文化大革命

This entry presents the Cultural Revolution as historical fact, relying on the scholarly consensus of historians in China and internationally, and on the official verdict of the Chinese Communist Party itself: the 1981 Resolution on Party History (关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议 Guānyú Jiànguó Yǐlái Dǎng de Ruògān Lìshǐ Wèntí de Juéyì), which characterized the Cultural Revolution as "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic." The Cultural Revolution remains a topic of great pain for many Chinese families, and its honest examination is inseparable from respect for those who suffered.

The Cultural Revolution did not emerge from nowhere. By the mid-1960s, 毛泽东 Máo Zédōng (Mao Zedong, 1893–1976) had presided over the People's Republic for seventeen years — years that included the Korean War, the collectivization campaigns, and most catastrophically the 大跃进 Dà Yuèjìn (Great Leap Forward, 1958–1962), whose disastrous agricultural and industrial policies produced a famine estimated to have killed between 15 and 55 million people. In the aftermath of the Great Leap, Mao had stepped back from day-to-day governance, and more pragmatic colleagues — including 刘少奇 Liú Shàoqí (President of the PRC) and 邓小平 Dèng Xiǎopíng (General Secretary of the Party) — had implemented recovery policies that implicitly criticized the Great Leap approach.

Mao's launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 was inseparable from his determination to reassert personal political authority, destroy rivals who he believed were steering China toward "revisionism" (修正主义 xiūzhèng zhǔyì — the Maoist term for Soviet-style pragmatic socialism), and prevent what he saw as a bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. He also appears to have genuinely believed that Chinese society required ongoing class struggle to remain revolutionary — that without constant political upheaval, the gains of the revolution would be reversed and a new exploiting class would emerge from within the party apparatus itself.

The formal launch came on May 16, 1966 with the "May 16th Notification" (五一六通知 Wǔ Yī Liù Tōngzhī), a Party directive attacking alleged "capitalist roaders" (走资本主义道路当权派 zǒuzī běn zhǔyì dào lù dāngquán pài — those within the Party taking the capitalist road) and bourgeois academics. On August 5, Mao posted his own big-character poster (大字报 dàzìbào) on the gates of Zhongnanhai (中南海, the Party leadership compound in Beijing): "Bombard the Headquarters" (炮打司令部 Pào Dǎ Sīlìng Bù) — an explicit call to attack the Party leadership around Liu Shaoqi. On August 18, one million young people massed in Tiananmen Square for the first of eight mass rallies in which Mao, wearing a Red Guard armband, reviewed the assembled youth who called themselves his revolutionary vanguard.

The Cultural Revolution lasted, in its most intense phase, from 1966 to roughly 1969 — and in a diminished but still politically dominant form through Mao's death in September 1976. Its death toll is estimated at between one and two million, with some historians placing the figure higher; the number imprisoned, persecuted, or displaced runs into the tens of millions.

The campaign to 破四旧 pò sì jiù — destroy the "Four Olds" — was among the most culturally devastating acts of the Cultural Revolution period. The Four Olds were:

旧思想 jiù sīxiǎng — Old ideas: Confucian values, traditional moral frameworks, religious beliefs, "feudal" ways of thinking about hierarchy, loyalty, and social obligation.

旧文化 jiù wénhuà — Old culture: classical literature, traditional arts, historical scholarship, Buddhist and Daoist cultural forms, traditional Chinese medicine's classical textual foundations.

旧风俗 jiù fēngsú — Old customs: traditional festivals, rituals, family ceremonies, religious observances, folk practices.

旧习惯 jiù xíguàn — Old habits: patterns of deference to elders, traditional social courtesies, respect for scholarly and religious authority figures.

In practice, destroying the Four Olds meant ransacking and destroying temples, monasteries, churches, and mosques. Statues of the Buddha, Confucius, and local deities were smashed or burned. Classical books were seized and destroyed in bonfires. Antiques and art objects were confiscated. Street names with "feudal" or "bourgeois" associations were replaced with revolutionary names (Beijing's famous 王府井 Wángfǔjǐng shopping street was briefly renamed "Anti-Imperialist Road"). Family ancestral tablets were destroyed. Traditional clothing, hairstyles, and personal possessions deemed insufficiently revolutionary were targeted.

Tibet suffered particularly severe destruction. The vast majority of Tibet's thousands of monasteries were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution — estimates range as high as 97% damaged or destroyed. Monks were expelled, imprisoned, or forced to renounce their vows. The combination of the Four Olds campaign and the political persecution of Tibetan religious leadership produced a cultural catastrophe whose full dimensions are still being assessed.

The losses to Chinese material culture were irreplaceable. Manuscripts, rare books, artworks, and architectural treasures accumulated over centuries were destroyed in the course of months. Some artifacts were saved by individuals who hid them at personal risk, or by museum workers who found bureaucratic pretexts to protect collections. But the destruction was vast, and the specific character of what was lost — the religious objects, family records, and local cultural materials that do not survive in palace collections or state archives — can never be fully inventoried.

