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The Cultural Revolution was launched
by Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong during his last
decade in power (1966-76) to renew the spirit of the Chinese revolution.
Fearing that China
would develop along the lines of the Soviet model and concerned
about his own place in history, 
Mao threw China's cities into turmoil in a monumental effort to
reverse the historic processes
underway.
During the early 1960s, tensions with
the Soviet Union convinced Mao that the Russian revolution had
gone astray, which in turn made him fear that China would follow
the same path. Programs carried out by his colleagues to bring
China out of the economic depression caused by the Great Leap
Forward made Mao doubt their revolutionary commitment and
also resent his own diminished role. He especially feared urban
social stratification in a society as traditionally elitist as
China. Mao thus ultimately adopted four goals for the Cultural
Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders
more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese
Communist Party; to provide China's youths with a revolutionary
experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as
to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less
elitist. He initially pursued these goals through a massive mobilization
of the country's urban youths. They were organized into groups
called the Red Guards, and Mao ordered the party and the army
not to suppress the movement.
Mao also put together a coalition of
associates to help him carry out the
Cultural Revolution. His wife, Jiang Qing, brought in a group
of radical intellectuals to rule the
cultural realm. Defense Minister Lin Biao made certain that the
military remained Maoist. Mao's
longtime assistant, Chen Boda, worked with security men Kang Sheng
and Wang Dongxing to carry out
Mao's directives concerning ideology and security. Premier Zhou
Enlai played an essential
role in keeping the country running, even during periods of extraordinary
chaos. Yet there were
conflicts among these associates, and the history of the Cultural
Revolution reflects these
conflicts almost as much as it reflects Mao's own initiatives.
Mao formally launched the Cultural Revolution
at the Eleventh Plenum of the
Eighth Central Committee in August 1966. He shut down China's
schools, and during the following months he encouraged Red Guards
to attack all traditional values and "bourgeois" things
and to test party officials by publicly criticizing them. Mao
believed that this measure would be beneficial both for the young
people and for the party cadres that they attacked.
The movement quickly escalated; many
elderly people and intellectuals were
not only verbally attacked but were physically abused. Many died.
The Red Guards splintered
into zealous rival factions, each purporting to be the true representative
of Maoist thought.
Mao's own personality cult, encouraged so as to provide momentum
to the movement, assumed
religious proportions. The resulting anarchy, terror, and paralysis
completely disrupted the urban
economy. Industrial production for 1968 dipped 12 percent below
that of 1966.
During the earliest part of the Red Guard
phase, key Politburo leaders were
removed from power--most notably President Liu Shaoqi, Mao's designated
successor until
that time, and Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping. In January
1967 the movement began to
produce the actual overthrow of provincial party committees and
the first attempts to construct
new political bodies to replace them. In February 1967 many remaining
top party leaders called
for a halt to the Cultural Revolution, but Mao and his more radical
partisans prevailed, and
the movement escalated yet again. Indeed, by the summer of 1967
disorder was widespread;
large armed clashes between factions of Red Guards were occurring
throughout urban
China.
During 1967 Mao called on the army under
Lin Biao to step in on behalf of
the Red Guards. Instead of producing unified support for the radical
youths, this
political-military action resulted in more divisions within the
military. The tensions inherent in the
situation surfaced vividly when Chen Zaidao, a military commander
in the city of Wuhan during the summer of
1967, arrested two key radical party leaders.
In 1968, after the country had been subject
to several cycles of radicalism
alternating with relative moderation, Mao decided to rebuild the
Communist Party to gain
greater control. The military dispatched officers and soldiers
to take over schools, factories,
and government agencies. The army simultaneously forced millions
of urban Red Guards to
move to the rural hinterland to live, thus scattering their forces
and bringing some order to
the cities. This particular action reflected Mao's disillusionment
with the Red Guards
because of their inability to overcome their factional differences.
Mao's efforts to end the chaos were
given added impetus by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
August 1968, which greatly
heightened China's sense of insecurity.
Two months later, the Twelfth Plenum
of the Eighth Central Committee met to
call for the convening of a party congress and the rebuilding
of the party apparatus.
>From that point, the issue of who would inherit political
power as the Cultural Revolution wound
down became the central question of Chinese politics.
When the Ninth Party Congress convened
in April 1969, Defense Minister Lin
Biao was officially designated as Mao's successor, and the military
tightened its grip on the
entire society. Both the Party Central Committee and the revamped
Communist Party were dominated by
military men. Lin took advantage of Sino-Soviet border clashes
in the spring of 1969 to
declare martial law and further used his position to rid himself
of some potential rivals to the
succession. Several leaders who had been purged during 1966-68
died under the martial law
regimen of 1969, and many others suffered severely during this
period.
Lin quickly encountered opposition. Mao
himself was wary of a successor who
seemed to want to assume power too quickly, and he began to maneuver
against Lin. Premier
Zhou Enlai joined forces with Mao in this effort, as possibly
did Mao's wife Jiang Qing. Mao's
assistant Chen Boda, however, decided to support Lin's cause.
Thus, despite many measures taken
in 1970-71 to return order and normalcy to Chinese society, increasingly
severe strains
were splitting the top ranks of leadership.
These strains first surfaced at a party
plenum in the summer of 1970.
Shortly thereafter Mao began a campaign to criticize Chen Boda
as a warning to Lin. Chen
disappeared from public in August 1970. Matters came to a head
in September 1971 when Lin himself was
killed in what the Chinese asserted was an attempt to flee to
the Soviet Union after an
abortive assassination plot against Mao. Virtually the entire
Chinese high military command was
purged in the weeks following Lin's death.
