As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the heyday as well as the eventual bankruptcy of Chairman Mao Zedong’s ultraleftist politics. Purportedly to prevent China from departing from its socialist path, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he considered to be the bourgeoisie within the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This 10-year-long class struggle on a massive scale caused unprecedented damage to traditional culture and to the nation’s economy. To a great extent, it was the disaster of the Cultural Revolution that prompted post-Mao Chinese Communist leaders, ahead of their Soviet counterparts, to implement pragmatic economic reforms. Major policies that the post-Mao government has adopted, even today, may still be best understood as a reaction to the radical politics of the Cultural Revolution.
The revolution was cultural because Mao conceived of it in Marxist terms as a thoroughgoing revolution in ideological spheres and at superstructural levels. It aimed to eradicate old culture and customs and to educate the masses through a series of political campaigns. Knowledge in general was also under attack because it was permeated by nonproletarian culture. Mao considered a populace with revolutionized consciousness to be the best defense against the country’s power takeover by the bourgeoisie. Mao’s formulation of cultural determinism against the original Marxist emphasis on economic base structure as the essential determining factor in a social transformation was hailed during the Cultural Revolution as a great contribution to Marxism. Although Mao’s program achieved considerable success in destroying much of traditional culture, the Cultural Revolution also brought about a revival of China’s feudal and imperial past in the widespread personality cult of Mao and the deification of the leader, so much so that religious fervor often passed as revolutionary enthusiasm, especially in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was political as well since the main task of this movement was to purge “those power holders in the party who take the capitalist road” (also known as “capitalist-roaders”). Even though some of the leaders thus named—such as Mao’s first chosen successor President Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao had begun to consider to be his main political rival in the CCP leadership in the early 1960s—took an approach less radical than Mao’s to China’s economic development, all of them were committed communists and had never designed a program, as charged, to “restore capitalism” in China.
The Cultural Revolution had a far greater impact on the lives of ordinary people and on Chinese society in general than any other political movement in the history of the PRC. Citizens classified as being in the “Black Five Categories” were regarded as traditional enemies. They were invariably persecuted and remained downtrodden during the entire 10-year period. A large percentage of school teachers and college professors, as natural targets of a Cultural Revolution, were persecuted as “bourgeois intellectuals” during its early stages and were subject to the orders of factory workers and army soldiers sent by Mao to take control of the nation’s schools in the later years of the Cultural Revolution. A vast majority of government officials and party cadres were named capitalistroaders or followers of a bourgeois revisionist line; in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, most of them were sent to factories or labor camps called “May 7 Cadre Schools” to reform themselves through manual labor. Enthusiastic urban youths in middle schools and colleges formed Red Guard organizations and served as Mao’s crusading army against the traditional party and state establishment before they—17 million in total—were sent to the countryside to receive reeducation from local peasants. Deprived of regular school education in their formative years, most members of this Cultural Revolution generation were at a loss in the competition for employment in the post-Revolution reform era. During and after a power-seizure campaign in 1967 and 1968, factional violence among mass organizations that included people from all walks of life escalated nationwide into civil war. The armed conflict in this period resulted in substantial military and civilian casualties that still remain uncounted, except for sporadic provincial and local statistics. In the meantime, nationwide campaigns to persecute suspected class enemies continued. According to official estimates, the total number of people affected by these campaigns, including the victims and their family members, amounts to one eighth of China’s population. Due to its long-lasting, grave impact on China’s economy and national life, “ten years of chaos” has become both the official and the popular reference to the Cultural Revolution.
Although Mao did not make any concrete plans for the Cultural Revolution until the mid-1960s, some major ideas in what eventually became Mao’s Cultural Revolution theory, or theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, began to form as early as 1956. At the 20th National Congress of the Soviet Communist Party held in 1956, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev attacked his predecessor, Josef Stalin, accusing him of violating socialist legality and promoting a personality cult. The de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union was soon followed by a popular revolt in Hungary. Apparently associating himself with Stalin and considering Khrushchev’s move as a betrayal of the international communist movement, Mao became alert to the danger of a similar power takeover, betrayal, and de-Maoization within the CCP. By 1959, when Khrushchev was ready to negotiate with the United States, Mao became certain about his completely negative assessment of the Soviet situation. In the 1960s, he began to call Soviet leaders “revisionists” (that is, those deviating from the orthodox Marxist-Leninist path) and launched a series of attacks—known as the “nine commentaries” to which Mao himself also contributed—on the Soviet leadership. In his judgment, revisionist leaders, corrupted officials, and a newly emerging bureaucratic class within a country’s ruling communist party, rather than hostile forces from the outside, posed the greatest danger to the legacy of communism. Therefore, Mao writes in a passage in the “Ninth Commentary,” that Chinese communists must watch out for “careerists and conspirators” like Khrushchev and prevent them from taking over party and state leadership. At the same time, he urged his comrades in the CCP to give constant attention to the training of successors to the revolutionary cause from the highest levels down to the grassroots. Eventually, Mao came to the conclusion that a nationwide cultural revolution was necessary for the purposes of purging revisionist leaders, on the one hand, and offering political education and training for the masses, on the other. In the actual Cultural Revolution, President Liu Shaoqi was named “China’s Khrushchev” and expelled from the CCP.