The 红卫兵 Hóngwèibīng (Red Guards) were the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution's opening phase — student-age youth, mostly from middle schools and universities, who were mobilized by Mao to attack the "bourgeois" establishment: teachers, professors, party officials, intellectuals, and anyone deemed insufficiently revolutionary. The name means "Red Guards" and deliberately evoked both military authority and ideological purity.

The movement began in spring 1966 at elite schools in Beijing. Students formed organizations, wrote polemical big-character posters (大字报 dàzìbào) attacking teachers and administrators, and began to engage in verbal and physical harassment of designated enemies. Mao's formal endorsement of the Red Guards — signaled by donning a Red Guard armband at the August 18 Tiananmen rally — unleashed a nationwide expansion. Schools and universities suspended classes. Young people across China formed Red Guard organizations, with competing factions soon engaged in violent conflict with each other as well as their designated targets.

Mao provided free rail passes, enabling Red Guards to travel across the country in a process called "revolutionary tourism" (串联 chuànlián). Millions of young people converged on Beijing and then dispersed across the country, carrying the revolution's disruptions into every province. The suspension of normal education and the mobilization of youth created a generation whose formative years were defined by political violence rather than schooling — the "lost generation" (失落的一代 shīluò de yī dài) whose educational deprivation would have long-term demographic and social consequences.

The specific experience of Red Guards — teenagers who held enormous coercive power over their teachers and parents, who participated in acts of violence they later came to understand as deeply wrong, who operated in an environment where institutional authority had been deliberately demolished — has been the subject of a substantial body of Chinese memoir literature since the 1980s. Writers including 巴金 Bā Jīn (Ba Jin) and many others have grappled with the moral complexity of this experience: how ordinary young people became perpetrators of extraordinary cruelty when given ideological license and institutional backing to do so.

By 1968, the Red Guard movement had become so violent and factional — with competing groups fighting full-scale armed battles using weapons seized from military arsenals — that Mao ordered the army to restore order and sent the Red Guards themselves to the countryside in the Send-Down Movement.

The 上山下乡运动 Shàngshān Xiàxiāng Yùndòng (Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement) was the policy, implemented from 1968 onward, of forcibly relocating urban youth to rural areas and border regions. Between approximately 1968 and 1980, an estimated sixteen million urban young people — roughly one-tenth of China's urban population — were sent to rural production brigades, state farms, and frontier regions in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Yunnan.

The official rationale was Maoist: intellectuals and urban youth needed to be "re-educated" by the working peasantry, to shed their bourgeois tendencies through physical labor and contact with the revolutionary masses. "It is very necessary for educated young people to go to the countryside and receive re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants" (知识青年到农村去，接受贫下中农的再教育，很有必要 Zhīshi qīngnián dào nóngcūn qù, jiēshòu pín xià zhōng nóng de zài jiàoyù, hěn yǒu bìyào) — Mao's December 1968 directive launching the program.

The practical realities varied enormously. Some sent-down youth adapted to rural life and formed genuine bonds with the peasant communities they lived among. Many others experienced the decade as a period of enforced deprivation: separated from families, without formal education, performing harsh agricultural labor in unfamiliar climates, with no clear path back to urban life. Women were particularly vulnerable to exploitation by local officials who controlled the assignments and evaluations that determined whether a young person could return to the city.

The generation shaped by this experience — the 知青 zhīqīng (educated youth, short for 知识青年 zhīshi qīngnián) — produced a distinctive body of literature called 知青文学 zhīqīng wénxué (Sent-Down Youth Literature) in the post-Mao period: memoirs, novels, and stories processing the decade's disruptions, losses, and unexpected formative experiences. Many of China's reform-era leaders, including Xi Jinping, were sent-down youth — a biographical fact that resonates differently in different analytical frameworks.

The 批斗会 pīdòu huì (struggle session, literally "criticize-struggle meeting") was the primary instrument of political persecution during the Cultural Revolution — a ritualized public gathering in which a designated "class enemy" was subjected to group denunciation, verbal abuse, physical violence, and forced confession. The form was not invented in 1966 — similar sessions had been used in land reform campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s — but it reached its most extreme and widespread form during the Cultural Revolution.

The typical struggle session followed a recognizable script: the target was forced to stand with their head bowed in a stress position (sometimes with arms pulled back in the "jet plane" 坐飞机 zuò fēijī position), wearing a dunce cap with their crimes written on it and a placard with their name crossed out hung around their neck. Assembled participants — often coerced colleagues, students, or neighbors — were required to shout accusations and denunciations. The target was required to confess to crimes, many of them fabricated or grotesquely distorted versions of actual actions. Refusal to confess, or an insufficiently self-abasing confession, could result in violence or prolonged sessions lasting hours or days.

The targets of struggle sessions included virtually every category of educated or prominent Chinese: university professors, scientists, writers, doctors, Buddhist and Daoist clergy, Christian pastors and Catholic priests, traditional Chinese opera performers, party officials accused of insufficient revolutionary purity, and ordinary people denounced by neighbors settling personal grievances under ideological cover. Entire families were affected — the social stigma attached to a persecuted family member extended to spouses, children, and siblings, who might find themselves denied education, employment, or housing.

