors to the revolutionary cause from our highest organizations down to the grass-roots.”
Mao’s contribution to the ninth commentary was to be chosen as the longest passage in the Quotations from Chairman Mao and studied as a keynote of his theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its vocabulary was to become standard during the Cultural Revolution, a political movement to mobilize and educate the masses on the grassroots level in the course of class struggle against “China’s Khrushchevs,” the “capitalist-roaders,” and the “bourgeoisie within the Party,” so that socialist China, unlike the Soviet Union, would never change its color.
CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY (MARXIST-LENINIST) CASE. This was a fabricated case against dozens of top-ranking CCP leaders. In December 1968, four public security officers, following the instructions of Xie Fuzhi, extorted from Zhou Ci’ao, an assistant research fellow at the Economics Institute of the Chinese Science Academy and a suspect of the May 16 Counterrevolutionary Clique, a wild tale about a Soviet-backed and coup-minded party within the CCP. According to the confession Zhou gave under torture, Zhu De was general secretary of this so-called Chinese Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), and Chen Yi was deputy general secretary and minister of defense. The party’s nine-member standing committee included, among others, Li Fuchun, Xu Xiangqian, Ye Jianying, and He Long. A congress was said to have been held secretly in July 1967. As planned by an “uprising operation committee,” General Chen Zaidao was to lead his troops to capture the city of Wuhan, while a telegraph was said to have been prepared by military marshals to seek cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek. Apparently with the backing of the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership, Xie Fuzhi was still able to press aggressively for further investigation of the veteran leaders even after they were elected to the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in April 1969. Because no trace of evidence was found to support Zhou Ci’ao’s forced confession, the case of the Chinese Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) finally came to an end around August 1969 without an official conclusion.
CIRCULAR OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE CONCERNING THE QUESTION OF “FERRETING OUT TRAITORS.” A party central document (zhongfa [1967] 200) issued on 28 June 1967, the circular contains guidelines and regulations regarding the widespread activities taken by mass organizations to “ferret out traitors.” Three months before, on 16 March 1967, the CCP Central Committee (CC) had issued the “Instructions on Materials Concerning Such Self-Confessing Traitors as Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, and Yang Xianzhen” to publicize the falsified case of the so-called Sixty-One Traitors Clique, which was a major step Mao authorized to bring down Liu Shaoqi. The document inspired mass organizations to launch a political campaign to “ferret out hidden traitors.” The movement quickly turned into chaos: many veteran revolutionaries were denounced as traitors without real evidence, and in some places the campaign became a fierce factional battle.
In order to keep these activities in check, the CC issued the 28 June circular that specifies five rules: solid evidence is required for any conclusion on a “traitor”; investigation of betrayal should be focused on capitalist-roaders within the party; distinction must be made between a cadre with some ordinary problems in the past and a real traitor or a spy; mass organizations are not to engage in factional battles in the name of “ferreting out traitors”; no mass organization should attack another because the latter is investigating traitors or spies from within. But, due to the influence of the earlier document, the circular had a limited effect in regulating the mass organizations’ actions, and numerous falsified cases resulted in an environment of political witch-hunting.
CLASS LINE. The phrase refers to the CCP’s class policy: in judging a person, consider the person’s family background but not family background alone; give more attention to the person’s political performance. This class policy gave rise to widespread political discrimination against and persecution of people from the families of the so-called Black Seven Categories during the Cultural Revolution, especially in its early stages. Based on this policy, early Red Guard organizations admitted only those from the families of the “Red Five Categories.” See also BLOOD LINEAGE THEORY; “ON FAMILY BACKGROUND.”
CLASS STRUGGLE. The classical Marxian concept of class struggle—the economically based conflict between a ruling, exploiting class of those who own the means of production and an exploited class of laborers—was much revised by Mao Zedong in his theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat to mean the conflict in Chinese society, especially in the CCP and in cultural/ideological spheres, between the revolutionary proletariat and those who represented the reactionary bourgeoisie. In 1956, after the completion of the socialist transformation of the nation’s economic structure, eliminating private ownership, Mao temporarily entertained the idea that the “conflict among people” was beginning to outweigh the conflict between mutually antagonistic classes in socialist China. But, under much pressure from within the party leadership after the failure of his radical policies of the Great Leap Forward, Mao, in the early 1960s, warned “never to forget class struggle,” which turned out to be an early signal of the Cultural Revolution.
During the China-Soviet Debate and the Socialist Education Movement in the first half of the 1960s, Mao came to the conclusion that class struggle existed and would continue to exist for a long time to come after the proletarian class took power and that the gravest danger of a capitalist restoration lay within the ruling communist party in which a new bureaucratic class representing the bourgeoisie was formed and was ready to direct the socialist country to capitalism by way of peaceful evolution. Based on such judgments, Mao decided that carrying out class struggle against “capitalist-roaders” within the party (literally, “those in power within the party who take the capitalist road”) in nationwide political campaigns, such as the Socialist Education Movement and the Cultural Revolution, was necessary to ensure that China’s political power remain in the hands of proletarian revolutionaries. In addition, Mao believed in carrying out class struggle in ideological spheres—that is, waging wars against what he considered to be nonproletarian culture and habits of mind—so as to revolutionize the consciousness of the masses; hence the revolution of 1966–1976 was called a cultural revolution.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s reformulation of class struggle served to justify the persecution of the majority of party leaders, and tens of millions of ordinary citizens, especially those of the so-called Black Seven Categories and their children, who were, in many cases, also treated as class enemies. According to an estimate by the post-Mao leadership, persecution in the name of class struggle during the Cultural Revolution affected one-eighth of China’s entire population.
COLLAR LIU BATTLEFRONT (jiu Liu huoxian). A short form for “The Liaison Station of the Battlefront for the Capital Proletarian Revolutionaries to Collar, Struggle, and Criticize Liu Shaoqi.” The “Battlefront” was a coalition of college Red Guard organizations formed in July 1967 for the sole purpose of removing President Liu Shaoqi from Zhongnanhai—the resident compound for CCP top leaders in the heart of Beijing—to face criticism from the masses.
In August 1966, to experience the mass movement firsthand, Liu, accompanied by the newly appointed first secretary of the Beijing municipal party committee Li Xuefeng, went to the Beijing Institute of Architectural Engineering and met with students from two rival Red Guard organizations at the Institute. As the Cultural Revolution continued to unfold, it became increasingly clear to the public that Liu was on the wrong side of the movement. The rebels of the Institute, then, began to denounce Liu’s visit as an attempt to obstruct the mass movement. They wrote Liu several times, demanding that he talk to the masses at the Institute and openly acknowledge his guilt. This was a prelude to the later organized effort to “collar” Liu.
On 5 January 1967, Liu wrote Chairman Mao Zedong for instructions as to how to respond to the rebels’ demands. Mao forwarded Liu’s letter to Premier Zhou Enlai on the next day with a note suggesting not going. The rebels’ demand was then put off after Zhou talked to them on 7 January. As a new round of criticism of Liu surged in April 1967, however, the demand from the rebels resurfaced. On 9 July, Liu, following orders from the central leadership, submitted a self-criticism report to the rebels at the Beijing Institute of Architectural Engineering. Dismissing the report as Liu’s “manifesto of retaliation” and “a big poisonous arrow” aimed at Mao’s revolutionary line, the rebels began to camp around the west gate of Zhongnanhai and set up their “Collar Liu Frontline Command Post” there, demanding from Liu not only a guilty plea but also that he remove himself from Zhongnanhai. On 18 July, some campers declared that they were starting a hunger strike. With support from student organizations at other schools and from members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), a “Collar Liu” mass rally was held at the west gate that evening, drawing a crowd of several hundred thousand representing more than a hundred mass organizations. A large coalition of “Collar Liu Battlefront” was then formed.
When the word of the mass rally, the hunger strike, and the “Battlefront” spread, many mass organizations outside Beijing sent their representatives to join the effort. Hundreds of camps were set up outside Zhongnanhai. More than a hundred loudspeakers were blasting the demand of the “Battlefront” and slogans against Liu from dawn till after midnight, and time and again the campers attempted to storm in from each of the five gates of Zhongnanhai to haul Liu out. The CCRSG lent its support by having medical teams dispatched to tend the campers. In the meantime, the attack on Liu Shaoqi and his family escalated within the compound. Several struggle meetings against Liu and his wife were held by the rebels within Zhongnanhai. Physical abuse intensified at these meetings, and Liu’s residence was ransacked. Finally, Liu, his wife, and their children were separated and put under surveillance. The “Collar Liu Battlefront” lasted for more than a month while Mao Zedong was on an inspection tour of three regions. It was only by Mao’s directive that the crowd outside of Zhongnanhai withdrew in August. Liu, however, never regained his freedom or had a chance to see his family. The humiliation and brutal abuse of Liu continued until his death on 12 November 1969.
COMRADE CHIANG CH’ING. A biography of Jiang Qing written by Roxane Witke and published by Little, Brown and Company in 1977 in the United States. This book was the outcome of a series of interviews Witke had with Jiang Qing in 1972 when the former, an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, was visiting China as a member of a delegation of American women.
The original goal of the delegation’s visit was to gather information and conduct interviews on Chinese women’s liberation. After Witke expressed her desire to meet Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai instructed that if Jiang agreed to meet with Witke, “they could talk for an hour or two. . . . But it’s all right also if Jiang does not want to meet her.” Jiang, on the other hand, not only met Witke in Beijing on 12 August 1972 but also managed to have a long series of interviews with Witke in Guangzhou from 25 to 31 August. During the weeklong private interviews—some 60 hours in all—Jiang told Witke about her personal life and expressed her wish for a biography to be published overseas that was comparable to Red Star over China, a story of Mao Zedong by Edgar Snow. The result was Witke’s five-part story of Jiang Qing, detailing Jiang’s impoverished, violence-filled childhood, her acting career in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, her first meeting with and later marriage to Mao in Yan’an, her increasingly active engagement in culture and arts, and her emergence as a nationally recognized leader during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1975, when the conflict between the Jiang Qing group and the more moderate and more pragmatic faction of the party central leadership intensified and when the Jiang group became increasingly unpopular among ordinary Chinese citizens, the leak of the Jiang-Witke interview caused a scandal. A popular political rumor spread across China that Witke’s Comrade Chiang Ch’ing was translated into Chinese with the title Queen of the Red Capital, and the book caused an angry response from Mao: “[Jiang Qing is so] ignorant and ill informed. Drive her out of the Politburo immediately. We shall separate and go our different ways.” Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the PRC delegation in the United Nations to purchase the copyright of Comrade Chiang Ch’ing to prevent it from further distribution. In fact, Comrade Chiang Ch’ing was neither published in 1975 nor translated into Chinese. The Chinese Queen of the Red Capital came out of Hong Kong and had nothing to do with Witke’s yet-to-be-completed book.
After the downfall of the Gang of Four, Jiang Qing’s self-exposure was listed as a crime. On 23 September 1977, the CCP Central Committee issued part three of the collected material denouncing the Gang of Four. In this document, Jiang Qing’s 1972 interviews with Witke, Witke’s newly published book on Jiang, and the historical military maps that Jiang had given Witke were mentioned together as evidence of Jiang Qing’s “betrayal of the state in pursuit of personal fame.”
CONFUCIANISM VERSUS LEGALISM (ru fa douzheng). An observation by Chairman Mao Zedong on political conflicts in the early stages of Chinese history, the idea of the “struggle between Confucianism and Legalism” became in late 1973 and early 1974 the focus of a propaganda campaign criticizing the allegedly Confucius-worshipping Lin Biao. The real, though unnamed, target of the campaign was Zhou Enlai, whose moderate and pragmatic approach to state affairs was perceived by Mao and the ultraleftist Jiang Qing group to be a main obstacle to a full realization of Mao’s radical Cultural Revolution program.
Confucianism and Legalism were two among many competing schools of thought in pre-Qin China. Mao’s view of the conflict between the two as the major political conflict of the ruling class in feudalist China, however, accorded Legalism an unprecedented high status. Concerned with the politics of his own day rather than what happened in the remote past, Mao seemed to be reacting to the report that quotations of Confucius were found in Lin Biao’s residence and that in the “571 Project” Summary, allegedly a blueprint for Lin’s armed coup, Mao was called the present-day Qin Shihuang (the First Emperor of Qin, or the First Emperor of China, known as a tyrant embracing Legalism and persecuting Confucian scholars to consolidate his power). Mao’s high opinion of the Qin Emperor and Legalists and his dislike of Confucius became known from a poem he wrote to Guo Moruo, which was widely circulated at the time. On 4 July 1973, during a conversation with Zhang Chunqiao and Wang Hongwen, Mao made harsh comments on the work of foreign affairs directed by Premier Zhou Enlai and mentioned “criticizing Confucius” as well.
With Mao’s approval, an article entitled “Confucius: A Thinker Who Stubbornly Defended the Slave-Owning System,” by Professor Yang Rongguo of Zhongshan University, appeared in People’s Daily on 7 August 1973. On 4 September, Beijing Daily carried the article “Confucius and Reactionary Confucianism” by the Peking University and Tsinghua University Great Criticism Group, a major writing team in the service of Jiang Qing and her faction. The Beijing Daily article inaugurated a series of publications, both in essay and in book form, examining cases of the Confucian-Legalist conflict in Chinese history but implicitly attacking Zhou Enlai. The tactic of launching an attack by innuendo and insinuation was known later as “allusory historiography.” In addition to this high-powered media offensive, the discussion of Confucianism and Legalism also took the form of lectures and study sessions among grassroots units though the masses were largely unaware of the loaded present-day references of the historical subject. See also CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS.
CONSERVATIVES (baoshoupai). A counterreference to rebels (zaofanpai), this term was used to identify negatively the mass faction that stood by party officials (the so-called capitalist-roaders) and was supported by the work groups in the beginning stage of the Cultural Revolution. Originally, the official label for this faction, as it was referred to in the 5 June 1966 People’s Daily editorial “Becoming Proletarian Revolutionaries or Bourgeois Royalists,” was the blatantly pejorative “royalists” (baohuangpai). After Premier Zhou Enlai dismissed the term as inappropriate in a public speech on 10 September 1966, “conservatives” became its replacement but still retained its negative tone and negative connotations. Compared to the rebel faction, the conservative camp had a significantly larger number of people who were closely associated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and had a vested interest in the current social and political system—members of the CCP and the Communist Youth League, members of the armed militia, students from families of the Red Five Categories, and so on—although they never called themselves “conservatives.”