On the domestic front, the Cultural Revolution was in some ways Mao’s response to the ideological differences and power conflicts between him and other veteran CCP leaders that came to the surface in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. Encouraged by the completion of collectivization in the PRC in 1956 but unhappy about the cautious economic policies that Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, and other central leaders put in place to stop the reckless “adventurism” of an unrealistic production drive, Mao decided to abandon the Soviet model of economic development and began to contemplate more radical measures for the transformation of the Chinese countryside. These measures, which materialized in the 1958 Great Leap Forward, turned out to be disastrous: 20 million farmers died in the great famine of the Three Difficult Years (1959–1961), for which the Great Leap Forward policies were largely responsible.
By then Mao had already retired to the “second front” of the central leadership, maintaining his chairmanship of the CCP, while President Liu Shaoqi, as the leader of the “first front,” implemented a series of pragmatic and liberal policies, especially in the countryside, to deal with the economic crisis. However, when the remedial measures were just beginning to yield positive results, Mao, in August 1962, criticized the “first front” leaders for reversing the party’s socialist agricultural policies and warned his colleagues “never to forget class struggle.” In early 1963, Mao launched a nationwide Socialist Education Movement and, in January 1965, designated as the major task of this movement to “purge those power holders in the party who take the capitalist road.” The middle stage of this movement—the fourth year of the projected seven years—merged with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Its focus on the struggle against “capitalist-roaders” became the focus of the Cultural Revolution as well, though the main site of the struggle shifted in 1966 from rural areas and local governments to the cities and higher levels of the CCP leadership.
In the cultural sphere, Mao began to send out signals of dissatisfaction in late 1963, and again in mid-1964, when he harshly criticized the CCP leaders in literature and art circles for deviating from socialist principles and promoting feudalist and bourgeois art. 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 Small Group” to lead the movement. Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing, was appointed head of the group. In the meantime, Mao began to assign his wife Jiang Qing an increasingly significant role in Chinese politics. In 1965, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao, both diehard cultural revolutionaries, made well-calculated moves in Shanghai to have Yao Wenyuan write a critique of Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, a play by Wu Han, a renowned historian and a deputy-mayor of Beijing. Mao read the draft version of this article three times and thought of Wu Han’s play as an implicit plea for redressing the case of Marshal Peng Dehuai, who was dismissed from office in 1959 for his criticism of the Great Leap Forward policies. The Yao article, initially carried in the 10 November 1965 issue of Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily and soon reprinted in a number of provincial newspapers, sparked a nationwide propaganda campaign against “academic authorities.” The publication of this article came to be known as the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural Revolution.
The seven-month period from November 1965, when Yao Wenyuan’s article was published and when Mao left Beijing for unknown reasons, to May 1966, when the CCP document “May 16 Circular” was adopted at an enlarged session of the CCP Politburo, is generally considered the prelude to the Cultural Revolution, during which Mao launched a major offensive against the Peng Zhen-led CCP Beijing Municipal Committee. Both Peng’s initial refusal to reprint the Yao article in Beijing newspapers and his later attempt as head of the “Five-Person Small Group” to draft a party document—to be known as the “February Outline”—to lead the campaign against Wu Han and others in the direction of an “academic discussion” were perceived by Mao as deliberate resistance to the revolution that he was launching. To clear the path for the Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered a group of cultural revolutionary theorists and writers to gather in Shanghai and draft an item-by-item rebuttal of the “February Outline.” And, for the same purpose, he managed to remove from power three veteran leaders: General Luo Ruiqing, chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA); Lu Dingyi, director of the CCP propaganda department; and Yang Shangkun, director of the general office of the CC. By spring 1966, the criticism of “academic authorities” in Beijing had evolved into a militant mass movement against the so-called Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique consisting of three veteran leaders of the Beijing Municipal Committee. By the time Mayor Peng Zhen decided to give in, it was already too late. In May 1966, an enlarged Politburo meeting was convened in Beijing at Mao’s proposal. At the meeting, Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang were denounced together as an “antiparty clique,” and the Beijing Municipal Committee was dissolved. Also at this meeting, with the passage of the “May 16 Circular” repudiating the “February Outline,” the Cultural Revolution was officially launched.