Lin's demise had a profoundly disillusioning
effect on many people who had
supported Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Lin had been the
high priest of the Mao
cult, and millions had gone through tortuous struggles to elevate
this chosen successor to power
and throw out his "revisionist" challengers. They had
in this quest attacked and tortured
respected teachers, abused elderly citizens, humiliated old revolutionaries,
and, in many cases,
battled former friends in bloody confrontations. The sordid details
of Lin's purported
assassination plot and subsequent flight cast all this in the
light of traditional, unprincipled
power struggles, and vast numbers of Chinese people began to feel
that they simply had been
manipulated for personal political purposes.
Initially, Premier Zhou Enlai benefited
the most from Lin's death, and from
late 1971 through mid-1973 Zhou tried to nudge China back toward
stability. He encouraged a
revival of the educational system and brought back into office
a number of people who had
been cast out. China began again to increase its trade and other
links with the outside
world, and the economy continued the forward momentum that had
begun to build in 1969. Mao
personally approved these general moves but remained wary lest
they call into question the basic
value of having launched the Cultural Revolution in the first
place.
During 1972, however, Mao suffered a
serious stroke, and Zhou learned that
he had a fatal malignancy. These events highlighted the continued
uncertainty over the
succession. In early 1973 Zhou and Mao brought back to power Deng
Xiaoping. Zhou hoped to groom
him to be Mao's successor. Deng, however, had been the second
most important purge
victim at the hands of the radicals during the Cultural Revolution.
His reemergence made
Jiang Qing and her followers desperate to firmly establish a more
radical path.
>From mid-1973 until Mao's death in
September 1976, Chinese politics shifted
back and forth between Jiang Qing and those who supported her
(notably Wang Hongwen, Zhang
Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, who with Jiang Qing were later dubbed
the Gang of Four,)
and the Zhou-Deng group. The former favoured ideology, political
mobilization, class
struggle, anti-intellectualism, egalitarianism, and xenophobia,
while the latter
promoted economic growth, stability, educational progress, and
a pragmatic foreign policy. Mao tried
unsuccessfully to maintain a balance between these two forces
while he struggled to find a
successor who would embody his preferred combination of each.
>From mid-1973 until mid-1974 the
radicals were ascendant; they whipped up a
campaign that used criticism of Lin Biao and of Confucius as a
thinly veiled vehicle for
attacking Zhou and his policies. By July 1974, however, the resulting
economic decline and
increasing chaos made Mao shift back toward Zhou and Deng. With
Zhou hospitalized, Deng assumed
increasing power from the summer of 1974 through the late fall
of 1975, when the radicals
finally convinced Mao that Deng's policies would lead eventually
to a repudiation of the Cultural
Revolution and of Mao himself. Mao then sanctioned criticism of
these policies by means of wall
posters (ta-tzu-pao), which had become a favoured method of propaganda
for the radicals. Zhou died
in January 1976, and Deng was formally purged (with Mao's backing)
in April. Only Mao's
death in September and the purge of the Gang of Four by a coalition
of political,
police, and military leaders in October 1976 paved the way for
Deng's subsequent reemergence in
1977.
Although the Cultural Revolution largely
bypassed the vast majority of the
people who lived in rural areas, it had serious consequences for
China as a whole. In the short
run, of course, the political instability and the constant shifts
in economic policy produced
slower economic growth and a decline in the capacity of the government
to deliver goods and
services. Officials at all levels of the political system learned
that future shifts in policy would
jeopardize those who had aggressively implemented previous policy.
The result was bureaucratic
timidity. In addition, with the death of Mao and the end of the
Cultural Revolution (the Cultural
Revolution was officially ended by the Eleventh Party Congress
in August 1977, but it in
fact concluded with Mao's death and the purge of the Gang of Four
in the fall of 1976), nearly
three million party members and countless wrongfully purged citizens
awaited reinstatement. Bold
measures were taken in the late 1970s to confront these immediate
problems, but the
Cultural Revolution left a legacy that continued to trouble China.
There existed, for example, a severe
generation gap; individuals who
experienced the Cultural Revolution while in their teens and early
twenties were denied an education
and taught to redress grievances by taking to the streets. Post-Cultural
Revolution
policies--which stressed education and initiative over radical
revolutionary fervour--left little
room for these millions of people to have productive careers.
Indeed, the fundamental damage to all
aspects of the educational system itself took several decades
to repair.
Another serious problem was the corruption
within the party and government.
Both the fears engendered by the Cultural Revolution and the scarcity
of goods that
accompanied it forced people to fall back on traditional personal
relationships and on bribery and
other forms of persuasion to accomplish their goals. Concomitantly,
the Cultural Revolution
brought about general disillusionment with the party leadership
and the system itself as
millions of urban Chinese witnessed the obvious power plays that
took place under the name of
political principle in the early and mid-1970s. The post-Mao repudiation
of both the objectives
and the consequences of the Cultural Revolution made many people
turn away from
politics altogether.
Among the people themselves, there remained
bitter factionalism, as those
who opposed each other during the Cultural Revolution often shared
the same work unit and
would do so for their entire careers.
Perhaps never before in human history
has a political leader unleashed such
massive forces against the system that he created. The resulting
damage to that system was
profound, and the goals that Mao sought to achieve ultimately
remained elusive.
