Workers joined the fray and China was plunged into what historians describe as a state of virtual civil war, with rival factions battling it out in cities across the country.īy late 1968 Mao realised his revolution had spiralled out of control. What happened next?Īfter the initial explosion of student-led “red terror”, the chaos spread rapidly. ![]() ![]() Nearly 1,800 people lost their lives in Beijing in August and September 1966 alone. Blood flowed as Mao ordered security forces not to interfere in the Red Guards’ work. Party officials, teachers and intellectuals also found themselves in the cross-hairs: they were publicly humiliated, beaten and in some cases murdered or driven to suicide after vicious “struggle sessions”. Schools and universities were closed and churches, shrines, libraries, shops and private homes ransacked or destroyed as the assault on “feudal” traditions began. ![]() By August 1966 - so-called Red August - the mayhem was in full swing as Mao’s allies urged Red Guards to destroy the “four olds” - old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. It warned that the party had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary “revisionists” who were plotting to create a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.Ī fortnight later, on 1 June, the party’s official mouthpiece newspaper urged the masses to “clear away the evil habits of the old society” by launching an all-out assault on “monsters and demons”.Ĭhinese students sprung into action, setting up Red Guard divisions in classrooms and campuses across the country. Most historians agree the Cultural Revolution began in mid-May 1966 when party chiefs in Beijing issued a document known as the “May 16 Notification”. behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement,” Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans wrote in his damning account of the Cultural Revolution, The Chairman’s New Clothes. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Imagesīut it was also an attempt by the elderly dictator, whose authority had been badly hit by the calamitous Great Famine of the 1950s, to reassert control over the party by obliterating enemies, real or imagined. so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system,” one early directive stated.įrank Dikötter, the author of a new book on the period, says Mao hoped his movement would make China the pinnacle of the socialist universe and turn him into “the man who leads planet Earth into communism.”Ĭhinese red guards during the cultural revolution in 1966. “Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road. Seventeen years after his troops seized power, Mao saw his latest political campaign as a way of reinvigorating the communist revolution by strengthening ideology and weeding out opponents. The Cultural Revolution was the brainchild of China’s ‘Great Helmsman’, Chairman Mao Zedong. Gangs of students and Red Guards attacked people wearing “bourgeois clothes” on the street, “imperialist” signs were torn down and intellectuals and party officials were murdered or driven to suicide.Īfter violence had run its bloody course, the country’s rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nothing but “grave disorder, damage and retrogression”.Īn official party reckoning described it as a catastrophe which had caused “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic” in 1949. ![]() In fact, the Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives and thrust China into 10 years of turmoil, bloodshed, hunger and stagnation. “Like the red sun rising in the east, the unprecedented Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is illuminating the land with its brilliant rays,” one editorial read. When the mass mobilisation kicked off party newspapers depicted it as an epochal struggle that would inject new life into the socialist cause. However, Mao’s decision to launch the “revolution” in May 1966 is now widely interpreted as an attempt to destroy his enemies by unleashing the people on the party and urging them to purify its ranks. Its bewildering complexity and almost unfathomable brutality was such that to this day historians struggle to make sense of everything that occurred during the period.
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