The three-year period from May 1966, when an enlarged CCP Politburo meeting was held in Beijing to purge the so-called Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique, to April 1969, when the Ninth National Congress of the CCP was convened in Beijing upon the establishment of the new power organ, the “revolutionary committee,” at local and provincial levels, may be considered the first, and major, phase of the Cultural Revolution. Sixteen May 1966 was the official beginning of the Cultural Revolution because the CC document adopted by the Politburo on that day repudiates the notion of “academic discussion” in the February Outline for denying the class identity of truth and defines the current political movement as a nationwide class struggle against the representatives of the bourgeoisie in the party and state leadership. This document came to be known as the first “programmatic document of the Cultural Revolution.” In late May 1966, the CC implemented the decision of the Politburo and formed a “Central Cultural Revolution Small Group” (CCRSG), with Chen Boda, a leading CCP theorist, as head of the group; Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing as deputy-heads; and Kang Sheng as adviser. This group, consisting mostly of ultraleftist theorists and writers, was to serve as the chief advocate of Mao’s radical policies and virtually replaced the Politburo in mid-1967.
On the evening of 1 June 1966, the Central Radio followed Mao’s directive to broadcast nationwide a big-character poster by Nie Yuanzi and six other people at Peking University attacking leaders of the University and Beijing Municipal Committee. The broadcast of the poster, along with the publication of a militant editorial entitled “Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits” in the CCP official organ People’s Daily on the same day, ignited an explosion of public energy, especially on Beijing’s middle school and college campuses, where students began to establish Red Guard organizations, and hundreds of thousands of big-character posters appeared in just a few days, charging school authorities and teachers with carrying out a revisionist and counterrevolutionary line in education. Since the “May 16 Circular” was still an internal document, 1 June 1966, then, became the actual beginning of the Cultural Revolution for the public.
To provide guidance for the explosive mass movement and to restrain rebellious youths, the CCP central leadership headed by Liu Shaoqi during Mao’s absence made the decision to dispatch work groups to schools and government institutions, and the decision was acknowledged by Mao. But, a few days after he returned to Beijing in mid-July, Mao began to criticize the work groups for carrying out a fire-containing mission and for repressing the mass movement. In early August, Mao convened the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee in Beijing. At the plenum, Mao wrote a big-character poster titled “Bombarding the Headquarters,” calling Liu and his supporters’ work group policy a measure of “bourgeois dictatorship.” Liu’s name was not mentioned, but the intent was obvious. Also at the plenum, Defense Minister Lin Biao, the chief promoter of the personality cult of Mao, was elevated to the second highest leadership position, and a radical guideline designating the purging of “capitalist-roaders” as the focus of the Cultural Revolution was adopted.
In the meantime, Mao made a decisive move to mobilize student Red Guards in his effort to topple Liu and to shake up the entire party and state apparatus, of which he had been the chief architect. With Mao’s approval, his letter of support for the Red Guards, dated 1 August 1966, in which he reiterates his own words, “To rebel is justified,” was circulated at the Eleventh Plenum. After the plenum, Mao came out eight times between 18 August and 26 November to review a total of 11 million Red Guards from all over China. Mao’s beckoning initially inspired Red Guards in a battle to eradicate vestiges of traditional culture, which led to the destruction of numerous cultural monuments and historical sites and the debasing of knowledge, education, and traditional values. In this general offensive against the so-called old world, Red Guards assumed the authority of the law in the name of “mass dictatorship” and persecuted millions of innocent people of nonproletarian background. In a 40-day period following Mao’s first inspection of Red Guards, 1,772 people were killed or committed suicide in the city of Beijing alone. In October 1966, when Mao launched a campaign to criticize the “bourgeois reactionary line,” aimed more specifically at Liu Shaoqi, student Red Guards became Mao’s crusading army against Liu and the old party establishment. After that, Liu lost his freedom and was subject to brutal treatment under “mass dictatorship” until his death in 1969.
The campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line soon merged into a nationwide power-seizure movement, in which mass organizations assumed authority in local and provincial government. Inaugurated by Shanghai’s “January Storm” of 1967, the power-seizure operation became a violent competition among mass organizations, and the army’s involvement following Mao’s late-January order to support the left failed to ease the tension and conflict. Although the new power organ, the “revolutionary committee,” consisting of representatives of the masses, the army, and veteran party officials, was beginning to be established at various levels in early 1967, factional violence nevertheless escalated and became an armed conflict in many parts of China. By late 1967 and early 1968, an estimated one million guns were in the hands of civilians, causing heavy casualties, and the country, in Mao’s words, was in a state of “all-round civil war.” In the midst of chaos, elementary and middle schools, though in session since early 1968, were out of control and without a curriculum, while colleges had not been admitting students at all. And the nation’s economy was on the verge of collapse. In July 1968, Mao and the central leadership were finally determined to put an end to the widespread armed conflict and nationwide chaos. In that month, the CC issued nationwide two public notices concerning violence in the provinces. Also in that month, Mao dispatched teams made up of workers and military personnel to school campuses to stop the violence and also to assume leadership there. At a meeting with the five most influential Red Guard leaders in Beijing, Mao informed his audience of his plan to end violence by sending students off campus. In late 1968, an unprecedented urban youth relocation movement began. Students from the cities went to the countryside to work and to receive re-education from local peasants, and the relocation of urban youths effectively ended the turbulent Red Guard movement. In the meantime, armed conflict in the provinces also gradually came to an end.