Because of Mao’s support of the rebels, the conservative faction tumbled during the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line (1966), so much so that during the nationwide power seizure campaign (1967), competing rebel factions all dismissed their rivals as “conservatives.” By then a large number of conservatives had already joined moderate rebel organizations, and it was in the name of rebellion that their conflict with radical rebels continued during the nationwide armed conflict in 1967 and 1968. These moderate rebels were sometimes referred to as “new conservatives.” See also BYSTANDERS.
CONTINUING REVOLUTION UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT. Also known as the theory of uninterrupted revolution, this is a major theory Mao Zedong developed in his later years concerning the course of revolution under socialism. The Cultural Revolution may be considered as an experiment or implementation of this theory. Hailed as Mao’s greatest contribution to Marxism-Leninism during the Cultural Revolution, the theory was written into the party constitution twice (1969 and 1973) and the state constitution once (1975) as the “third great landmark in the development of Marxism” and the key to “resolving all conflicts and contradictions under socialism,” especially to preventing a “capitalist restoration.”
Important elements of this theory began to appear in Mao’s political thinking after 1956, the year of the 20th Soviet Congress at which General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev criticized Joseph Stalin. Considering the Soviet destalinization to be a clear signal of departure from socialism and regression to capitalism, Mao began to study the cause of this backward turn under socialism and to search for ways of preventing such a regression from happening in China. During the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, he considered people’s political attitudes (rather than just their socio-economic status) to be one of the defining features of their class identity. In the early 1960s, he called his colleagues’ attention to the ongoing class struggle in a socialist society. He developed the concept of an emerging bureaucratic class in 1964 and coined the term “capitalist-roaders within the party” in 1965. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, more ideas relevant to the theory—such as Mao’s increasing attention to class struggle in ideological and cultural spheres and the education of the masses through such struggle—appeared in the party documents the May 16 Circular and the Sixteen Articles. However, the systematic formulation of these ideas into a coherent theory did not take place until 1967.
On 18 May 1967, the People’s Daily and the Red Flag carried the joint editorial “A Great Historical Document” written by Wang Li with Mao’s revisions, marking the first anniversary of the passage of the May 16 Circular. This article publishes the phrase “revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat” for the first time and calls Mao’s theory represented by this phrase as “the third great landmark in the development of Marxism.” The term is further developed in a joint National Day (1 October) editorial of the People’s Daily, the Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily, as a theory of “continuously conducting revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.” And, finally, the complete formulation of the theory appears in “March Forward along the Road of the October Socialist Revolution: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.” This important theoretical piece was drafted by Chen Boda and Yao Wenyuan, approved by Mao upon review, and published on 6 November 1967, as a joint editorial of the People’s Daily, the Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily. This article sums up the theory with six major points:
1. The Marxist-Leninist law of the unity of opposites must be employed in observing a socialist society.
2. During the long historical period of socialism, classes, class contradictions, and class struggle still exist; so do the struggle between the socialist and the capitalist roads and the danger of a capitalist restoration. In order to prevent such a “peaceful evolution” into capitalism, a socialist revolution on the political and ideological fronts must be carried out to the end.
3. Class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat is, in essence, still a battle for power. To prevent a bourgeois takeover, the proletariat must exercise an all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie in the superstructure, including all cultural spheres.
4. The struggle between the two classes and the two roads in society will necessarily find expression in the party as well. The handful of those in power within the party who take the capitalist road are simply the bourgeois representatives in the party. To strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat, we must watch out for the Khrushchevs among us, expose them, and take back the power they had seized.
5. The most important form of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat is the great proletarian cultural revolution, in which the masses liberate themselves and educate themselves.
6. The fundamental program of the great proletarian cultural revolution in the ideological sphere is “fight selfishness, repudiate revisionism.” This is a great revolution that touches the depths of human consciousness and aims to establish in the people’s mind the world outlook of the proletariat.
The same day as the article appeared, Lin Biao, at a mass rally, spoke of the Cultural Revolution as Mao’s continuing revolution theory in practice, an “indication of enormous significance that Marxism-Leninism, in its developing process, has reached the stage of Mao Zedong Thought.”
At the Sixth Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee, held in June 1981, the central leadership repudiated Mao’s continuing revolution theory. According to the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China adopted at the plenum, Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat consists of “erroneous leftist notions” divorced from both Marxist-Leninist theory and Chinese reality. The resolution embraces Mao Zedong Thought as an “integration of the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism with concrete practice of the Chinese revolution” but insists that Mao’s continuing revolution theory is inconsistent with and, therefore, must be thoroughly distinguished from, the system of Mao Zedong Thought.
COUNTERATTACK (fanji). Directed by Li Wenhua and produced by Beijing Film Studio in 1976 following orders from Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao, this was a film intended to be a propaganda piece against Deng Xiaoping during the campaign to counterattack the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend. Portrayed with striking resemblance to Deng Xiaoping in terms of his political views and political experience, a villainous provincial party chief, after his reinstatement, sets going a trend against the Cultural Revolution. There is also direct mention of Deng’s name and his policies of overall rectification in the film. The piece was hastily put together in six months, and by September 1976 it was ready for internal preview. However, before the film was publicly released, Jiang Qing and her supporters were arrested. The post-Cultural Revolution Chinese government named the film a standard piece of conspiratorial literature.
COUNTERATTACK THE RIGHT-DEVIATIONIST REVERSAL-OF-VERDICTS TREND (fanji youqing fan’anfeng) (1975–77). Launched in November 1975, the campaign against the so-called reversal of verdicts was Mao Zedong’s response to Deng Xiaoping’s tactically anti-Cultural Revolution overall rectification program. The political campaign became more specifically identified as a “Criticize Deng, Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend” movement in February 1976, continued briefly under Hua Guofeng after Mao’s death, and officially ended with the full reinstatement of Deng in July 1977.
Mao started the campaign initially in educational circles by writing harsh comments on one of the two letters Liu Bing and three other veteran officials at Tsinghua University had written him in August and October 1975 criticizing Chi Qun and Xie Jingyi, Mao’s trusted PLA propaganda team and workers propaganda team leaders at Tsinghua University. Mao considered the two letters to have represented a widespread anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment, and Deng Xiaoping, who took the letters to Mao, was partial to the authors in Mao’s view. On 20 November, the Politburo met upon Mao’s request to evaluate the Cultural Revolution. Deng disappointed Mao by refusing to take charge of drafting a resolution on the issue. Later in the month, Mao’s comments on the letters by Liu Bing and his colleagues were presented to ranking officials in the form of briefing at a meeting organized by the Politburo, and the phrase “a trend of right-deviationist reversal of verdicts” was mentioned for the first time. Implicated in this trend if not yet identified with it, Deng’s rectification program was forced to end.
On 1 December, the party organ the Red Flag carried an article entitled “The Direction of the Revolution in Education Cannot Be Altered” by the Great Criticism Group of Peking University and Tsinghua University. The publication of this article marked the beginning of a massive propaganda campaign against Deng Xiaoping and, implicitly, Deng’s strongest supporter Premier Zhou Enlai. On 25 February 1976, a provincial leaders’ meeting was called by the central leadership, at which Hua Guofeng, who was made acting premier after Zhou Enlai’s death, said that Deng could be criticized by name. Also at this meeting, Mao’s order to “criticize Deng, counterattack the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend” was presented. Mao’s words were said to be gathered by Mao Yuanxin, the chairman’s liaison at the Politburo. Mao allegedly said that the bourgeoisie was within the party, that capitalist-roaders were still on the road, that some veteran cadres were discontent and would settle scores with the Cultural Revolution, and that Deng Xiaoping did not care for class struggle. In the ongoing media campaign, Deng was referred to as “the biggest unrepentant capitalist-roader within the party.” On 7 April, the Politburo passed a resolution at Mao’s request, dismissing Deng from office and implicating him with the Tiananmen Incident of 5 April—a historical event at the time of the Qingming Festival, in which millions of people came to Tiananmen Square to commemorate the late Premier Zhou Enlai and protest against the Jiang Qing group.
After the downfall of the Gang of Four in October 1976, Hua Guofeng, Mao’s hand-picked successor, insisted on a policy called “two whatever’s” (supporting whatever decisions Mao had made and following whatever instructions Mao had given) and decided to continue with the campaign against Deng and against the right-deviationist reversal of verdicts and to defend the Cultural Revolution. Ranking cadres Chen Yun and Wang Zhen, among others, objected to Hua’s decisions on Deng, while Deng himself challenged the idea of “two whatever’s.” Eventually, with broad support from members of the CCP Central Committee, Deng was reinstated in all his party, government, and military positions at the Third Plenum of the Tenth CCP Central Committee in July 1977. See also OVERALL RECTIFICATION.
COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ARMED REBELLION IN SHANGHAI (1976). This is the official reference to a long- and ambitiously planned armed resistance in Shanghai in anticipation of the political struggle and leadership change in Beijing after the death of Mao Zedong. Considering Shanghai to be the base of the cultural revolutionaries, members of the Jiang Qing group, Wang Hongwen in particular, paid much attention to building up a strong militia, and even “the second army” (second to the PLA), as Wang put it, in Shanghai. In 1975, Wang demanded that the militia be prepared for a guerilla war. In August 1976, as Mao was dying, 74,000 guns, 300 cannons, and much ammunition were given to the militia troops in Shanghai. However, due to the lack of leadership and the lack of popular support, the ultraleftists’ battle plan to defend their cause was easily foiled by the CCP central leadership after the arrest of the Gang of Four in Beijing on 6 October 1976.
COW-DEMONS AND SNAKE-SPIRITS (niuguisheshen). This is a generic term referring to all citizens denounced as class enemies, including landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, “bad elements,” Rightists, capitalists, “black gang” members, “reactionary academic authorities,” traitors, spies, capitalist-roaders, and even the children of the denounced. The term was adopted by the CCP official organ the People’s Daily in its editorial “Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits” (1 June 1966). Mao Zedong also used the term in his writing and speeches. The official endorsement helped make “cow-demons and snake-spirits” one of the most popular dehumanizing terms during the Cultural Revolution.
COW SHED (niupeng). This is a common reference to illegal prisons for those denounced as class enemies, or “cow-demons and snake-spirits” (hence the name “cow shed”), during the Cultural Revolution. See also MASS DICTATORSHIP.
CRITICIZE CHEN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION (1970–1971). Initiated by Mao Zedong at the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee (23 August-6 September 1970), this political campaign against Chen Boda for his support of Lin Biao in a power intrigue against the Jiang Qing faction at the plenum was also Mao’s strategic move against Lin Biao and his associates. After the downfall of Lin Biao in September 1971, the campaign against Chen became the movement to criticize Lin and conduct rectification in which the political target, the “Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique,” was also referred to as the “Lin-Chen Anti-Party Clique,” though in official media both campaigns were known as the “Criticize Revisionism and Conduct Rectification” movement until late August 1973 when Lin’s downfall was officially publicized.
At the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee, Chen Boda, with Lin Biao’s approval, compiled a brief collection of quotations called “Engels, Lenin, and Chairman Mao on Genius” and distributed it in the form of a pamphlet to the delegates. The unstated aim of this move was to make insinuations against the radical faction of the central leadership, especially Zhang Chunqiao who had insisted on excluding from the revised Constitution (on the agenda to be discussed at the plenum) the word “genius” and two other modifiers praising Mao’s contribution to Marxism. After hearing the complaint from Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, Mao wrote “Some Views of Mine,” accusing Chen Boda of trickery and deceit with a fake Marxist theory on genius, and called on CCP officials to study classic works of Marxism so as not to be deceived by the likes of Chen. In the meantime, Chen was under investigation.
The CCP Central Committee (CC) officially launched the campaign against Chen internally on 16 November 1970 with a document called “Directives Regarding the Anti-Party Question of Chen Boda.” Mao’s “Some Views of Mine” was attached, and a series of quotations on genius that Chen compiled was included in the document as an appendix. This was the beginning of the campaign to criticize Chen and conduct rectification. The campaign continued and deepened as Mao guided it with a series of directives, mostly in the form of comments on the relevant briefings, reports, and self-criticisms of Lin Biao’s associates. The targets of the campaign, theoretically, were Chen’s supposed “productionism” in opposition to the revolutionary line of the Ninth National Congress of the CCP (the charges were based on his conflict with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan over the drafting of the party’s political report for the meeting), his revisionism or “fake Marxism,” and his divisionism. But the real political aim of the campaign appeared to be, as the process of the campaign itself showed, to implicate Lin Biao’s associates and force them to fall into step with Mao’s ideological and political line. This effort culminated in a two-week “report session” (15–29 April 1971) in Beijing at which central and local cadres gathered to talk about their experience in exposing and criticizing Chen, discuss written self-criticisms submitted by Lin Biao’s cohorts Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Ye Qun, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo, and study Mao’s critical comments on their self-criticisms. On the last day of this meeting, the CC issued a circular to communicate the Chen Boda issue to all party members, and the campaign reached the grassroots level nationwide.
As Mao summarized after Lin Biao’s downfall, issuing directives, which he called “throwing rocks,” was an approach he adopted to guide the Criticize Chen and Conduct Rectification movement and to undermine Lin Biao’s power. The fall of Chen Boda the “scholar,” as he was often called, turned out to be a prelude to the fall of Lin Biao the commander and his generals. Both, in Mao’s view, were part of the 10th major line struggle in the history of the CCP, which was also a struggle between two headquarters, like the one between Mao and President Liu Shaoqi in the early part of the Cultural Revolution. See also ELIMINATING THE OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL PRESIDENT.
CRITICIZE LIN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION (pilin zhengfeng) (September 1971–August 1973). Referred to in official media as the “Criticize Revisionism and Conduct Rectification” until August 1973 when the Tenth National Congress of the CCP convened to close the case of the “Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique,” the phrase “Criticize Lin and Conduct Rectification” was the name of a political campaign against Lin Biao and his supporters after the September 13 Incident. Also known as part of the 10th line struggle in the history of the CCP, this campaign was a continuation of the Criticize Chen and Conduct Rectification movement that began in August 1970 at the Lushan Conference.
