From student movement to national upheaval
The Cultural Revolution began in 1966, not 1967. Mao Zedong’s campaign was launched in the spring and summer of that year, and the first wave of Red Guards, mostly university and secondary-school students, attacked teachers, officials and anything labelled old or bourgeois in the autumn. What 1967 did was change the character of the movement. It moved from students attacking targets chosen from above to a nationwide contest for power, in which rival groups claimed to be the true followers of Mao and, in many places, picked up weapons.
For that reason 1967 is generally regarded as the most violent and chaotic year of the whole decade-long episode. The movement officially lasted until 1976, but the sharpest breakdown of order came in 1967 and 1968.
The seizure of power
In January 1967 Mao encouraged rebels to take power from local Party committees and government bodies, which he suspected of protecting “capitalist roaders”. The model was set in Shanghai, where worker rebels and radical allies pushed aside the city leadership in what became known as the Shanghai January Storm. Similar seizures followed in other provinces and cities. Many of these were improvised and contested, and rebels who claimed authority often found themselves unable to run anything.
Within weeks the central leadership accepted that rebel groups alone could not govern. Mao instructed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to “support the left”, which in practice pulled soldiers into local politics. The solution adopted was the revolutionary committee, a body that was supposed to combine representatives of rebel groups, the army and veteran cadres. The first provincial-level committees appeared early in 1967, and the process was not complete until 1968.
Factions and violence
The central problem was that rebels disagreed about who the real rebels were. In most cities and many factories, groups with similar slogans split into rival organisations. Some were made up of people with a grievance against local officials; others were formed by people who, often for reasons of job or family background, wanted to defend the existing order and the officials who had protected them. Outsiders labelled them rebels and conservatives, but both claimed to be defending Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and both were convinced the other was a counter-revolutionary front.
Because Red Guard groups and worker organisations looked to different patrons in Beijing and in the regional military, the quarrels became harder to settle. In a number of places, including Chongqing and parts of Guangxi, clashes involved rifles and even heavier weapons, much of it reportedly taken from army depots or supplied by sympathetic units. Beatings, killings, public humiliation of captured opponents and mass arrests were common. Reliable figures for the whole country do not exist, and estimates of total deaths over the decade vary widely, so any single number should be treated with caution.
The Wuhan Incident
The most dramatic confrontation between the centre and the army came in the central city of Wuhan in July 1967. The local military commander, Chen Zaidao, was seen by radical groups as favouring the conservative faction, while a rival rebel organisation had the sympathy of Beijing’s Cultural Revolution leaders. When two envoys from Beijing, including the radical theorist Wang Li, went to the city to mediate, a pro-army group detained Wang Li. Zhou Enlai flew to Wuhan to deal with the crisis, and Mao himself was in the city at the time.
The outcome was a humiliation for the local military leadership: Chen Zaidao was removed from his post and the rebel side was vindicated. But the affair also worried Mao. The episode showed that a local garrison could resist the centre, and in August radical slogans calling for a purge of “the handful” of power-holders inside the army were criticised. Wang Li himself soon fell from favour. By September the leadership was telling groups to stop seizing weapons and to end armed struggle.
Liu Shaoqi
The most famous victim at the top was Liu Shaoqi, who had been head of state and was publicly labelled China’s leading “person in authority taking the capitalist road”. In 1967 the attacks became personal and physical. His wife, Wang Guangmei, was subjected to a notorious public struggle session at Tsinghua University in April, and Liu himself was reportedly criticised and mistreated in Beijing during the summer. He was stripped of his posts and formally expelled from the Party in 1968. He died in Kaifeng in November 1969 while still in custody, and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980.
Liu’s case mattered beyond one man. It showed that no official, however senior, was protected, and it set a pattern in which accusations of disloyalty could ruin careers and lives within days. Other senior figures, among them Deng Xiaoping, were also denounced, though Deng survived and returned to power.
The army and the end of the open fighting
One lasting effect of 1967 was a larger role for the military. Soldiers were asked to restore order, run factories and schools, and sit on the revolutionary committees. Some units mediated honestly; others took sides. By late 1967 and 1968, Mao concluded that the Red Guards had become too unruly, and the movement was reined in. In 1968 student groups were dismantled, workers’ teams were sent to universities, and in December Mao endorsed sending urban youth to the countryside, which removed millions of former Red Guards from the cities.
How 1967 shaped society
The effects ran through Chinese life for years. Schools and universities were closed or disrupted, and the national university entrance system did not return until 1977. Families were split by political labels, and fear of denunciation affected how people spoke and wrote. Many intellectuals, teachers and officials suffered persecution, imprisonment or death. The economy was disrupted, and the authority of the Party was damaged, even as the army grew stronger.
The movement was also felt abroad. Radical slogans circulated in the wider Maoist movement, and China’s foreign relations became tense, including a violent outburst in British-ruled Hong Kong that summer, when the Hong Kong riots drew on the mood in the mainland. Some students in the European New Left admired Mao’s challenge to established authority, though they often knew little about what was happening in China.
In 1981 the Communist Party itself described the Cultural Revolution as a decade of catastrophic turmoil, blaming Mao for serious errors while preserving his overall standing. For most historians, 1967 was the year when the movement’s promise of mass participation gave way most clearly to disorder and coercion, and the consequences shaped debates about politics, memory and authority in China for decades afterwards. Even today, Chinese public discussion of the period remains limited, and many details are still contested.