As the power-seizure campaign and the subsequent factional violence took place at local and provincial levels in 1967 and 1968, the ideological as well as power conflict at the top between veteran revolutionaries of the old government led by Premier Zhou Enlai and newly risen cultural revolutionaries, especially those of the CCRSG, intensified and came to the surface from time to time. In February 1967, the attempt of the CCRSG to carry out Mao’s plan to shake up military leadership provoked the indignation of a number of old marshals in the Central Military Commission and vice-premiers of the State Council. The veteran leaders vented their anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment at a high-level meeting, accusing the cultural revolutionaries of persecuting party officials, eliminating party leadership, and instigating disturbances in the army. Mao sided with the cultural revolutionaries and harshly condemned the veteran leaders for creating a “February Adverse Current” against the Cultural Revolution. But, in August 1967, when aggressive intrusions and interferences of the CCRSG in military and foreign affairs met strong resistance from veteran leaders, including Zhou Enlai, Mao decided to make a concession in spite of his ideological sympathy for the cultural revolutionaries: he removed three active members of the CCRSG (Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu) from power and named them an antiparty clique. In March 1968, however, when Jiang Qing and Lin Biao conspired against three generals (Yang Chengwu, Yu Lijin, and Fu Chongbi) of the veterans’ camp, Mao again sided with the cultural revolutionaries and allowed the generals to be purged.
While all three instances of power conflict were officially named “line struggles within the party,” the denunciation of President Liu Shaoqi remained the major, fore-grounded, and longest campaign during this period. The Liu case was closed in October 1968 when a scandalous investigative report on Liu’s personal history was approved by the CC at the Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee. In the report, Liu was named a traitor, a spy, and a renegade; the evidence was completely fabricated. By this time, in late 1968, though the campaign to “rectify the class ranks”—a political program focusing on personal histories of ordinary citizens that resulted in more wrongful verdicts and more deaths than any other campaign in the Cultural Revolution—was still underway, Mao’s major political battle against “China’s Khrushchev” was won. And, with nationwide factional violence coming to an end and the new power organ, the “revolutionary committee,” established in all provinces, Mao’s plan to move from revolutionary chaos to order and stability seemed to have been accomplished. The stage was set for the Ninth National Congress of the CCP.
In April 1969, the Ninth National Congress was held in Beijing. The meeting produced a new party constitution. In a move unprecedented in the history of the CCP, the new constitution specified Mao Zedong as the leader of the CCP and Lin Biao as Mao’s “close comrade-in-arms and successor.” The National Congress was in Mao’s view one of unity and success, promising closure to an era.
Mao’s hand-picked successor had thus been ordained in the new party constitution, and a large number of new members had been elected to the Ninth CC, constituting 70 percent of its total seats, under the newly consolidated “proletarian headquarters.” The Ninth National Congress of the CCP could have indeed been the closure of the Cultural Revolution that Mao had hoped for, but two newly emerged issues caused Mao concern. First, the initial alliance in the central leadership between the military generals loyal to Lin Biao and the cultural revolutionaries led by Jiang Qing was breaking down. Second, because of Lin Biao’s painstaking political maneuvers in the early years of the Cultural Revolution to replace leaders of other factions within the Chinese military with his close associates, his power in the PLA and in the CCP central leadership had apparently become too strong in Mao’s view.
The power conflict between the Lin Biao camp and the Jiang Qing faction seemed also to have an ideological dimension. In preparation for the Ninth Congress, Mao asked Chen Boda, head of the CCRSG, who was by then already alienated from Jiang Qing and her close allies, to lead the drafting of the party’s political report. During the writing process, Chen discussed the report with Lin Biao, and apparently, both were considering the Ninth Congress to be a turning point for China’s economic development. Mao, however, criticized Chen’s first draft for its “productionist” tendencies and entrusted Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan instead with the task of redrafting and revision. Mao’s decision virtually ended Chen’s cooperation with his colleagues in the CCRSG and pushed him further toward an alliance with the Lin Biao group.