The campaign proceeded first with a series of emergency notices and measures. On 18 September 1971, five days after the fatal crash of the aircraft Trident 256 at Undurkhan, Mongolia, that killed Lin Biao, Ye Qun, their son Lin Liguo, and six others aboard the plane, the CCP Central Committee (CC) issued a circular to ranking cadres concerning Lin Biao’s flight and death, charging Lin with treason and calling on party members to “break clean” with him. On 24 September, the CC ordered Generals Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo—all implicated in the Lin Biao case—to leave office and conduct self-examination. On 3 October, the CC disbanded the Lin Biao-controlled Central Military Commission Administrative Group and formed the Central Military Commission Administrative Conference Office in its place, with Marshal Ye Jianying as chair. On the same day, the CC also formed a special case group with Zhou Enlai as director to investigate the problems of the “Lin [Biao]-Chen [Boda] Anti-Party Clique.” On 6 October, the CC issued another circular concerning the alleged coup d’état by Lin Biao and his associates. This document, to be circulated at the county level of party leadership first, also outlined a schedule for gradually releasing the information to grassroots party organizations and the general public. On 24 October, the CC ruled that the information of the Lin Biao affair be communicated to the masses but not be published in newspapers or on radio or in the form of big-character posters or slogans.
On 11 December 1971, 13 January 1972, and 2 July 1972, respectively, the CC authorized the issuance of part one, two, and three of “The Crushing of the Counterrevolutionary Coup of the Lin-Chen Anti-Party Clique,” all of which had been prepared by the special case group. Part one focused on the activities of Lin and company around the time of the 1970 Lushan Conference; part two on the “5-7-1 Project Summary,” said to be Lin’s “program of armed coup”; part three on evidence of the coup attempt itself. On 20 August 1973, four days before the Tenth National Congress of the CCP, the CC approved the special case group’s “Investigative Report on the Counterrevolutionary Crimes of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique” and expelled Lin Biao, Chen Boda, Ye Qun, Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo from the party. The words about Lin Biao as the greatest defender of Mao’s revolutionary line and the statement about Lin as Mao’s successor were deleted in the revised CCP Constitution. The deletion was approved by the Tenth National Congress.
The guideline of the Criticize Lin and Conduct Rectification campaign underwent a considerable revision as the movement proceeded. At first, Zhou Enlai characterized Lin Biao’s tendencies and policies as “ultraleftist.” In so doing, Zhou, who was in charge of the daily affairs of the central government and had full power for some time when Mao Zedong was gravely ill immediately after Lin’s fall, attempted to take advantage of the political situation to reverse the kind of extremism that had dominated Chinese politics, sabotaged the national economy and caused chaos nationwide since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Zhou began to be vocal, as he had not before, about the importance of the nation’s economy, of the skills and expertise of the workforce, of education, and of diplomatic relations. He also advocated “liberating cadres” and “implementing the party’s policies for intellectuals.” In the meantime, Mao reflected upon the Lin Biao affair and began to acknowledge some missteps in the past. He suggested the redressing of the cases of the February Adverse Current and the Yang-Yu-Fu Affair and allowed the practical-minded Deng Xiaoping to return from a virtual exile to Beijing to serve as deputy premier—a move that Zhou supported.
However, Zhou’s measures and ideas against “ultraleftism” met strong resistance from cultural revolutionaries of the Jiang Qing group. They labeled Lin Biao and company as “ultrarightist” and saw Zhou’s slogans and policies as symptoms of a resurgence of right-leaning tendencies. Well aware that Zhou’s attack on ultraleftism might lead to a complete reversal of the course of the Cultural Revolution, Mao supported Jiang Qing and her associates. In his conversation with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan on 17 December 1972, Mao concurred with their judgment of Lin Biao. In September 1972, Mao transferred 38-year-old Wang Hongwen, Zhang and Yao’s close associate in Shanghai, to Beijing and allowed him to attend top-level meetings of the Politburo, the State Council, and the Central Military Commission. The rapid rise of Wang Hongwen, who was given the honor of delivering the report on the revision of the CCP Constitution at the CCP Tenth National Congress, entered the Politburo, and became vice-chairman of the CCP, signaled that Mao was choosing another successor after his first choice turned out to be disastrous. As the Criticize Lin and Conduct Rectification movement drew to a close around the CCP Tenth Congress, another campaign, Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius, was about to begin. This movement, supposedly with Lin Biao as the main target, was implicitly a general offensive against Zhou Enlai for his criticism of ultraleftism and his tactic of revising some of Mao’s radical policies.
CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS. This was a political and ideological campaign that Mao Zedong launched in 1974 supposedly for a dual purpose: first, to link Lin Biao’s ideology to what Mao saw as China’s moralistic, backward-looking, and reactionary legacy, namely Confucianism; second, to defend the Cultural Revolution against the kind of criticism that in Mao’s view paralleled the Confucian resistance to essentially Legalist social transformations in the early “feudal” period of Chinese history. However, with a strong aversion to Zhou Enlai’s “Confucian” inclination to moderation and realism and in reaction to Zhou’s well-received critique of Lin Biao’s ideology as ultraleftism, Mao was also directing from behind the scene a general offensive against Zhou Enlai in the name of an anti-Lin campaign. Zhou was never named as a target; rather, by innuendo and insinuation he was referred to as, among other names, “the major Confucian within the party” and “the Duke of Zhou (Dynasty).”
Mao began to connect Lin Biao with Confucius in early 1973 after he learned that notes on Confucius and Mencius and hand-copied quotations from the Analects of Confucius had been found in Lin’s residence. Mao also knew that in the “571 Project” Summary, allegedly a blueprint for Lin’s armed coup, he himself was called the present-day Qin Shihuang (the First Emperor of China). In May 1973, at a work session of the CCP Central Committee (CC), Mao proposed to “criticize Confucius” as he was talking about Lin Biao. On 4 July 1973, Mao told Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao that like the Kuomintang, Lin Biao followed the dictates of Confucius and opposed the Legalists. In Mao’s view, the Legalists, who helped the Qin Shihuang build an empire, favored the present over the past, while Confucians, politically short of accomplishments, tended to turn the course of history backwards. On 1 January 1974, three official organs, the People’s Daily, the Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily, carried a joint New Year’s Day message that called upon the nation to criticize the tradition of revering Confucianism and debasing Legalism and designated the criticism of Confucius to be a component of the criticism of Lin Biao. On 18 January, Mao authorized the dissemination of the collection entitled Lin Biao and the Way of Confucius and Mencius, which was put together by Jiang Qing’s followers at Peking University and Tsinghua University. The issuance of this document nationwide marked the beginning of the Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius movement.
Despite its name, however, the actual content of the campaign had little to do with Lin Biao. Jiang Qing and her associates in the central leadership were prompted by Mao as to the real purpose of the campaign. They directed the campaign with several loyal writing teams, especially the Peking University and Tsinghua University Great Criticism Group and the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee Writing Group. The writing teams published a series of supposedly historical commentaries with Zhou Enlai as an implicit target. In these articles, Confucius was said to have represented the old order of a slave-owning aristocratic society and to have devoted his life to the reactionary cause of “restoring the perished kingdoms, reviving the doomed dynasty, and recalling those retired from the world.” The intended but unsaid parallel was Zhou Enlai’s painstaking effort, especially after the downfall of Lin Biao, to deradicalize the party’s policies, to rehabilitate veteran cadres and intellectuals, and to restore order and normality to the economy, education, and national life in general. In the meantime, some of these articles applauded the Qin Shihuang for burning books and burying alive Confucian scholars and, with unmistakable references to Jiang Qing, praised “outstanding stateswomen” of the past, such as Queen Dowager Lü of the Han Dynasty and Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty, for upholding the so-called Legalist line of social progress against reactionary Confucianism. Referring to this campaign, Jiang Qing suggested that the 11th line struggle within the party had begun, while Wang Hongwen, who was now closely associated with Jiang Qing, called it the “Second Cultural Revolution,” both alluding to Zhou Enlai as the target of the political movement.
This propaganda campaign in the manner of allusory historiography did not gain much support from within the party and without, so much so that Mao eventually detached himself from Jiang Qing and said at the Politburo meeting of 17 July 1974, “She does not represent me; she represents herself.” Articles of vicious insinuations against Zhou, however, continued to appear in major newspapers in the second half of 1974. But the campaign had lost steam and eventually ended without an official closure when Deng Xiaoping as first vice-premier assumed Zhou Enlai’s responsibilities in January 1975 and pursued Zhou’s course much more aggressively in a nationwide overall rectification program. See also CONFUCIANISM VERSUS LEGALISM.
CRITICIZE REVISIONISM AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION (pixiu zhengfeng). This was the publicized name for both the political campaign against Chen Boda (August 1970–September 1971) and the one against Lin Biao and his supporters (September 1971–August 1973). In the course of these campaigns, the names of Chen and Lin were not mentioned in official media; Chen was often referred to as a “fake Marxist swindler” and Lin as a “swindler of the Liu Shaoqi kind.” See also CRITICIZE CHEN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION; CRITICIZE LIN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION.
CULTIVATION OF A COMMUNIST (lun gongchandangyuan de xiuyang). Based on a series of lectures that Liu Shaoqi had delivered at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Yan’an in July 1939, this well-known work appeared in book form for the first time in 1943 and was subsequently widely regarded as an essential textbook and classical literature for the CCP’s ideological education. Its first revised edition came out in 1949 and second in 1962. On several occasions, Mao Zedong offered favorable comments on the book as well. In mid-February 1967, however, Mao spoke of Liu Shaoqi’s book as a “deceitful work” that only talks about personal cultivation without addressing the reality of class struggle and of the struggle of the proletariat for power. Therefore, in Mao’s view, the book represented “a form of idealism totally opposed to Marxism-Leninism.” “Even Chiang Kai-shek,” Mao said, “and even the bourgeoisie of the world, could accept the kind of personal cultivation discussed in the book. What individual? What personal cultivation? Everyone is a class person; there is no such a thing as a person standing alone, a person in the abstract. What he talks about is the way of Confucius and Mencius, acceptable to both feudal landlords and capitalists.”
On 8 May 1967, the People’s Daily and the Red Flag carried a joint editorial entitled “The Critical Point of Cultivation Is Betrayal of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The publication of this article was authorized by the Politburo with the approval of Mao. On 11 May, the CCP Central Committee (CC) issued a circular on criticizing Liu Shaoqi’s Cultivation, in which Liu is referred to as the “biggest capitalist-roader within the party.” The nationwide criticism of The Cultivation of a Communist was thus launched. The book that had enjoyed so much prestige in the CCP was now labeled “black cultivation” and a “big anti-Marxist-Leninist and anti-Mao Zedong Thought poisonous weed.” On 29 February 1980, the CC rehabilitated Liu Shaoqi. The Cultivation of a Communist was reprinted in the same year.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION COMMITTEE (wenhua geming weiyuanhui). This was the name of the temporary power organ in a given institution formed in the beginning stage of the Cultural Revolution for the purpose of directing the ongoing political movement. In some institutions, it was called the Cultural Revolution Preparation Committee (meaning a preparatory committee for setting up the Cultural Revolution Committee). It should be distinguished from the organ of power “revolutionary committee” established at various levels as a result of the power seizure movement in 1967. Cultural Revolution Committees were first created in educational and governmental institutions in early summer 1966 and often consisted of party officials and the representatives of the masses. When the party authority in an institution fell, the committee often became the ad hoc authority of the institution. In Beijing, where work groups were sent to educational institutions in June and July, many such committees were established under the auspices of the work groups.
When Chairman Mao Zedong ordered in late July that work groups be withdrawn, the Cultural Revolution Committees of these institutions, then, took over. The “Sixteen Articles,” a programmatic document for the Cultural Revolution adopted at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (1–12 August 1966), endorses the Cultural Revolution Committee as a temporary organ of power not only suitable for educational and governmental institutions but also adaptable for factories, enterprises, and urban and rural communities. Soon Cultural Revolution Committees were established in all kinds of institutions at the local level across China. Before long, however, many such committees were accused of having followed the bourgeois reactionary line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in supporting traditional party authorities and suppressing the rebellion of the revolutionary masses. As a result, most of these committees either were forced to stay on the sidelines or were replaced by various newly established mass organizations in late 1966.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP. See CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP.
DAILY READING (tiantiandu). The phrase refers to a government-endorsed practice of studying Mao Zedong’s writing for an hour every day, which contributed much to the popularization of Mao Zedong Thought and the personality cult of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. The practice originated in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and, with Lin Biao’s enthusiastic endorsement, the daily reading hour was so firmly set as to become “thunder-proof,” as army soldiers put it. With much urging and support from the central leadership, the civilian authorities at the grassroots—in schools, in factories, and in government institutions—also implemented the daily reading program as a routine (such as the first class hour in school and the first work hour in a government agency) in the first few years of the Cultural Revolution. Mass meetings were often held at which activists would talk about ways they studied Mao’s works and applied Mao’s ideas in their daily lives. The practice of daily reading continued until after the downfall of Lin Biao.
DAO COUNTY MASSACRE (1967). This was a brutal slaughter of thousands of innocent people under the irrational, chaotic, and lawless mass dictatorship involving not only mass organizations but also local CCP officials and militia personnel. During the summer of 1967, a rumor was circulating in Dao County, Hunan Province, that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops were going to attack mainland China and that class enemies on the mainland, especially people of the “Black Five Categories” (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, “bad elements,” and Rightists), would rise in rebellion in cooperation with Chiang’s battle plan and kill all party members, cadres, and poor and lower-middle-class peasant leaders. On 5 August 1967, the county leadership met and confirmed the story. In the meantime, factional violence escalated in the county: on 8 August, the “Revolutionary Alliance,” a rebel organization that dominated the downtown area, stormed the county militia headquarters, confiscated all of its weapons, and forced its rival the “Red Alliance,” a politically more conservative mass organization, to retreat to its base in the countryside; on 13 August, a violent confrontation occurred in the downtown area, which ended with the defeat of the “Red Alliance.”