The suicide rate among the persecuted was high. Among the most prominent who took their own lives were the novelist 老舍 Lǎo Shě (Lao She, who drowned in a Beijing lake in 1966), the translator 傅雷 Fù Léi (Fu Lei) and his wife, and many thousands of others whose deaths were recorded only in family memory. The effects on intellectual and scientific communities were particularly severe: China lost years of research capacity and experienced a generational discontinuity in scholarship that took decades to recover from.

The Cultural Revolution also targeted music, theater, and the visual arts with unusual thoroughness. Almost all traditional opera forms, classical music performance, and Western classical music were banned. What remained were the 样板戏 yàngbǎnxì (model operas) — eight approved revolutionary theatrical works (later expanded slightly) promoted by Jiang Qing (江青, Mao's wife), including the Peking Opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (智取威虎山 Zhìqǔ Wēihǔshān) and the ballet The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军 Hóng Sè Niángjǐ Jūn). These eight works were effectively the only permitted public performance art for years — a cultural restriction without parallel in modern history.

The Cultural Revolution did not end cleanly or all at once. Several events mark points in its unraveling.

In September 1971, Lin Biao (林彪 Lín Biāo) — Mao's officially designated successor, the editor of the Little Red Book (毛主席语录 Máo Zhǔxí Yǔlù) of Mao's quotations, and the man most identified with the Cultural Revolution's military dimension — died in a plane crash over Mongolia after an alleged coup attempt. The circumstances remain disputed and partially classified. His fall shocked the country and discredited, at least implicitly, the most extreme Maoist position.

Deng Xiaoping (邓小平 Dèng Xiǎopíng), twice purged during the Cultural Revolution (once as a "capitalist roader" in 1966 and once after the 1976 Tiananmen Incident in which crowds mourning Zhou Enlai's death were suppressed), was rehabilitated and began a quiet restoration of pragmatic governance in the years before Mao's death.

Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976 — an event that genuinely shocked millions of Chinese who had known no other political reality. Within weeks, the 四人帮 Sìrénbāng (Gang of Four) — the radical clique that had driven Cultural Revolution policies in its later phase — was arrested. The Gang of Four comprised: 江青 Jiāng Qīng (Mao's wife), 张春桥 Zhāng Chūnqiáo, 姚文元 Yáo Wényuán, and 王洪文 Wáng Hóngwén. Their arrest is conventionally dated as the end of the Cultural Revolution, though the policy dismantling had begun earlier.

The Gang of Four's 1980–1981 trial — broadcast on Chinese television and watched by hundreds of millions — served as a cathartic public reckoning, though one carefully managed to limit accountability to a small circle of villains and spare the broader institutional structures that had enabled the persecution. Jiang Qing's defiant conduct at trial — refusing to recant, arguing she had merely executed Mao's directives — raised questions about responsibility that the trial was not designed to answer. She was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment; she committed suicide in 1991.

The formal party verdict came in the 1981 Resolution on Party History (关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议), which characterized the Cultural Revolution as "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic." Mao was judged "70% correct, 30% incorrect" — his early revolutionary leadership credited, his later errors acknowledged. This formula, which protected the foundations of party legitimacy while acknowledging the Cultural Revolution's catastrophic nature, remains the official CCP position.

Deng Xiaoping's 改革开放 Gǎigé Kāifàng (Reform and Opening Up) policies, launched from 1978, were in some ways a direct institutional response to the Cultural Revolution: rebuilding universities, restoring the examination system, rehabilitating persecuted intellectuals and officials, and opening China to foreign investment and knowledge on the premise that the Cultural Revolution's contempt for expertise and international learning had been catastrophically wrong. The material success of Reform and Opening in transforming China's economy has co-existed, somewhat uneasily, with an incomplete public reckoning with the Cultural Revolution's human costs — a reckoning that many Chinese families have conducted in private while public discussion remains constrained.

The Cultural Revolution produced a distinctive political language — a dense, ritualized vocabulary of accusation, confession, and ideological assertion that saturated every form of public communication. Understanding this language is essential to reading Cultural Revolution-era texts, and the echoes of this vocabulary in contemporary Chinese political discourse are audible to those who know what to listen for.

The period's characteristic written form was the 大字报 dàzìbào (big-character poster) — hand-painted accusations, denunciations, and political arguments pasted on walls in public spaces. In 1966–1967, Beijing's walls were covered with competing big-character posters from rival Red Guard factions, creating a chaotic visual environment of accusation. The form had pre-revolutionary precedents but reached its widest use in this period. Deng Xiaoping banned big-character posters in 1980 after the Democracy Wall (民主墙 Mínzhǔ Qiáng) movement used the form to advocate political liberalization.

The 小红书 xiǎo hóng shū (Little Red Book, formally Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, 毛主席语录 Máo Zhǔxí Yǔlù) was the era's defining text — a collection of Mao's sayings organized by topic, edited by Lin Biao, and issued in editions exceeding one billion copies. Owning and studying the book was mandatory; not being able to cite relevant passages on demand could mark a person as ideologically suspect. The book's physical red cover, small size, and ubiquity made it an immediately recognizable cultural artifact — one that continues to appear in antique markets and as a historical curiosity.