The first and only open engagement between the Lin Biao group and the Jiang Qing group took place in late August and early September 1970 at the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee, also known as the Lushan Conference. The battle took the form of a noisy dispute over two questions: whether Mao Zedong was a genius and whether the Chinese leadership should, as Mao proposed, eliminate the position of the president of state. In his opening speech, Lin Biao spoke of Mao as head of China’s proletarian dictatorship and hence tacitly made known his disagreement with Mao on the issue of national presidency; Lin also spoke of Mao as a genius. Following Lin’s steps, Chen Boda compiled a pamphlet called “Engels, Lenin, and Chairman Mao on Genius” and distributed it among delegates. Knowing that Jiang Qing’s close ally, Zhang Chunqiao, had opposed the inclusion of “genius” along with two other modifiers praising Mao in the revised PRC constitution, Chen, along with other associates of Lin Biao, stirred up a storm in discussion groups: without mentioning Zhang’s name, they called for the denunciation of those who denied Mao’s genius. Mao lent full support for the Jiang Qing group in this bizarre power intrigue. He condemned Chen’s theory of genius as “fabrication” and “sophistry” and ordered Lin Biao’s associates to go through self-examination at the plenum and in the “Criticize Chen and Conduct Rectification Campaign” after the plenum. The fall of the Lin faction began.
In anticipation of Mao’s move against Lin Biao, Lin Liguo, the son of Lin Biao, allegedly formed a secret group with a few of his colleagues in the air force and drafted a plan for an armed coup in March 1971. Code-named “571 Project Summary,” this plan contains both details concerning military operations and diagnoses of the current political situation of China, in which Mao was referred to as the “biggest feudal tyrant in Chinese history.” In the meantime, Mao made a strategic tour of the south in the summer of 1971, during which he communicated to party and government officials and military generals his critical view of Lin Biao and his associates. This tour allegedly both triggered and foiled Lin Liguo’s plot against Mao’s life (the extent of Lin Biao’s knowledge of the “571 Project Summary” and its execution still remains a mystery). On the early morning of 13 September, within hours of Mao’s unexpected early return to Beijing, Lin Biao, his wife Ye Qun, and their son Lin Liguo reportedly fled in panic and died in a plane crash in Mongolia. All of Lin’s supporters in the military were subsequently arrested.
The downfall of Mao’s hand-picked successor and the treason charge against him shocked the nation. Some readers of the “571 Project Summary,” which was distributed nationwide as evidence of Lin’s crimes, were surprised by unexpected echoes of their own unformulated judgment in some of its diagnoses of the ills of the Cultural Revolution. The “September 13 Incident” marked not only the end of a stage in the Cultural Revolution but also the beginning of many people’s disillusion with and critical reflection upon the Cultural Revolution.
With the downfall of Lin Biao, what had been celebrated as a major achievement of the Cultural Revolution turned out to be Mao’s inadvertent making of China’s Khrushchev. The September 1971 incident was a heavy blow to Mao, leaving Premier Zhou Enlai, now the second-ranked leader, with more responsibilities in the daily affairs of the party and the state. His personal view of Lin Biao aside, which he kept to himself exclusively, Zhou made a strategic move in his effort to restore a certain normality to Chinese national life: in the name of rectifying the “ultraleftist” line of Lin Biao, Zhou began to speak against widespread “anarchism” and called for quality control in industrial production and advanced research in basic sciences. In October 1972, two years after colleges began to admit “worker-peasant-soldier students” with a requirement of a minimum of two years precollege work experience, Zhou suggested that some outstanding high school students should be allowed to enter college directly upon graduation. In the meantime, he devoted much energy to reinstating veteran officials who had been removed from office and persecuted in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. He was instrumental in bringing Deng Xiaoping back to Beijing from exile in 1973.
In the aftermath of the Lin Biao incident, Mao initially acquiesced in Zhou’s cautious moves. He also made a series of concessions with the veteran leaders he had formerly denounced; in particular, he acknowledged the “Retaliation against the February Adverse Current Campaign” of 1967 to be a mistake, though he blamed Lin Biao for it. Also during this period, a major foreign policy change Mao had been contemplating since the 1969 China–Soviet border clash materialized: In February 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon visited Beijing, and Zhou Enlai played a major role in executing Mao’s plan to normalize China–U.S. relations. However, Mao soon began to regard Zhou’s criticism of ultraleftism as an attempt to reverse the radical course of the Cultural Revolution and therefore supported Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao’s suggestion to denounce Lin Biao’s “Right extremism” in the nationwide “Criticize Lin and Conduct Rectification Campaign.” The mild deradicalizing trend that Zhou cautiously set in motion, especially in education, was now dismissed as a “Rightist resurgence,” and a number of youths challenging the educational establishment were hailed by cultural revolutionaries as heroes “going against the tide.” In 1973 and 1974, the widely supported restorative effort in education suffered a severe setback.