To demonstrate their acute “class consciousness,” and perhaps also to vent their frustrations, members of the “Red Alliance” (many of them local officials) and their supporters in the local militia began to slaughter those of the “Black Five Categories” and their children in the countryside. Some poor and lower-middle peasants also set up a court to sentence to death whomever they considered to be a threat. Execution was swift, and the methods used were among the cruelest. From 13 August to 17 October, more than 4,000 people were killed, more than 300 committed suicide, and 117 entire households were wiped out. Among those killed were old people in their seventies, babies (the youngest being 10 days old), and pregnant women. The total number of deaths amounted to 1.2% of the county’s population. The county authorities were at a loss about what to do, while local officials in more than half of the county’s rural districts and communes were involved in the planning and the execution of the massacre. The brutality of the Dao County massacre also spread to the neighboring counties. Informed of the grave situation, Premier Zhou Enlai looked into the matter himself and sent out five urgent telegrams. An end was finally put to the massacre by the PLA troops from the Hunan Provincial Military District.
DENG TUO (1912–1966). Writer, journalist, veteran revolutionary on the CCP Beijing municipal committee, and author of the popular newspaper column Evening Chats at Yanshan under the penname of Ma Nancun, Deng was an early victim of the campaign Mao Zedong launched in the Beijing cultural circles at the preparation stage of the Cultural Revolution.
Born in Minhou, Fujian Province, as Deng Zijian, Deng Tuo joined the CCP in 1930. During the war of resistance against Japan (1937–1945), Deng served, among other important positions related to the party’s propaganda work, as head of the Jin-Cha-Ji branch of the Xinhua News Agency. In 1944, he was put in charge of the initial compilation and publication of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong. After the communists took over Beijing in 1949, Deng was appointed director of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee as well as editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP. In 1956, he led a reform to make the People’s Daily “not only the party’s paper but also people’s paper.” Mao Zedong was not pleased and criticized the newspaper as “being run by bookworms and dead people” after he noticed the rather cautious response of the People’s Daily to his call for criticism of the CCP preceding the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign. Deng was consequently removed from the position of editor-in-chief but remained as director of the newspaper, from which he later resigned.
In 1958, Deng was appointed culture and education secretary of the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee and editor-in-chief of Frontline, the official journal of the Beijing party committee. In 1960, he became an alternate secretary of the CCP North China Bureau. In 1961, Deng, upon invitation, started a column entitled “Evening Chats at Yanshan” (yanshan yehua) for the popular newspaper Beijing Evening. A few months later, he also began to co-author with Wu Han and Liao Mosha the column “Notes from a Three-Family Village” (sanjiacun zhaji) in the Frontline. An erudite and brilliant essayist, Deng wove history, philosophy, and popular culture into his entertaining and yet politically sensitive pieces, which were often subtly evocative and satirical, reminiscent of a long Chinese tradition of history writing and criticism in carefully guarded language of allusions and understatement. In the years between 1961 and 1964, Deng wrote more than 170 essays for the two columns. They were immensely popular among readers of all tastes.
In late 1965 and early 1966, following Yao Wenyuan’s attack on Wu Han, the author of the historical play Hairui Dismissed from Office and a co-author of the “Notes from a Three-Family Village,” a political campaign was spreading across China criticizing the so-called bourgeois counterrevolutionary academic authorities. In April and early May 1966, Deng was openly criticized for his essays published in the Beijing Evening and Frontline. Named the head of a “Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique,” Deng was accused of conspiring with Wu Han and Liao Mosha in attacking the party and its policies with historical allusions and by innuendo. On 16 May, an article by Qi Benyu further humiliated Deng by calling him a traitor. On 17 May, he spent the entire night completing a long letter to the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee refuting all the accusations. He then wrote a short and final note to his wife before taking an overdose of sleeping pills and ending his life in the early hours of 18 May. Deng was the first ranking official to die in the Cultural Revolution. He was officially rehabilitated in 1979.
DENG XIAOPING (1904–1997). General secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1956, Deng was denounced as China’s number two capitalist-roader in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. He came back to the central leadership in 1973 to succeed Zhou Enlai as the nation’s chief administrator, only to be criticized and dismissed again in late 1975 and early 1976 for his opposition to the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership. Eventually, Deng returned a second time in July 1977 to lead the CCP’s critical evaluation of the Cultural Revolution and China’s economic reform.
A native of Guang’an, Sichuan Province, Deng studied both in France (1921–1925) and in the Soviet Union (1926). He joined the CCP while in France, returned to China in 1927, and soon became an important political leader in the Jiangxi Soviet established by Mao Zedong. Deng participated in the Long March (1934–1935). During the war of resistance against Japan, he served as deputy director of the Eighth Route Army’s political department. He was appointed a secretary of the CCP Central Committee (CC) in 1945 and served as chief political commissar of the Second Field Army of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during the civil war of the late 1940s. After the communist takeover of China in 1949, Deng became first secretary of the CCP Southwest Bureau. He was transferred to Beijing in 1952 and entered the ruling Politburo in 1955.
In 1956, at the First Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee, Deng was elected to the Standing Committee of the Politburo and became general secretary of the CCP. As a member of the CCP core leadership, Deng was a close assistant of Mao, politically and ideologically, in leading the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 against intellectuals and in taking a tough line against the chauvinistic leadership of the Soviet Union, especially during his several official visits to Moscow. On the other hand, Deng was known for his pragmatism in domestic economic policies, which was to be characterized during the Cultural Revolution as a “cat theory” based on his own words: “Black or white, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” In this aspect, especially considering his critical assessment of the radical and irrational policies of the Great Leap Forward of 1958, Deng was seen by Mao as a close ally of Liu Shaoqi.
In June 1966, when the Cultural Revolution had just broken out while Mao kept himself away from Beijing, Deng Xiaoping joined President Liu Shaoqi, Premier Zhou Enlai, and other members of the Politburo Standing Committee in deciding, with Mao’s approval, to dispatch work groups to schools to provide instruction and guidance for the masses participating in the revolution. Mao, however, withdrew his support for the decision on work groups after he came back from the south in July. When Mao attacked the work group policy as a bourgeois reactionary line and Liu Shaoqi as the commander of the bourgeois headquarters, Deng fell from power along with Liu. Deng was denounced as the second leading capitalist-roader within the CCP. As Liu was dying of abuse and illness in Kaifeng, Henan, in October 1969, Deng was exiled to a factory of tractor parts in a suburb of Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, to work and reform himself.
In early 1973, at Mao’s suggestion and with strong support from Zhou Enlai, Deng came back to Beijing and was reinstated as vice-premier. At the enlarged sessions of the Politburo held in Beijing in November and December 1973 concerning what Mao saw as Zhou Enlai’s “capitulationism” and “revisionism” in dealing with the United States, Deng followed Mao’s line and criticized Zhou—apparently a necessary step to take on his way back to power. In April 1974, Deng, rather than Zhou, represented the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for the first time at the General Assembly of the United Nations. In January 1975, at Mao’s suggestion, Deng became vice-chairman of the CCP, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, chief of the general staff of the PLA, and first vice-premier of the State Council. He was thus entrusted with the power to preside over the daily affairs of the party, the army, and the state while Zhou Enlai was hospitalized for cancer treatment. In late February 1975, Deng launched his overall rectification program, which virtually reversed the course of the Cultural Revolution. Late that year, Mao interfered and began a nationwide campaign to criticize Deng and counterattack the rightdeviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend. When the April 5 Movement broke out in 1976 commemorating the late Premier Zhou Enlai and protesting against the ultraleftist Jiang Qing group, Deng was stripped of all his official duties for allegedly being both the backer and the hope of all the “counterrevolutionaries” gathering in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in the country.
In July 1977, within a year of the death of Mao and the fall of the ultraleftist Gang of Four, Deng was reinstated again. By the time of the Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee (December 1978), he had already become the virtual center of the CCP leadership. He challenged the dogmatism of Mao’s successor Hua Guofeng who insisted on continuing with “whatever” decisions Mao had made, and Deng won broad support for replacing Hua with the more reform-minded Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. Deng played a decisive role in the CCP’s critical assessment of the Cultural Revolution, which culminated in the passage of the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1981 at the Six Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee. Deng also put himself behind the “liberation of thinking” movement and made his own words the slogan of the nation: “Facts are the only test for truth.” In the meantime, Deng advocated “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and engineered economic reforms creating special economic zones, adopting certain aspects of a market economy, and freeing enterprises from state control, which eventually ended China’s centralized economy based largely on a Soviet model. The political aspect of Deng’s liberalization program was not so radical, though; it reached its limit during the June 4 democracy movement of 1989 when, with Deng’s approval, the army was brought in to crack down on unarmed civilians protesting in Tiananmen Square.
In 1987, Deng began to retire from various high positions he had been holding in the party, the military, and the state, setting an example for other CCP veteran leaders, including those skeptical of Deng’s reform. On 19 February 1997, Deng Xiaoping died in Beijing. See also POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4–7 APRIL 1976; SS FENGQING INCIDENT.
DESTROY THE FOUR OLDS (po sijiu). This campaign was initiated by Red Guards in August 1966 aiming to sweep away all “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” (hence “Four Olds”) in Chinese society. Endorsed by the Cultural Revolution faction of the central leadership, the campaign resulted in unprecedented damage to the nation’s historical landmarks, valuable artifacts, and other material witnesses of culture and civilization and claimed thousands of innocent lives nationwide—1,772 in the city of Beijing alone.
The phrase “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” as a pejorative reference to all traditions—Chinese or foreign—that were deemed nonproletarian from the viewpoint of the Culture Revolution ideology first appeared in a 1 June 1966 People’s Daily editorial entitled “Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits.” Lin Biao used the phrase in his speech at the mass rally of 18 August and called on Red Guards to wage war against the Four Olds. As a prelude to Lin’s battle cry, an ultimatum had already been drafted by Red Guards at Beijing No. 2 Middle School on the night of 17 August, declaring war on barbershops, tailor shops, photo studios, and used book stores. On the day after the mass rally, Beijing’s Red Guards took to the streets and started to smash street signs and name boards for shops, restaurants, schools, factories, and hospitals and replace them with new labels. Chang’an (meaning “eternal peace”) Avenue in the center of the city, for instance, was renamed East-Is-Red Avenue, and Beijing Union Hospital, which was established by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1921, now became Anti-Imperialism Hospital. Red Guards made speeches, distributed pamphlets, and put out posters on the streets that dismissed various fashions in hair and dress, stylized photos, pointed boots, and high-heeled shoes as evidence of bourgeois lifestyle. They would stop passers-by whose appearance was unacceptable and humiliate them by shaving their hair, cutting open their trousers, or knocking off their shoe heels. The official endorsement of such actions in two Peoples Daily editorials on 23 August helped to spread the fire of the anti-Four Olds campaign across the country and prompted Red Guards to move further to raid churches, temples, theaters, libraries, and historic sites, causing irretrievable damage. During the raid upon the historic Confucian Homestead, Confucian Temple, and Confucian Cemetery, for instance, more than 1,000 tombs and stone tablets were destroyed or damaged, and more than 2,700 volumes of ancient books and 900 scrolls of calligraphy and paintings were set afire. Across the country, countless books that were deemed “old” were burned, especially those in school libraries.
During the campaign to destroy the Four Olds, violence against innocent people escalated. On 23 August, a group of Beijing Red Guards shepherded several dozen writers, artists, and government officials from the Municipal Cultural Bureau to what used to be the National Academy of imperial China, where a huge pile of theater props and costumes, all deemed “old,” was burning. The Red Guards ordered their victims to kneel down around the fire and beat them so hard with belts and theatrical props that several victims lost consciousness. Lao She, a well-known writer and one of the victims of this notorious event, took his own life the next day. Such brutality was widespread during the campaign, especially at the struggle meetings that Red Guards held against their teachers, the so-called black gang members, and the people of the “Black Five Categories.” It had become commonplace for Red Guards during the months of August and September to ransack private homes and confiscate personal belongings of the alleged class enemies. Some homes were raided several times by different groups of Red Guards. In Shanghai alone, an estimated 150,000 homes were illegally searched. In the name of sweeping away the Four Olds, the raiders took away not only cultural artifacts that were considered “old,” but also currency, bank notes, gold and silver bars, jewelry, and other valuables. At the height of the Destroy the Four Olds campaign, Chairman Mao Zedong continued to hold inspections of millions of Red Guards in Beijing, while Lin Biao, standing by Mao’s side at these inspections, continued to praise the Red Guards’ attack on the old ways. In late 1966 and early 1967 when Red Guard organizations became more deeply involved in factional conflicts and power-seizure struggles, the anti-Four Olds campaign finally lost its impetus and came to an end. See also RED AUGUST.
DING XUELEI. This penname was used by the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee Writing Group, a writing team headed by Xu Jingxian and remotely controlled by Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. “Xuelei” suggests “following the example of Lei Feng,” a PLA soldier and the most admired communist hero in the early 1960s for his determination to be a “rust-free screw on the revolutionary machine.” During the Cultural Revolution, the writing group produced numerous articles—many under this penname—to promote the interest of the ultraleftist faction of the CCP central leadership and attack its opponents.
DING ZUXIAO AND LI QISHUN. Labeled counterrevolutionaries, these two women were executed in 1970 for criticizing the personality cult of Chairman Mao Zedong. Ding, of the Tujia ethnic minority, was an educated youth in the countryside of Dayong County, Hunan Province, since 1965. In a letter, dated 17 March 1969, to the Dayong County Revolutionary Committee, Ding is sharply critical of the vogue of the “three loyalties (loyal to Mao, Mao Zedong Thought, and Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line).” “Our loyalty is,” she writes, “to the people, to the motherland, and to truth; it should not go to a particular person. The loyalty promoted today is actually the cult of the personality, a slavish mentality.” Ding associates this kind of loyalty to the legacy of feudalism in which “Chairman Mao,” she writes, “is treated as an emperor, an object of daily worship.” On 21 April 1969, having received no response from the authorities to her request that her letter be published in a local newspaper, Ding distributed in downtown Dayong more than a dozen leaflets in which she, again, criticizes the Mao cult: “an unprecedented personality cult in the nation’s history” is her way of characterizing the “three loyalties.” Ding was arrested on 5 July 1969 on charges of an attack on the proletarian headquarters and slander on the mass movement to study Mao Zedong Thought. Also arrested was her sister Zuxia, who had been involved in both the writing and the distributing of the letter.
On 27 September 1969, Li Qishun distributed in downtown Dayong more than 20 copies of the letter “To the Revolutionary People,” which she had written in support of her former classmate and friend Ding Zuxiao. In the letter she calls Ding a hero deserving the name of a revolutionary vanguard. Li also sent a copy of the letter to the Red Flag editorial department in Beijing. She was soon arrested along with her sister Qicai, who had helped distributing Qishun’s letter. Some of her former classmates were also arrested as members of the so-called Ding Zuxiao and Li Qishun Counterrevolutionary Clique. On 8 May 1970, Ding Zuxiao, age 24, and Li Qishun, age 23, were executed. In 1980, the Dayong County party committee redressed this case and named Ding Zuxiao and Li Qishun “heroes of the people.”
ECONOMISM (jingji zhuyi). Also known as the “evil wind of economism,” this is an official reference to both the demands made by organized contract and temporary workers for job security and job benefits and the way government officials responded to such demands in late 1966 and the beginning of 1967. On 8 November 1966, during the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line, contract and temporary workers formed their own organization, the National Red Workers Rebel Corps. Soon they envisioned the possibilities of economic gains as a result of their political activities: as they were denouncing the unfair double-tiered class system within the working class, they demanded promotion, raise, and change of status to regular state employees.
Jiang Qing and some other members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) expressed sympathy and support on several occasions. At a reception the CCRSG held for the representatives of the Rebel Corps on 26 December 1966, Jiang spoke of the way temporary and contract workers were treated as the way workers in general were treated by capitalists. She reproached the officials from the Ministry of Labor and the All China Workers Union and called upon temporary and contract workers to rebel against these two government agencies. The Rebel Corps distributed Jiang’s speech (with comments from other members of the CCRSG as well) across China and forced the Ministry of Labor and the All China Workers Union to accede to their demands. Jiang’s speech and the Rebel Corps’s success also inspired regular state employees to seek economic gains by political means. Under pressure from below and from above and under attack during the Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign, government officials began to give in to workers’ demands for pay raises, bonuses, traveling expenses, and so on, which led to a sudden depletion of operational budget and a financial crisis in a number of cities in January 1967.
In the meantime, some mass organizations in Shanghai launched an offensive against this kind of materialistically motivated political activities. They wrote and distributed two articles: “Grasp Revolution, Promote Production, and Defeat the Counteroffensive of the Bourgeois Reactionary Line: To the People of Shanghai” (4 January 1967) and “Urgent Announcement” (9 January 1967); both were also carried in Shanghai’s newspapers Wenhui Daily and Liberation Daily and later broadcast nationwide. Upon Mao Zedong’s endorsement of the first article as “another Marxist-Leninist big-character poster,” the CCRSG began to accuse government officials, or capitalist-roaders, of bribing and corrupting the masses with economism—a charge detailed in an article that appeared on 12 January 1967 in the People’s Daily as well as the Red Flag. An official announcement was issued on 24 February 1967 to ban the National Red Workers Rebel Corps as a mass organization. Its leaders were arrested.
EDUCATED YOUTHS (zhishi qingnian or zhiqing). Although college graduates were also included in its original definition, this term, as commonly understood today, refers mainly to urban and suburban middle-school and high-school graduates during the Cultural Revolution who went to the countryside to work, to settle down, and to be “reeducated” by the farmers there. See also REEDUCATION; UP TO THE MOUNTAINS AND DOWN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE.
EIGHT BLACK THEORIES (heibalun). This is a common reference to Jiang Qing’s summary of the “anti-party” and “anti-socialist,” and therefore “black,” literary theories that she considered to have been dictating the production of literature and arts in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1966. The eight theories are “theory of depicting things as they are” (“black” because truthfulness means focusing on the dark side of socialism), “theory of the broad path of realism” (broadness implies that it is too narrow for literature just to be a servant to proletarian politics), “theory of deepening realism” (deepening implies that socialist realism lacks depths of real life), “theory of antithesis to thematic determination” (it betrays an aversion to contemporary proletarian themes), “theory of middle characters” (the “middle” implies a focus on problematic characters rather than revolutionary heroes), “theory of aversion to gunpowder smell” (it prefers humor and light-heartedness to the revolutionary spirit of war), “theory of converging elements as the spirit of the times” (it denies the revolutionary spirit as the defining spirit of the times) and “theory of departure from the scripture and rebellion against orthodoxy” (it shows discontent with revolutionary literature). See also SUMMARY OF THE SYMPOSIUM CONVENED BY COMRADE JIANG QING AT THE BEHEST OF COMRADE LIN BIAO ON THE WORK OF LITERATURE AND ARTS IN ARMED FORCES.
8–18. See MASS RALLY OF 18 AUGUST 1966.
EIGHT MODEL DRAMAS. The term refers to the eight pieces of performing art and music promoted by Jiang Qing and her supporters as revolutionary models for all art and literary works during the Cultural Revolution. The eight models include five Peking operas: Shajia Creek (Shajiabang), Taking Tiger Mountain by Stratagem (zhiqu weihushan), Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (qixi baihutuan), The Red Lantern (hongdeng ji), and On the Dock (haigang); two ballets: The White-Haired Girl (baimaonü) and The Red Detachment of Women (hongse niangzijun); and one symphony: Shajia Creek (jiaoxiang yinyue Shajiabang). The term “model opera” (yangban xi) appeared in the 6 March 1965 issue of the Shanghai newspaper Liberation Daily as a reference to The Red Lantern. The entire repertoire was listed for the first time as “eight model dramas” in a well-known editorial entitled “Excellent Models for Revolutionary Art and Literature” in the 31 May 1967 issue of the People’s Daily.
Despite Jiang Qing’s claims of originality and guidance in making the entire repertoire, most of the model dramas originated from theatrical pieces that had been created in the early 1960s during the Peking opera reform, in which other local forms of drama participated as well. Shajia Creek was originally a Shanghai local opera (huju) entitled Sparks in the Reeds (ludang huozhong). On the Dock was based on a local opera of Jiangsu province called Morning at the Harbor (haigang de zaochen) and was adapted to Peking opera in spring 1965 by the Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe. Taking Tiger Mountain by Stratagem, Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, and The Red Lantern were first produced at a national modern Peking opera festival—a joint performance by a number of troupes for the purpose of discussion and emulation—in 1964. The White-Haired Girl was adapted by the Shanghai Dance Academy from a popular revolutionary story with the same title.
Taking advantage of considerable success already achieved in drama reform, Jiang Qing tempered these pieces with what she considered to be elements of revolutionary art, such as the concept of “three prominences” and the idea of class struggle. Also under her direction, the China Ballet Troupe adapted the film The Red Detachment of Women to a ballet, and the Central Philharmonic Orchestra composed the symphony Shajia Creek. Then, the eight revolutionary model dramas became her personal achievements and, for quite some time during the Cultural Revolution, the only works deemed completely revolutionary and allowed on stage; as a popular Chinese saying had it: “Only eight plays for 800 million people.” During the Cultural Revolution, some of the artists initially involved in the making of these plays were persecuted, and even imprisoned, because their aesthetic judgment was different from Jiang Qing’s. In fact, these model dramas eventually became icons so sacred that any criticism or any attempt to adapt them to other forms might be considered evidence of a crime called “damaging the model dramas.” The iconic status of these pieces, as well as the dictatorial and repressive policies imposed by Jiang Qing and her supporters in artistic circles, was largely responsible for the paleness of Chinese art during the Cultural Revolution.
ELEVENTH PLENUM OF THE CCP EIGHTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE (1–12 August 1966). A landmark in the course of the Cultural Revolution, this was a meeting organized and presided over by Chairman Mao Zedong to rally support within the top leadership, to wage war against what he considered to be the “bourgeois headquarters,” and to launch the Cultural Revolution nationwide for the second time. The reorganization of the Politburo at the plenum strengthened Mao’s power, while the passage of the “Resolution of the CCP Central Committee Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” commonly known as the “Sixteen Articles,” provided another “programmatic document” defining the objectives and the party policies for the Cultural Revolution after the adoption of the “May 16 Circular” at an earlier meeting.
Mao’s decision to call the meeting in Beijing in late July 1966, shortly after his eight-month tour in the provinces, was based on his perception that the Cultural Revolution had encountered much resistance from above since it was first launched at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966. The resistance took the peculiar form of work groups that the central leadership dispatched to colleges and middle and high schools to cope with turmoil and violence and to guide the course of the Revolution under party leadership. Mao’s call was urgent. On 27 July, three days after the announcement and with little preparation, the preliminary session began. The plenum officially started on 1 August. Among those attending the meeting were nonvoting delegates from the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) and student and teacher representatives from college campuses. At the opening session, President Liu Shaoqi delivered a speech, reporting to the Central Committee (CC) on the state of the party since the last plenum and also assuming responsibility for what Mao saw as the problems of the work groups. Mao interrupted the speech and accused the work groups of taking the bourgeois stand against the proletarian revolution. On the same day, Mao’s reply to the letters from the Tsinghua University Middle School Red Guards in support of their rebellion was distributed among delegates.
Originally on the plenum agenda were the meeting of all delegates to discuss the “Sixteen Articles” on 4 August and the adjournment of the plenum on 5 August. But this schedule was changed due to the resistance of many delegates to Mao’s radical vision of the Cultural Revolution: in discussion sessions on 2–3 August, they acknowledged their “lack of comprehension” and criticized themselves for “not having been able to keep in step with Chairman Mao.” At an enlarged session of the Politburo Standing Committee on 4 August, Mao accused the work groups of repressing the student movement and pointed to the CC as the source of a “White Terror.” His speech included the alarming words, “Cow-demons and snake-spirits are among those present.” On 5 August, Mao wrote a 205-word big-character poster entitled “Bombarding the Headquarters,” accusing “certain central and regional leader-comrades” (implicitly Liu Shaoqi and those under his leadership) of exercising a bourgeois dictatorship, practicing white terror, and suppressing the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Two days later, Mao’s poster was circulated among the delegates. On 8 August, after the “Sixteen Articles” was passed, Lin Biao made a long speech during his meeting with the CCRSG, highlighting the significance of Mao’s attack on what was soon to be known as the “bourgeois headquarters headed by Liu Shaoqi”: “Chairman Mao is the supreme commander of this Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao has turned the situation around; otherwise, the Cultural Revolution would have been stillborn or interrupted. The bourgeoisie would have gained the upper hand, and we would have been defeated.”
On 12 August, at Mao’s suggestion, the Central Committee voted to reshuffle the Politburo and its standing committee. The members of the reorganized standing committee were listed in the following order: Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Tao Zhu, Chen Boda, Deng Xiaoping, Kang Sheng, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Li Fuchun, and Chen Yun. Liu Shaoqi dropped from the original number two position to number eight. Chen Boda and Kang Sheng, both key members of the CCRSG, were promoted to the standing committee and given prominent positions. The plenum did not re-elect chairman and vice-chairmen. But from this point on, Lin Biao alone was referred to as vice-chairman of the CCP, while Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Chen Yun were never mentioned again in association with that title. With these readjustments, the comparatively more pragmatic and moderate “first line” of leadership established in the early 1960s to take charge of daily affairs of the party and the state was virtually eliminated, and Mao’s power in the CC consolidated. And, partially repeating the words of Lin Biao’s speech at the Tenth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (24–27 September 1962), the “Communiqué of the Eleventh Plenum” included a statement about the supreme status of Mao and his ideas. This quotation signals the official sanction of the personality cult and the hegemony of Mao Zedong Thought.
ELIMINATING THE OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL PRESIDENT (bushe guojia zhuxi). On several occasions between March and August 1970, Mao Zedong proposed that the office of president of state be eliminated. Mao also made it clear that he himself did not want to be president. The majority of the Politburo and of the CCP Central Committee (CC), including Lin Biao, on the other hand, considered it appropriate for a state to have a president and insisted that Mao serve in that position. After the September 13 Incident of 1971, however, the proposal to install a national president was attributed to Lin Biao alone, and Mao called the proposal the “political program” in Lin’s plan to seize power.
Mao expressed for the first time his wish to eliminate the position of the state president on 7 March 1970, after the issue was raised by Zhou Enlai concerning the revision of the PRC Constitution. “Don’t write the chapter on president of state in the Constitution,” Mao said to his security chief Wang Dongxing. “And I’m not to serve as president, either.” Most members of the Politburo and of the CC took Mao’s words as a directive and did not differ until 12 April when the Politburo met to discuss Lin Biao’s suggestion that Mao be president of state as people desired, that the office of vice-president was not significant, and that Lin himself was not fit even for the position of vice-president. At the meeting, the majority of the Politburo, including Zhou Enlai, supported Lin’s view. In late April, and again in mid-June, Mao repeated his negative stand on the issue and pointed out that having a president of state was a formality. Mao had the support of the majority for the second time on 18 July at a Constitution revision meeting.
On 22 August 1970, the Standing Committee of the Politburo met at Lushan to discuss the agenda of the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee. Except Mao, who adhered to his earlier views, all other members were of the opinion that there should be a national president and that Mao should serve. Considering the possibility of Mao’s indifference to the ceremonial routine of foreign affairs, Zhou Enlai suggested that a president could authorize others to represent him or her on these occasions. On 23 August, at the opening session of the plenum, Lin Biao made a concession in his opening speech by using the term “head of the proletarian dictatorship” in place of “president of state.” Kang Sheng, who spoke after Lin, still insisted that all supported Mao as president. Two days later, however, Mao’s angry words, “Never mention again the question of state presidency. If you want me to die soon, then make me president,” finally silenced all the voices in support of installing a national president.