In fact, in the five-year period after the downfall of Lin Biao, Mao remained preoccupied with the potential threat to his Cultural Revolution legacy and preventing a “reversal of verdicts” became the major theme of most of the campaigns during this period. Despite his loyalty to Mao, Zhou Enlai was perceived by the cultural revolutionaries, and by Mao himself, to be potentially the most formidable force behind all such “reversal” efforts and became the implicit and yet real target of attack in a series of propaganda campaigns, including the “Criticize Confucianism and Appraise Legalism” movement and the “Criticize Lin [Biao] and Criticize Confucius” campaign of 1974 and the “Water Margin Appraisal” campaign of 1975. The attack on Zhou in all these campaigns took the form of “allusory historiography” in which Zhou was referred to as a Confucius of today, devoted to a reactionary cause to restore the order of bygone days and a capitulator betraying a revolutionary cause. Despite his perfect execution of Mao’s new foreign policy, or perhaps because of it, which had much elevated Zhou’s stature, a 10-day enlarged Politburo session was convened in late November and early December 1973 at Mao’s suggestion to criticize Zhou for carrying out a “capitulationist line” in foreign policy in his negotiations with the U.S. on the sensitive issue of military exchange. It was at this meeting, and in alliance against Zhou, that four diehard cultural revolutionaries in the Politburo—Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen—began to band together and form what was soon to be known as the “Gang of Four.”
To ensure the continuation of his Cultural Revolution legacy, Mao had also been searching for a successor after the fall of Lin Biao. Zhang Chunqiao, Mao’s true ideological heir, might have been a candidate but for his unpopularity, of which Mao became fully aware at the Lushan Conference of 1970. Wang Hongwen, a rebel leader turned official in Shanghai and a close associate of Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, seemed to be the first candidate whom Mao seriously considered. Mao transferred Wang to Beijing in September 1972, put him in charge of the CCP constitution revision, made him third-ranked leader at the Tenth National Congress of the CCP (August 1973), but eventually gave him up, apparently due to his lack of political skills and his increasing unpopularity as a member of the Jiang Qing group. Mao’s next choice was Deng Xiaoping, a choice that Zhou Enlai strongly supported. In January 1975, Deng was given several top official titles and was entrusted with power to preside over daily affairs of the party, the army, and the state while Zhou Enlai was hospitalized for cancer treatment.
Despite his promise to Mao that he would never reverse the verdicts of the Cultural Revolution, Deng, sharing Zhou’s unvoiced critical view of the Cultural Revolution, took a much more aggressive approach in his effort to combat ultraleftism and to energize the nation’s economy. In late February 1975, Deng launched a nationwide “overall rectification” program, and the swift reforms were carried out during the rest of the year in the areas of national defense, transportation, industrial production, education, and scientific research. In the most sensitive area of culture, literature, and the arts, Deng used Mao’s slogan “let a hundred flowers bloom” and pushed for the release of certain new and classic works that had been condemned by the Jiang Qing group. On the party organization and personnel front, the major tasks of the rectification included the enforcement of tough measures against the lingering factionalism and the demotion or dismissal of the incompetent officials who had enjoyed a meteoric rise for political reasons during the Cultural Revolution. Largely due to the overall rectification program, the China of 1975 was an economic success: the national gross output value of industry and agriculture increased by 11.9 percent in 1975, as compared to 1.4 percent in 1974. With this program Deng won broad support across the country.
As Deng was driving his reform program forward with full force, the conflict between him and the Jiang Qing group intensified. Later in the year, via Mao Yuanxin, Mao’s nephew and his designated liaison at the Politburo, the Jiang group managed to bring Deng’s apparent anti-Cultural Revolution stand to the attention of the increasingly isolated Mao. In the meantime, Deng declined a request from Mao that he be in charge of drafting a resolution concerning the Cultural Revolution at the Politburo. In November 1975, Mao Zedong finally decided to halt Deng’s rectification program and launch a nationwide political campaign called “Counterattack the Trend of Right-Deviationist Reversal of Verdicts.” Most of Deng’s official duties were soon suspended. In late January 1976, within a month of Premier Zhou Enlai’s death, Hua Guofeng, Mao’s final choice of successor, was named acting premier of the State Council at Mao’s proposal, replacing Deng as the man in charge.