In official history, the opposition to Mao’s proposal to eliminate the state presidency was mainly due to Lin Biao’s desire to be president. This conclusion is now broadly challenged by historians. The only “evidence” of Lin’s wish has been Wu Faxian’s confession that Ye Qun wanted Lin Biao to be president, but there was no other witness to Ye Qun’s saying these words. On the other hand, there was much circumstantial evidence from Lin’s subordinates that Lin, for a variety of reasons, might not want to serve as president at all. It is also significant, as some historians noted, that Lin Biao fled the country and was killed in a plane crash two to three weeks after Mao commented on the proposal to install the office of the national president as a “political program” for usurpation and made the following judgment: “Someone wanted to be president,” Mao said, “and to split the party and couldn’t wait to take power.” Much of the dispute in the beginning of the 1970s over the national presidency, like many other issues concerning Lin Biao’s alleged conspiracy to seize power, remains to be explained.
ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4–26 MAY 1966. Presided over by Liu Shaoqi but dictated by the absentee Mao Zedong with Kang Sheng as a mediating agent, this meeting signaled the official launching of the Cultural Revolution. At the second session on 16 May, the Politburo approved “The Circular of the CCP Central Committee,” also known as the “May 16 Circular,” which was drafted by Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Wang Li, and a few others, and meticulously revised by Mao before the meeting. The circular, along with the “Sixteen Articles” adopted in August 1966 at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee, was designated as a “programmatic document” that laid out guidelines for the Cultural Revolution.
Also on the agenda was the criticism of Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi, and Yang Shangkun for their alleged anti-Party activities and their “revisionist line.” The accusations led to the Politburo’s decision to suspend the four of their official duties and to investigate the apparently isolated cases as evidence of a Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique. The denunciation and dismissal of Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang was interpreted at the time as the first major victory of Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line over a bourgeois revisionist line during the Cultural Revolution.
The meeting marked a quick ascent of ultraleftist forces in the party leadership. Most key members of the soon-to-be-formed Central Cultural Revolution Small Group—Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu—had the privilege of attending this high-level meeting. The group was established to replace the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group led by Peng Zhen. The decision was announced two days after the meeting. At the initial “forum” session, Kang Sheng gave a lengthy report on Mao’s recent directives. Zhang Chunqiao and Chen Boda closely followed Kang to lead the attack on Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang, setting the tone for the rest of the meeting. Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping expressed support for Mao’s move against Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang and conducted self-criticism of their own political insensitivity. In a long and militant speech delivered at the third enlarged session on 18 May, Lin Biao accused Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang of conspiring to usurp the communist power and restore capitalism. Lin’s aggressiveness apparently inspired so much fear that all participants began to attack Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang relentlessly while criticizing themselves. On 21 May, Zhou Enlai gave a speech in support of Mao’s criticism of Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang in which Zhou expressed his wish to maintain his revolutionary integrity in his later years by following Mao closely. At an earlier group session as well as the 23 May meeting, Marshal Zhu De was attacked by a number of ranking leaders including Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, and Kang Sheng, because he, having been in semiretirement for years and out of touch with politics, was rather slow in responding both to the campaign against Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang, and to Lin Biao’s promotion of Mao Zedong Thought at the expense of Marxism-Leninism.
Some executive and personnel decisions were also made at the meeting that the Beijing party committee be reorganized with Li Xuefeng replacing Peng Zhen as first secretary, that Tao Zhu be transferred to Beijing and serve as executive secretary of the Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee, and that Ye Jianying replace Luo Ruiqing as secretary general of the Central Military Commission.
ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 25 NOVEMBER–5 DECEMBER 1973. Presided over by Wang Hongwen and remote-controlled by Mao Zedong through his liaisons Tang Wensheng and Wang Hairong, these Politburo sessions were held to criticize Premier Zhou Enlai for carrying out a “right-wing capitulationist line” in foreign affairs. Ye Jianying, who was involved in negotiations with the United States on military exchange and cooperation, was also implicated. An alternative label for them both was Zhou-Ye revisionist line. Preceded by the high-level meetings in May and June in which Zhou, following Mao’s order, criticized himself for committing “grave mistakes” in early parts of the CCP history, and followed by a series of public political campaigns, including the Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius and Water Margin Appraisal campaigns, in which Zhou was the unnamed target, the Politburo sessions in late 1973 were Mao’s most aggressive effort to humiliate and subdue the premier for his moderate and pragmatic approach to state affairs that Mao found inconsistent with his own radical policies.
The event that directly led to the Politburo sessions was Zhou’s meeting on the evening of 13 November 1973, with Henry Kissinger, the visiting U.S. secretary of state, whom Mao had received the previous day. After the farewell banquet on the evening of 13 November, Kissinger proposed another round of talks with Zhou alone on the question of Sino-U.S. military cooperation. Having no time to consult with Mao, Zhou accepted the proposal, talked with Kissinger (Tang Wensheng the interpreter on the Chinese side and Winston Lord on the U.S. side were the only other persons present), and promised to give him a response on the unresolved issues next morning—that is, after Zhou had a chance to consult with the central leadership. Having tried but failed to get in touch with Mao during the night, Zhou proposed to Kissinger the following morning that each side appoint an official to continue the dialogues on military cooperation. After Kissinger’s departure, Tang Wensheng, following Mao’s instruction, asked Zhou to approve the notes she took of Zhou’s talks with Kissinger. Then, on November 17, Mao talked to a number of officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, calling for a criticism of “revisionism” in foreign affairs.
A series of meetings followed that eventually led to the enlarged Politburo sessions in late November and early December. These sessions began with Tang Wensheng’s eight-hour report on foreign affairs and on Mao’s critical comments. In Mao’s view, Zhou was so afraid of the Soviet Union that once the Soviets invaded he would be their “puppet emperor.” Therefore, Mao speculated, Zhou opted for protection under the American nuclear umbrella. Mao’s view set the tone for the meeting. The Politburo members and others attending the meeting had to speak against the premier though most of them, as they later confessed, did so against their own will. Jiang Qing proposed, with Mao’s approval, to form a “help group” to criticize Zhou. She also said that Zhou “couldn’t wait to replace the Chairman” and that the conflict between Mao and Zhou was the “eleventh line struggle within the party,” which put Zhou in parallel with Liu Shaoqi (enemy of the ninth line struggle) and Lin Biao (the tenth). Deng Xiaoping, attending the meeting at Mao’s request as a non-member of the Politburo and, being obliged to speak, warned Zhou not to go too far because he was so close to Mao that Mao’s power was not beyond reach for him. Zhou Enlai listened, took notes, and wrote a self-denouncement.
Eventually, Mao dismissed Jiang Qing’s notion of the “eleventh line struggle” and claimed that Tang Wensheng and Wang Hairong’s report on the Zhou-Kissinger talks was misleading. After the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, the records of these sessions were destroyed upon request by Zhou Enlai’s widow Deng Yingchao and Marshall Ye Jianying. The existing official version of the event mentions Mao’s having been mislead by the Tang-Wang report in criticizing the premier but covers up the enlarged Politburo sessions of late 1973 altogether.
EVENING CHATS AT YANSHAN (yanshan yehua). A major target of criticism at the beginning stage of the Cultural Revolution, the Evening Chats at Yanshan was originally a newspaper column by Ma Nancun, which appeared in Beijing Evening from March 1961 to September 1962. Ma Nancun was the penname of Deng Tuo, writer and culture and education secretary of the CCP’s Beijing municipal committee. “Yanshan,” or Mount Yan, is a reference to Beijing’s western hills. The column pieces were also published in book form by Beijing Press with the original column title—first as a five-volume series (1961–1962) and then in one volume (1963).
As Deng Tuo writes in one of his essays, in “chatting” with his readers at evening hours, he intended to entertain them with some useful knowledge of the past and the present after their day of labor so that they may find their spare time both interesting and meaningful. Rich in history and wit, his essays address contemporary issues and criticize ills of the times. They were so popular at the time that every 30 pieces were reprinted in book form immediately after they appeared in the newspaper column, and altogether, five volumes were published in less than two years. But the popularity of his writing only made him more vulnerable when the Beijing municipal party committee, headed by Mayor Peng Zhen, became the first political target of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Not long after the historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office by Wu Han, deputy mayor of Beijing, was harshly criticized in official media, Evening Chats at Yanshan and Notes from a Three-Family Village, coauthored by Deng Tuo and two others associated with the municipal leadership of Beijing, also came under attack, especially for these authors’ critical, and sometimes satirical, comments on current politics rendered in carefully guarded language of allusions and understatement.
Since Peng Zhen was denounced at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966, the Evening Chats at Yanshan and Notes from a Three-Family Village were publicly criticized by Jiang Qing’s writing group (under the pseudonym Gao Ju) in the article “Opening Fire at the Anti-Party and Anti-Socialist Black Line” published in Liberation Army Daily on 8 May 1966. On the following day, Guangming Daily carried He Ming’s “Open Your Eyes Wide and Tell Truth from Falsehood.” On 10 May Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily and Liberation Daily published Yao Wenyuan’s article “Criticizing the ‘Three-Family Village’: the Reactionary Nature of Evening Chats at Yanshan and Notes from a Three-Family Village.” All these articles denounced the Evening Chats at Yanshan as “anti-party and anti-socialist talks of the night.” On 18 May 1966, Deng Tuo took his own life.
On 2 March 1979, the Beijing party committee, with the approval of the CCP Central Committee, rehabilitated Deng Tuo. Beijing Press reprinted the book Evening Chats at Yanshan in the same year with a foreword by Deng’s widow Ding Yilan.
EXTENDED CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP ROUTINE MEETINGS (zhongyang wenge pengtouhui). Much more than what meetings the name may suggest, these were actually executive gatherings of the de facto CCP top leadership after Chairman Mao Zedong, reacting furiously to the anti-Cultural Revolution February Adverse Current (1967), sidelined veteran vice-premiers in Zhou Enlai’s State Council (SC) and old marshals in the Central Military Commission (CMC). With the traditional, constitution-sanctioned top-level party, army, and state apparatuses—namely, the Politburo, the CMC, and the SC—already disabled after the downfall of Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Tao Zhu, and Marshal He Long, Mao’s decision was a further step in reshuffling the central leadership to make it serve his radical cause.
The first of the extended Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) routine meetings took place in spring 1967. Fifteen members served in this extended group—at least for some time—including eight of the CCRSG members Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Li, Guan Feng, Qi Benyu, plus Zhou Enlai, Xie Fuzhi, Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Wang Dongxing, Ye Qun, and Wen Yucheng. Premier Zhou Enlai acted as head of the group. Mao’s move to establish this group as de facto leading body of the CCP was a landmark victory of the ultra-leftist faction led by Jiang Qing; it virtually canceled the operation of the ad hoc “Politburo Standing Committee routine meetings” and put the “extended CCRSG routine meetings,” dominated by the cultural revolutionaries, in their place. The move also helped strengthen Lin Biao’s power in the central leadership since three of his close followers—Generals Huang Yongsheng and Wu Faxian and Lin’s wife Ye Qun—were included in the group. But it was a major setback for Zhou Enlai’s effort to prevent the CCRSG from interfering with the state and military affairs of the SC and CMC. As the only one left of the “old government,” Zhou had to renegotiate his position in this new power circle dominated by cultural revolutionaries and manage state affairs with more caution and more compromise in one of the most difficult periods in his political career.
From then on, the extended CCRSG routine meetings were virtually the highest “cabinet” meetings at which the most important party and state affairs were discussed. These meetings continued to be held from time to time until the dissolution of the CCRSG itself and the establishment of the new party apparatus in April 1969 at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP, at which all CCRSG members (except Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu, who had been ousted in August 1967 and January 1968) and all of the three Lin associates in the group became members of the new Politburo.
FEBRUARY 12 PUBLIC NOTICE CONCERNING NATIONAL MASS ORGANIZATIONS (1967). Coded zhongfa [67] 47, this is a public announcement jointly issued by the CCP Central Committee (CC) and the State Council (SC) to delegitimize and disband all national mass organizations. The document begins with the perception of the CC and the SC that all mass organizations at the national level (not necessarily in school or work units or at the city or provincial level) were nondemocratic and that some were even put together by reactionary elements of the Black Five Categories. The CC and the SC therefore ordered that no national mass organization be recognized, that all existing ones be disbanded, that all public funds in the possession of these organizations be returned, and that members of these organizations report to agencies of public security in case of counterrevolutionary activities. On 15 February, the PLA Military Control Commission at the Beijing Bureau of Public Security pronounced three national organizations, including the National Red Workers Rebel Corps, reactionary and six others illegal. Leaders of the first three organizations were arrested. From this point on until the end of the Cultural Revolution, no national mass organization appeared again anywhere in China.
FEBRUARY 23 INCIDENT (1967). Also known as the Zhao Yongfu Incident, this term refers to the violent clash between a mass organization and armed troops on 23 February 1967, in Xining, the capital city of Qinghai Province. Zhao Yongfu was deputy commander of the PLA Qinghai provincial military district. He also served as deputy director of the coordination office set up at the order of Beijing to lead the troops in supporting the left. Following a directive from Beijing authorizing the military control of newspapers and radio stations, the coordination office sent troops to take over the provincial newspaper Qinghai Daily from the hands of a mass organization called the Xining August 18 Red Guard Battalion. After the Red Guards forced the PLA out, the coordination office decided to take the newspaper office building by force. Zhao Yongfu was entrusted with the command of the operation. On 23 February, as the armed troops moved in, a violent encounter took place between them and the civilians, who were not armed. The fighting ended with 169 civilians and four soldiers dead and 178 civilians and 46 military men injured.
The role of the central leadership in this operation is still shrouded in mystery. According to Zhao Yongfu, he telephoned the office of Lin Biao for instructions ahead of the military operation, and Lin’s office expressed support. According to Wang Li’s recollection, Lin Biao congratulated Zhao on a successful military action but later blamed Marshal Ye Jianying (who was then in charge of daily affairs of the Central Military Commission) for the bloody incident. It is at least clear that, some time after the event, Ye Qun spoke for Lin’s office and denied any knowledge of Operation February 23, while Lin Biao and Jiang Qing began to talk about the bloody event as a local reflection of Beijing’s February Adverse Current. On 23 March, Zhou Enlai announced the decision of the central leadership that Zhao Yongfu had conducted a military coup and suppressed the masses and that he was to be taken into custody and under investigation. Two other ranking officials were also implicated. In the Ten Commands of the Central Military Commission dictated by Lin Biao and approved by Mao on April 6, Zhao Yongfu was mentioned as a “counterrevolutionary.”