In late March and early April 1976, millions of Beijing citizens visited Tian’anmen Square during the traditional Qingming Festival season to commemorate the late Premier Zhou Enlai. Similar events took place in a number of provinces as well. Numerous posted elegies contained a strong political message against the cultural revolutionary faction of the CCP central leadership. The mourners’ outpouring of grief turned out to be simultaneously a mass protest. Although the authorities cracked down on the protest movement, it became evident that Mao’s Cultural Revolution legacy was completely rejected by the populace. On 6 October 1976, within a month of the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, Hua Guofeng, with the full support of the CC security chief Wang Dongxing and Marshall Ye Jianying, ordered the arrest of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. Celebrated nationwide, the downfall of the Gang of Four marked the official closure of the Cultural Revolution.
The post-Mao CCP leadership began in late 1976 to implement concrete measures to reverse Mao’s Cultural Revolution policies in all areas. The pace of policy change gained speed after the reinstatement of Deng Xiaoping in July 1977. In regard to an overall judgment of the Cultural Revolution, the central leadership took a major step in December 1978 at the Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee. At this meeting, the leadership rejected Hua Guofeng’s dogmatic principle of “two whatever’s” (uphold whatever decisions Mao has made and adhere to whatever instructions Mao has given) and decided to abandon Mao’s theory of class struggle and of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat and to carry out a thoroughgoing review, nationwide and at all levels, of all persecution cases of the past. By the end of 1980, virtually all of the cases brought during the Cultural Revolution—including the case against President Liu Shaoqi, more than three million cases against government officials, and many more against ordinary citizens—had been proven “wrongful, false, and mistaken.” In June 1981, at the Sixth Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee, the central leadership finally adopted the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China,” a landmark document that contains a comprehensive assessment of the Cultural Revolution.
The stated purpose of the Resolution is to review Mao’s legacy and conclude a highly problematic chapter in the CCP history—“preferably in broad stroke rather than in detail,” as Deng Xiaoping suggested—so that both the party and the nation may be united, leave the past behind, and look ahead. Of all the issues he discussed on several occasions between March 1980 and June 1981 concerning the drafting of the Resolution, Deng considered the assessment of Chairman Mao Zedong to be the most important. On the one hand, Deng said, the Resolution should be critical of Mao’s mistakes, truthfully and unequivocally; on the other hand, however, the legitimacy of the CCP leadership in the Cultural Revolution must be acknowledged, and the banner of Mao Zedong Thought should not be abandoned; for to abandon this banner means to deny the “glorious history of our party.” Embracing Deng’s concern for both the truth of the Cultural Revolution and the legitimacy of the party leadership under Mao as the principal guideline, the Resolution deals with two conflicting issues: On the one hand, it names the Cultural Revolution as the cause of “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses the party, the state, and the people had suffered since the founding of the PRC,” criticizes Chairman Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftism as an erroneous ideology informing the Cultural Revolution, and recognizes the partial responsibility of the CCP central leadership for the Revolution. On the other hand, the Resolution blames Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and their followers for taking advantage of Mao’s errors and committing crimes behind his back, and it charges them as the chief culprits responsible for the national disaster. The Resolution upholds Mao Zedong Thought as the guiding principle of the CCP while at the same time excluding Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat from Mao Zedong Thought proper in spite of Mao’s own judgment. Apparently, the Resolution reflects a dilemma the post-Mao CCP leadership faced: the leadership gained its legitimacy by consenting to the will of an overwhelming majority of the people and abandoning Mao’s Cultural Revolution program, and yet, at the same time, the leadership was concerned that a thoroughgoing critique of the Cultural Revolution might again put its legitimacy in question.
The apparent self-contradictions in the Resolution have been reflected in self-contradictory government policies, especially after the PRC leaders condemned the mass protest of 1989 as a return of the Cultural Revolution (actually a false analogy ignoring the striking contrast between the spontaneity of the one and the supreme leader being the prime mover of the other): On the one hand, the Cultural Revolution is dismissed as “ten years of chaos” in official media. On the other, important Cultural Revolution documents remain classified in Beijing’s Central Archives, and serious studies of the Cultural Revolution are invariably censored in mainland China. The goal of the Resolution to help the nation leave the past behind and look ahead is more than fulfilled with the aid of the invisible hand of the market: the China of the 1990s produced “xiang-qian-kan” (turn to the money) as a pun for “look ahead,” with historical amnesia as an unfortunate by-product.