After the Cultural Revolution, the CCP Central Committee and the Central Military Commission reinvestigated the Zhao Yongfu case and concluded that Zhao had made a mistake in an early stage of the Cultural Revolution in the midst of the chaos caused by Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and their followers and that Zhao’s mistake did not go beyond the “contradictions among the people.” For punishment, Zhao was dismissed from all his posts but his administrative rank was to remain intact.
FEBRUARY ADVERSE CURRENT (1967). This phrase refers to the eruption of anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment by a number of marshals and vice-premiers at two top-level meetings in January and February 1967. The veteran leaders’ protest concerned what they perceived as three major problems of the Cultural Revolution: the persecution of the veteran cadres, the elimination of party leadership, and the evolving chaos in the army. The subsequent campaign, known as the “Retaliation against the February Adverse Current” that took place from late February to the end of April 1967, virtually disabled the CCP’s highest decision-making body the Politburo without due process and left the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) with power beyond the law.
The old government officials and military leaders let their opposition be felt on two occasions, known as the “two great disturbances”: the Central Military Commission (CMC) meeting on 19–20 January 1967 and the CCP Central Committee (CC) briefing sessions on 11 and 16 February. On the first occasion, members of the CMC and the leaders of all military regions met at Jingxi Guesthouse in Beijing to discuss how the Cultural Revolution should be carried out in the army. Chen Boda and Jiang Qing, of the CCRSG, who were invited to the meeting, insisted that the “great democracy” be enforced in the armed forces, as it was everywhere else, while marshals Ye Jianying, Xu Xiangqian, and Nie Rongzhen strongly opposed the idea on the grounds of national security and stability. At the meeting, Chen and Jiang also attacked Xiao Hua, director of the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), accusing him of belittling the CCRSG in the matters of the Cultural Revolution. They demanded that Xiao Hua appear at a mass rally of a hundred thousand to conduct self-criticism. Upon Ye Jianying’s timely report after the meeting, Mao’s office advised Xiao Hua to ignore Chen and Jiang. The marshals and generals were encouraged by Mao’s support for Xiao. As the meeting reconvened the next day, they vented their rage, excoriating the CCRSG for persecuting army officers and inciting the rebels against the armed forces. Ye Jianying pounded the table so hard as he spoke that he fractured the bone in his right hand.
The second “great disturbance” took place at Huairen Hall in the Zhongnanhai compound where veteran leaders in charge of the daily affairs of the Party, the government, and the army met members of the CCRSG at briefing sessions chaired by Premier Zhou Enlai. At the meeting on the afternoon of 11 February, Marshal Ye Jianying reproached Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, and Zhang Chunqiao for turning the party, the government, factories, and farms upside down and for wanting now to stir up the military. He also asked them what they really had in mind when they seized power in Shanghai and adopted the name “Shanghai People’s Commune” without putting such important affairs of state through proper procedures of discussion at the Politburo. Marshal Xu Xiangqian slapped the table in anger and asked if their uprooting the army was aimed to take away the army’s proper role as the main support of the proletarian dictatorship. On 16 February, as the briefing session reconvened, Vice-Premier Tan Zhenlin confronted Zhang Chunqiao at the door, asking him why Chen Pixian, the former first secretary of the Shanghai party committee, was not in Beijing, since Chen, at Zhou Enlai’s suggestion and with Mao Zedong’s approval, was supposed to come to Beijing and be shielded from the abuses of the Red Guards.
At the meeting, Tan once again raised the Chen Pixian question. Joined by other vice-premiers, including Chen Yi, Yu Qiuli, and Li Xiannian, Tan reproached Zhang Chunqiao and other members of the CCRSG for aiming to get rid of all veteran cadres and eliminate party leadership. Tan called the Cultural Revolution the cruelest instance of struggle in party history, while Chen Yi named it the biggest bi-gong-xin (conviction by forced confession) in all of Chinese history. Recalling the CCP rectification movement in Yan’an in the 1940s to make his criticism of China’s current situation suggestive and prophetic, Chen Yi pointed out that the top-ranking leaders who were being denounced, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, had previously been among Mao’s closest supporters. As Li Xiannian blamed an editorial in the party organ Red Flag for initiating attacks on veteran cadres, Zhou Enlai showed his alliance with the veterans with a question to Kang Sheng: “Such an important matter, why didn’t you let us read about it first?” Xie Fuzhi, vice-premier and minister of public security, on the other hand, time and again sided with members of the CCRSG.
Immediately after the meeting, on the night of 16 February, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Li prepared the minutes of the briefing sessions. Jiang Qing arranged to have the sessions reported to Mao on 17 February before Zhou Enlai had a chance to see Mao. In the meantime, Chen Yi continued to criticize certain measures of the Cultural Revolution in a long speech addressed to students on the evening of 16 February, while Tan Zhenlin wrote Lin Biao a letter on 17 February, denouncing the ultraleftists of the CCRSG in the strongest possible language: “They are completely ruthless; one word and a person’s political life is done. . . . Our party is smeared beyond recognition.” Without mentioning her name, Tan spoke of Jiang Qing as “more of a terror than Wu Zetian” (Empress of the Tang Dynasty, who reigned 685–705). Lin Biao passed the letter to Mao with a comment that Tan’s thinking had unexpectedly deteriorated into confusion.
Mao’s immediate reaction to the news of the briefing sessions was fury. On the night of 18 February, Mao convened part of the Politburo to a meeting, during which he sharply criticized the marshals and vice-premiers. He considered the target of their protest to be himself and accused them of siding with the “black headquarters” of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and attempting to reverse the verdicts. Mao also ordered Tan Zhenlin, Chen Yi, and Xu Xiangqian to be on leave to conduct self-criticism. From 25 February to 18 March, seven party cell meetings were held in Huairen Hall to criticize Tan, Chen and others. At these meetings, members of the CCRSG accused the veteran leaders of creating a February Adverse Current to oppose Mao’s Cultural Revolution policies and protect a handful of capitalist-roaders. Kang Sheng called the Huairen Hall “disturbance” “a rehearsal for a kind of coup d’état, a rehearsal for a capitalist revival.” In the meantime, the CCRSG began to spread the news out of the Zhongnanhai compound and initiate a nationwide mass movement to criticize the February Adverse Current and to bring down the marshals and vice-premiers.
Mao, on the other hand, did not want the condemnation of the veterans to go that far. On 30 April, Mao invited the veterans to his home for a “gathering for unity” and allowed them to watch fireworks from Tiananmen on 1 May, the International Labor Day. As these old cadres’ names were listed in all the newspapers on May Day indicating Mao’s judgment, Jiang Qing and her supporters in the CCRSG had to halt for the moment their Retaliation Against the February Adverse Current campaign. They raised the issue again in October 1968 at the Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee and in April 1969 at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP, but, without much encouragement from Mao, they could not carry the issue further. After Lin Biao’s downfall in September 1971, Mao essentially reversed his critical attitude and spoke of the “great disturbance at Huairen Hall” as an act against Lin Biao, Chen Boda, and Wang-Guan-Qi (the alleged Anti-Party Clique). He suggested that the February Adverse Current not be mentioned again.
In early 1979, the CCP Central Committee redressed the February Adverse Current case. Since then the reactionary-sounding referent has often been rephrased in official media as a “February resistance” to indicate the righteousness in the veteran leaders’ clashes with the ultraleftist forces within the CCP during the Cultural Revolution.
FEBRUARY MUTINY. This was a rumor used by Kang Sheng in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution to persecute Peng Zhen and He Long. In February 1966, as directed by the Central Military Commission, the Beijing Military Region began organizing a regiment in its Garrison Command to train militia and maintain security, but a suitable barracks was not immediately available. Since some college students were in the countryside participating in the Socialist Education Movement at the time, the Garrison Command at first negotiated with Peking University and the People’s University about the possibility of quartering the troops temporarily in student dormitories but then decided to give up the idea and seek shelter elsewhere. By July 1966, Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing, was already denounced as a “black gang” member and an “anti-Party element.” Some students at Peking University, in an information-exchange and brainstorming session, recalled the negotiation and began to speculate on a possible connection between the housing issue raised in February and the February Outline that Peng Zhen had helped to produce. Pure speculation soon led to the writing of a big-character poster titled “The Mind-Boggling February Mutiny” in which the dormitory negotiation was assumed to be preparation for a coup by Peng Zhen and Deputy Mayor Liu Ren.
Speaking at a mass rally at Beijing Normal University on 27 July, Kang Sheng charged Peng Zhen and other leaders of the Beijing party committee with plotting a coup. In September 1966, Kang began to incriminate Marshal He Long with sensational details about the so-called February Mutiny: that He Long mustered troops and built fortresses in Beijing suburbs, that people at the National Sports Commission led by He Long were equipped with guns, and that cannons were set in Shichahai Park and were aimed at the Zhongnanhai compound. In the capacity of adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, Kang Sheng’s charges were widely believed to have been based on credible evidence. On 29 June 1974, the CCP Central Committee (CC) issued a formal notice rehabilitating He Long which dismisses the February Mutiny as pure rumor. But Kang Sheng’s role in this notorious persecution case was not mentioned until 1980 when the CC formally concluded the investigation of the February Mutiny case, denouncing Kang Sheng for his use of rumor to bring down Peng Zhen and He Long.
FEBRUARY OUTLINE (1966). Officially titled “Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group’s Outline Report Concerning the Current Academic Discussion,” this CCP document was issued to party organizations nationwide on 12 February 1966 as a guideline for the ongoing political criticism of literary and academic writing. The Politburo’s condemnation of this document three months later marked the official beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
Since Yao Wenyuan’s critique of Wu Han’s historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was first carried in Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily on 10 November 1965, the fire of political criticism had been spreading rapidly across China. Criticism was getting more militant and threatened to implicate more well-known authors. In the meantime, Mao Zedong’s comment that the “vital area” of Wu’s play is dismissal and that Peng Dehuai (a minister of defense dismissed in 1959) is also Hai Rui oriented the movement toward current politics. To provide guidance for the ongoing political movement, Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing and head of the Five-Person Group, convened an enlarged meeting of the group on 3 February 1966. The ideas discussed at the meeting were summarized by deputy directors of the CCP Propaganda Department Xu Liqun and Yao Zhen in the form of an outline report.
The outline was approved by the Politburo Standing Committee on 5 February and by Mao on 8 February. It was issued as an official document on 12 February. The outline affirms the criticism of Wu Han and the discussion and debate such criticism inspired. It defines the current debate as a great struggle of the proletariat against bourgeois ideas in ideological and academic spheres. On the other hand, it seems also to try to retain as much liberal attitude as circumstances permit. It demands that academic discussions “follow the principles of seeking the truth and of everyone being equal in front of the truth, convince others with reason, and not intimidate others with the arbitrariness and the authority of a scholar-tyrant.” The outline also advises caution in criticizing a person by name in a newspaper or magazine.
In late March, Mao, contradicting his initial support for the February Outline, called it erroneous and criticized the Five-Person Group, the CCP Propaganda Department, and the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee. At the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966, Peng Zhen was branded head of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique largely due to his attempt to limit the issues of a cultural revolution to literary and academic matters. The May 16 Circular, approved at the meeting and considered to be one of the programmatic documents of the Cultural Revolution, was essentially an item-by-item refutation of the February Outline. See also MAY 16 CIRCULAR.
FIRST MARXIST-LENINIST BIG-CHARACTER POSTER. This was a common reference to the big-character poster “What Are Song Shuo, Lu Ping, and Peng Peiyun Really Doing during the Cultural Revolution?” by seven faculty members of the Department of Philosophy at Peking University: Nie Yuanzi, Song Yixiu, Xia Jianzhi, Yang Keming, Zhao Zhengyi, Gao Yunpeng, and Li Xingchen. Most of the coauthors participated in the discussion and revision of the first, second, and third draft versions of the poster, which were written, respectively, by Zhao, Song, and Yang, but, because of Nie’s position as party secretary of the department and a senior faculty member, her signature tops the others’ on the final version that was mounted on the wall of a school dining hall on 25 May 1966. Having this particular poster broadcast nationwide on 1 June was one of the most decisive moves Chairman Mao Zedong made to mobilize the masses and stir up the nation for the Cultural Revolution. The poster became known as the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster” when Mao called it such in early August in his “Bombarding the Headquarters—My Own Big-Character Poster.”
The poster accuses Song Shuo, deputy director of the university department of the Beijing municipal party committee, Lu Ping, president of Peking University, and Peng Peiyun, deputy-party secretary of the university, of conspiring with the Beijing municipal committee in an attempt to suppress the revolutionary activities of the faculty, staff and students in the name of “strengthening the leadership” and contain the ongoing Cultural Revolution on campus in a theoretical and academic discussion. Their actions were, according to the authors, revisionist and counterrevolutionary.
Despite its high-flown political rhetoric, the poster had much to do with an internal political conflict during the Socialist Education Movement between Nie and her colleagues, on the one hand, and Lu Ping and the university party committee, on the other: in 1964, Nie and her colleagues had accused Lu and his party committee of carrying out a bourgeois line but eventually lost the political battle after the Beijing municipal party committee led by Peng Zhen stepped in to support Lu, discounting the accusations by Nie and her colleagues. To assist Lu, the municipal committee appointed Song Shuo a leading member of the Peking University Socialist Education Movement work team and made Peng Peiyun a deputy party secretary of the university. The new political movement now provided an opportunity for the comeback of Nie and her colleagues. They wrote the poster also with the knowledge of the downfall of Peng Zhen, along with the entire Beijing municipal committee, at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966. Furthermore, according to Nie, as they were drafting the poster, they gained moral support from Cao Yi’ou, wife of Kang Sheng and head of an investigation group sent to Peking University by Kang on 14 May 1966.
Since more than a thousand big-character posters that appeared on campus shortly after the poster of the Nie group demonstrated more opposition than support, Yang Kerning sought help from Cao Yi’ou. Eventually, on 1 June, a copy of the poster reached Mao via Kang Sheng, and Mao’s reaction was swift and positive. Closely following Mao’s directive, the Central People’s Radio broadcast the poster at 8:30 p.m., and, on the following day, the People’s Daily published the entire text of the poster under the banner headline “Seven Comrades at Peking University Uncover Secret Plot.” The paper also carried a commentary entitled “Hail the Big-Character Poster at Peking University.” The unprecedented publicity for a short big-character poster ignited the fire of a mass movement, especially on school campuses, across China that challenged the CCP leadership at various levels. At the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (1–12 August 1966), Mao called the poster the “declaration of the Paris Commune of the 1960s—Beijing Commune” and the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in China,” which sent another shock wave across the country, and this time the challenge was aimed squarely at what Mao called the “bourgeois headquarters”—soon to be revealed as President Liu Shaoqi and his supporters in the party leadership.
[FIVE] “571 PROJECT” SUMMARY (“571 gongcheng” jiyao). With “571” (pronounced “wu-qi-yi” in Chinese) homonymically suggestive of “armed uprising” (wuzhuang qiyi), this is allegedly a plan for an armed coup devised in March 1971 in Shanghai by Lin Liguo, son of Lin Biao, and some young People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers close to him, including Yu Xinye, who was said to have drafted the Summary, Zhou Yuchi, and Li Weixin. The document was reportedly discovered after the September 13 Incident in a red notebook left by Lin Liguo and his associates at a secret depot at an air force academy in Beijing. On 14 November 1971, the CCP Central Committee issued nationwide a document that includes the 571 Project Summary as evidence of the alleged armed coup by Lin Biao and his supporters, though no evidence was given concerning Lin Biao’s involvement in the making of the Summary.
The nine-part Summary claims that a power struggle is going on and that the other side (the Jiang Qing group) is planning to replace Lin Biao with someone else as Mao Zedong’s successor. Mao, referred to by the code name “B-52” in the Summary, is perceived as no longer trusting Lin Biao and his supporters in the army; as a result, the power struggle is “going in a direction that will benefit those working with pens but not those holding guns.” Therefore, rather than waiting to be eliminated, “we”—that is, Lin Biao and his associates—shall launch a “violent revolution,” starting with a military action followed by political control, to stop the current “counterrevolution in the manner of peaceful evolution.” For this purpose, the alleged designers of the Summary prefer to “round up all the high-ranking cadres while they are at a meeting” and force Mao to give up power, but “poison gas, bacterial weapons, bombing, 543 [a missile], car accident, assassination, kidnapping, and urban guerrilla troops” may also be employed if necessary.
Aside from details concerning the armed coup, the Summary contains a series of diagnoses of China’s current political situation that actually articulated the widespread, and yet very much self-censored, discontents of the nation. Among such diagnoses are “the core ruling clique is very unstable in their infighting among themselves for power and profits,” “peasants lack food and clothing,” “‘educated youths’ going up to the mountains and down to the countryside is virtually forced labor in disguise,” “Red Guards were deceived and used as cannon fodder at the outset (of the Cultural Revolution) and were later put down as scapegoats,” “cadres’ going to May 7 Cadre Schools is virtually job loss in disguise,” and “the freezing of workers’ wages is nothing but exploitation.”
The Summary was also known for its sharp criticism of Mao. According to the Summary, Mao is not a real Marxist-Leninist; rather, he has abused the trust of the Chinese people and become the “Qinshihuang (First Emperor of Qin, known for his despotism) of modern China.” The Summary dismisses Chinese socialism as fascism and Mao as a paranoid, a sadistic persecutor, and the “biggest feudal tyrant in Chinese history.”
Ironically, when the Summary was distributed nationwide in late 1971 as evidence of Lin Biao’s crimes, many readers, though horrified and disgusted by the alleged coup, nevertheless found its criticism of Mao and the Cultural Revolution to be an echo of their own judgment. Many considered the downfall of Lin Biao and the release of the 571 Project Summary to be the beginning of their disillusionment about Chinese politics and of their consciously critical judgment of the Cultural Revolution.
“FIVE OLD PIECES”. This was a common reference to the five most popular works of Mao Zedong endorsed by the central leadership as core material for political studies during the Cultural Revolution. As an expansion of the “Three Old Pieces” (“The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” and “Serve the People”), already popular before the Cultural Revolution, the “Five Old Pieces” included two more essays: “On Rectifying Wrong Ideas in the Party” (1929) and “Oppose Liberalism” (1939).
FIVE-PERSON CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP (wenhua geming wuren xiaozu). This group was formed in early July 1964 to lead a rectification movement in literature and art circles, which turned out to be an immediate prelude of the Cultural Revolution. On 12 December 1963, and again, on 27 June 1964, Mao Zedong harshly criticized the CCP leaders in literature and art circles for deviating from socialist principles and promoting what he considered to be feudalist and bourgeois art. In his judgment, the CCP leadership in this area had been off course from the correct party policies since 1949. Based on Mao’s criticism and at Mao’s proposal, the CCP Central Committee (CC) decided to conduct rectification in literature and art circles and set up a five-person group to lead the movement. The group consisted of Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Kang Sheng, Zhou Yang, and Wu Lengxi. Peng, mayor and first party secretary of Beijing, was appointed head of the group, while Lu, director of the propaganda department of the CC and a vice-premier of the State Council, served as deputy head. After Yao Wenyuan published “On the New Historical Drama Hairui Dismissed from Office” in Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily in November 1965 attacking Wu Han, a renowned historian and a deputy mayor of Beijing, Peng ordered Beijing’s newspapers not to reprint Yao’s article, without knowing Mao’s full support for Yao.
In February 1966, as the criticism of Wu Han continued, the five-person group submitted to the CC a policy guideline entitled Outline Report Concerning the Current Academic Discussion, also known as February Outline. Initiated largely by Peng Zhen, the document attempted to confine the criticism of Wu and a few other writers and scholars to the realm of academia and prevent it from becoming a high-pitched political condemnation campaign. With Mao’s approval, the CC quickly distributed the document nationwide. In late March, however, Mao began to criticize the February Outline and accused the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group of suppressing the Left and protecting the Right. At the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4–26 May 1966, the central leadership announced decisions to revoke the February Outline, to dissolve the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group, and to form a new Central Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Politburo. And with the passage of the May 16 Circular as a critique of the February Outline, the Cultural Revolution was officially launched.
FOUR CLEANS (1962–1966). See SOCIALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENT.
FOUR FELLOWS (si tiao hanzi). The modern Chinese writer Lu Xun coined this pejorative term to refer to Tian Han, Zhou Yang, Xia Yan, and Yang Hansheng in one of his polemics written in 1936. The “Four Fellows” was used again during the Cultural Revolution and publicized much more broadly by the critics of the four persons—all of them now holding important positions in literary and artistic circles: Zhou was a deputy minister of culture and a deputy head of the CCP Propaganda Department; Tian, president of the China Federation of Literature and Art Circles and president and party secretary of the Association of Chinese Dramatists; Xia, a deputy minister of culture (until 1965) and president of the Association of Chinese Film Artists; and Yang, party secretary of the China Federation of Literature and Art Circles. With Lu Xun’s harsh remark already a liability, the four writers and officials were accused of having carried out a “black line” in the area of literature and art against Mao Zedong’s revolutionary policies since 1949, and they were among the first to fall from power during the Cultural Revolution.
FOUR GREATS (sige weida). This is a reference to Chairman Mao Zedong’s honorific title “great teacher, great leader, great commander, and great helmsman.” In a speech delivered at the mass rally of 18 August 1966, Chen Boda called Mao “the great leader, the great teacher, and the great helmsman.” At the same event, Lin Biao spoke of Mao as the “great commander” of the Cultural Revolution. Lin used the four phrases together for the first time in a public speech on 31 August 1966. Lin’s handwritten slogan “Long live great teacher, great leader, great commander, and great helmsman Chairman Mao” turned out to be a most widely printed piece of calligraphy during the Cultural Revolution.
FOUR NEVER-FORGETS. This is a common reference to “Never forget class struggle, never forget proletarian dictatorship, never forget stressing politics, and never forget holding high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought,” one of the most popular political slogans used at mass rallies and struggle meetings during the Cultural Revolution. See also LIN BIAO–MAY 18 SPEECH.
FOUR OLDS (sijiu). A short form for “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.” See DESTROY THE FOUR OLDS.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CLIQUE. Labeled by the government as counterrevolutionary, this was a reading group active in the first half of the 1970s. The leader of the group was Xu Xiao, an educated youth from Beijing. Xu was inspired by her older friend Zhao Yifan’s book-reading salon and organized a correspondent group of some 20 young workers and PLA soldiers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shanxi Province in the early 1970s. The members of the group shared volumes from two internally published book series known as grey books and yellow books. They wrote to one another describing what they learned from the books and discussed current politics in their letters without knowing that their correspondence was being monitored by government censors. All members of the group were arrested and imprisoned in late 1975 on the charges of circulating items of counterrevolutionary literature, exchanging ideas against CCP leaders, and opposing the campaign to criticize Lin and criticize Confucius. The label “Fourth International” by which the government named the group was based on an accusation that Xu Xiao and Zhao Yifan attempted to organize a group to initiate a new stage of the international communist movement. The members of the “Fourth International Counterrevolutionary Clique” were rehabilitated in 1978.
FOURTH NATIONAL PEOPLE’S CONGRESS (13–17 January 1975). The only National People’s Congress held during the Cultural Revolution, the meeting opened in Beijing shortly after the Second Plenum of the Tenth CCP Central Committee presided over by Premier Zhou Enlai in which Deng Xiaoping was elected vice-chairman of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo Standing Committee. Three days before the plenum, Deng was also appointed vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In his “Report on Government Work” delivered at the Fourth National People’s Congress, Zhou reaffirmed the economic blueprint approved by the pre-Cultural Revolution Third National People’s Congress (21 December 1964–4 January 1965) for accomplishing “four modernizations” (the modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology) to make China a strong socialist country by the end of the 20th century. With strong support from Zhou (who was then suffering from cancer and ready to transfer his responsibilities to Deng) and the approval of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Fourth Congress appointed Deng Xiaoping first premier of the State Council. The stage was set for Deng’s 1975 “overall rectification.”
On the political and ideological front, however, the Fourth Congress upheld Mao’s radical policies. Both Zhou Enlai’s speech and Zhang Chunqiao’s “Report on Revising the Constitution” affirmed the party’s “basic line (of class existence and class struggle) for the entire socialist period” and Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In defining the revolutionary committee at a local level as both the permanent organ of the local People’s Congress and the local government body, the revised constitution sanctified the power structure established during the Cultural Revolution and granted it both legislative and administrative authority. The 1975 constitution also became the first one to rule officially that the power of a political party was superior to that of the state: following Mao’s suggestion, it abolished the office of the president of the nation; it stipulated that the National People’s Congress was the highest institution of power under the leadership of the CCP and that the chairman of the CCP was also commander-in-chief of all the armed forces. With nonparty members constituting only 23.2% of all delegates attending the Fourth Congress, the lowest nonparty representation of any congress in the PRC history, and with the so-called “democratic consultation” rather than grassroots election as the way of selecting congressional delegates, the people’s congress became a euphemism for party dominance.
FU CHONGBI (1916–2003). Named commanding officer of the Beijing Garrison Command in 1966, General Fu was persecuted by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing in 1968 as a member of the so-called Yang-Yu-Fu Anti-Party Clique. Born in Tongjiang, Sichuan Province, Fu joined the Red Army in 1932 and became a member of the CCP in the following year. Due to his outstanding military service, Fu was named major general in 1955 and became commander of 10th Brigade of the North-China Military Region and then commander of the People’s Liberation Army 19th Division. In addition to the position of deputy commander of the Beijing Military Region that he had held since 1965, Fu was made commanding officer of the Beijing Garrison Command in 1966. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution when Mao-supported cultural revolutionaries in the central leadership called upon mass organizations to attack a great number of senior party and military officials, Fu Chongbi, in the capacity of the Beijing Garrison Commander, followed instructions from Premier Zhou Enlai and provided certain protection for some senior officials to the displeasure of Jiang Qing and her followers in the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG).
In March 1968, when Lin Biao sought support from the Jiang Qing group for the removal of Generals Yang Chengwu and Yu Lijin, Jiang asked Lin to dismiss Fu as well. As a result of this political, bargain, Lin, with the approval of Mao Zedong, named the three generals a Yang-Yu-Fu Anti-Party Clique in March 1968. The charge against Fu was that he led solders to storm the office of the CCRSG, while the truth was that Fu and three military officers were there for official business with the permission of the CCRSG. Nevertheless, Fu was arrested on this blatantly false charge and was imprisoned for more than six years. After the downfall of Lin Biao and his associates in the army in September 1971, Mao began to seek support from other military factions. He acknowledged some of his mistakes in December 1973, and the CCP Central Committee (CC) dismissed the charges against Yang, Yu, and Fu in July 1974. Fu was reappointed as deputy commander of the Beijing Military Region in 1975 and commanding officer of the Beijing Garrison Command in 1977. In March 1979, the CC officially rehabilitated the case of the Yang-Yu-Fu Affair by publicizing its 1974 decision for the first time. Fu died on 17 January 2003.
FU LEI (1908–1966). A native of Shanghai, Fu Lei read Chinese classics at an early age and was trained in literature and the arts in Paris in his early twenties. Starting his career as a translator of foreign—mostly French—literature in the 1930s, Fu put into Chinese major novels by Honoré de Balzac and Romain Rolland and tales of Voltaire. His translated works totaling five million words, Fu Lei was one of the few prolific, refined, and truly great translators in China. He was also a highly respected literary and art critic and a fine letter-writer in his own right. In 1957, Fu was denounced as a Rightist during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. In the summer of 1966 when the Cultural Revolution broke out, Fu’s house was ransacked by the Red Guards. He and his wife Zhu Meifu became targets of the revolution, subject to public humiliation and physical abuse. In the early hours of 3 September 1966, Fu Lei and Zhu Meifu hanged themselves at home to protest the humiliation and torture they suffered at struggle meetings. On 26 April 1979, the Shanghai literature and art circles held a memorial service for Fu and Zhu. At the memorial service, an official announcement was made that naming Fu Lei as a Rightist in 1957 was a mistake and that all accusations against him in 1966 were groundless.