Seen from the vantage point of China’s reform era and beyond, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is essentially one of irony and self-negation because it helped bring about a great many changes that Mao had especially intended to prevent—indeed, to prevent by launching the Cultural Revolution. The severe impact of a prolonged stagnant economy on national life, for instance, forced the post-Mao CCP leadership not only to abandon once and for all Mao’s policy of “politics in command” in favor of a moderate and pragmatic approach to economic matters but also to embrace the market economy and borrow from capitalism in its effort to rejuvenate China’s economy and modernize the nation. Mao’s ultraleftism reached its limits during the Cultural Revolution and began to negate itself: Mao’s campaign to purge “capitalist-roaders” turned out to be the catalyst for the making of Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Along with economic hardships, the enormous human suffering caused by, and the widespread weariness and discontent about, class struggle as part of daily life over a 10-year period also contributed to the legitimacy crisis of the CCP that Deng Xiaoping apparently felt when he was giving instructions on assessing the Cultural Revolution. Consequently, to go along with its economic reform policy, the CCP leadership decided to end the practice of class struggle and to abandon the politically discriminating “class line” (biased against people of nonproletarian background) as well; it began to appeal to the entire population for support in the name of the Chinese nation. These historic moves in reaction to the Cultural Revolution constituted no less than a paradigm shift in the party rule: modernization and nationalism took over class struggle and revolution as the dominant ideology in post-Mao China.
In the spheres of culture proper, the Cultural Revolution left China with much desolation and confusion. After a devastating sweeping-away of long-established traditional values—including humaneness, personal loyalty, civility, children’s filial duty to parents, and students’ respect for teachers—the revolution failed to establish a new set of values on the ruins of the old. In the meantime, revelations of top-level power conflicts, especially those that led to Lin Biao’s downfall, began to have a profound disillusioning impact on the populace regarding revolution. Traditional culture was in shambles, while faith in communism no longer held. This kind of spiritual vacancy created by the Cultural Revolution soon led to a conviction crisis (xinyang weiji) among the nation’s youths, the emergence of cynicism and moral nihilism, and eventually, in a time of unprecedented economic boom, widespread corruption, and abuse of power.
On the other hand, as people’s trust in the ruling CCP drastically declined because of the Cultural Revolution, widely shared disillusionment about revolution also turned out to be the beginning of China’s new democratic consciousness, which manifested itself forcefully in the spontaneous mass protest of 1989. In fact, without the shock of the totalitarian extremes of the Cultural Revolution, democracy as a defense against such extremes would have been a much more distant vision. Yet it remains to be seen whether this vision can materialize in the near future and whether the current generation of Chinese leaders, who experienced the “ten years of chaos” in their youth or middle age, are willing to extend reform to political spheres to complete the break with the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution also aroused considerable interest abroad in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the waves of counterculture, student revolt, anti-Vietnam War protest, and feminist and gay rights movements swept much of the world. Many sympathizers from the outside, enthusiastic youths and liberal intellectuals alike, saw China as they wanted to see it: a utopian revolutionary model that they did not find in their own world. The high-flown rhetoric of China’s official propaganda, the genuine lack of information in the outside world especially due to China’s increasing isolation during the first few years of the Cultural Revolution, and favorable reports by some China observers that were more representative of the reporters’ own political stands than of Chinese reality, also helped create this myth of the Cultural Revolution. For instance, a rather vague but fantastic image of Chairman Mao Zedong commanding an army of rebellious Red Guards in a war against the old world was embraced by Parisian students as an inspiration for their epoch-making May 1968 revolt. The Quotations from Chairman Mao, popularly known outside China as the “little red book,” became one of the best sellers worldwide in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organizations modeled after the Red Guards emerged to challenge the establishment in many countries—communist and noncommunist, Western and non-Western. Considering the genuine opposition to, and critique of, the authorities and traditional culture as seen in many of the mass movements outside China, the “cultural revolution” was, in fact, a more appropriate name for what was happening in the world during the 1960s than for Chinese events, although Beijing was at the time held by many as the world’s Yan’an—the holy land of revolution.
In middle and late 1970s, when the bleak and brutal reality of China’s Cultural Revolution was better known abroad, most of its foreign supporters, like their historical counterparts in the 1930s concerning Stalin’s Soviet Union, were profoundly disillusioned and began to detach themselves from their earlier position. In the meantime, however, there were those who adhered to their earlier vision of China as a revolutionary model and held on to their faith in Mao’s cultural revolution theory as an authentic revolutionary ideology against the bourgeois legacy of Enlightenment. Their ideas contributed considerably to various postmodern critical theories that were formulated in the West in late 1970s and 1980s. Then, an awkward encounter took place in late 1980s when these theories, some of them closely associated with China’s recent past but lacking a critical perspective, traveled to China and were received as an intellectual high fashion. This highly intellectualized, elitist legacy of the Cultural Revolution in an alien theoretical discourse re-presented Maoism in a drastically simplified and yet sanitized version. In spite of its disregard for historical reality, such a legacy remains an unignorable challenge to historians of modern China, especially considering the prevalence of historical amnesia on the mainland, the Chinese government’s restrictive policy concerning Cultural Revolution studies, and the fact that history is never a faithful recording of what has happened but is always a representation of it.