A campaign launched from the top
The Cultural Revolution was begun by Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, in 1966. Mao had lost some of his influence in the party after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the campaign of the late 1950s that was followed by a severe famine. He feared that the revolution was being abandoned by officials who favoured more pragmatic policies, and he turned to young people and to the army to challenge them.
A party notice in May 1966 launched the movement, and in the summer students formed groups calling themselves Red Guards. They were encouraged by Mao, who received huge crowds in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square starting in August 1966. By the end of that year, schools were closed, officials and teachers were being denounced, and the movement had spread through cities across the country.
What the Red Guards did
Red Guards attacked what they called the “four olds”: old ideas, culture, customs and habits. Temples, books and works of art were destroyed. Teachers, intellectuals, and people with a suspect family background were publicly humiliated, beaten, and in many cases driven to suicide or killed. Mao’s sayings, collected in the so-called Little Red Book, were carried and recited as a kind of creed, and a cult of personality grew around him.
Senior officials were targeted as well. Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, and Deng Xiaoping were criticised as supporters of the “capitalist road”, and both lost their posts. Liu would be formally expelled from the party in 1968 and died in 1969.
1967: from denunciation to seizure of power
If 1966 was the year of mass rallies, 1967 was the year in which the contest turned into a struggle for actual authority. In January, rebel groups in Shanghai took over the city’s newspapers and then its administration, in what became known as the January storm or January power seizures. The radical leaders Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan were prominent in the Shanghai events. The seizure was praised by Mao, and similar takeovers spread to other provinces and to government bodies.
The new bodies were meant to replace the old party committees. In Shanghai, a commune was proclaimed in February, though it was soon replaced by a “revolutionary committee”, a form that combined rebels, army representatives and surviving officials. This became the model elsewhere.
Factions and the army
The weakness of the approach soon showed. The rebels did not form a single group. Rival factions each claimed to be the true defenders of Mao Thought, and they fought one another over factories, universities and local governments. Some fought with fists and sticks, while in some places weapons seized from army depots were used. Production fell, transport was disrupted, and in several regions civil order broke down.
In late January, the army was ordered to support the left, but without clear guidance on which groups counted. Local commanders often backed whichever faction they considered reliable, and that sometimes meant suppression of others, which in turn caused resentment.
A major crisis came in Wuhan in July, when a dispute between a conservative faction supported by the local military commander and radicals backed by Beijing led to violence and the temporary detention of officials sent from the capital. The central authorities responded by removing the commander, and the incident is often cited as a warning that the military could not be taken for granted.
Later in the summer, radicals pushed attacks on the army and even took over parts of the foreign ministry, and some foreign missions were attacked. Premier Zhou Enlai worked behind the scenes to limit the damage and protect key institutions, and by September Mao and the leadership were calling for order and unity.
China and the world
The turmoil had effects abroad. Chinese diplomats were recalled in large numbers, and relations with several states suffered. Chinese communities overseas were drawn into disputes, and in the colony next door the Hong Kong riots were fed by the same radical mood. In the West, some young radicals who were part of the student movement admired the Chinese example, often with limited knowledge of what was happening, while Mao’s writings circulated among Western leftists.
Winding down
From late 1967 into 1968, the leadership tried to restore order. Red Guard groups were curbed, and in 1968 millions of urban youths were sent to the countryside, where they were supposed to learn from the peasants. Revolutionary committees were set up across the provinces, and the army became the dominant force in many of them.
The wider Cultural Revolution is usually dated to Mao’s death and the arrest of the “Gang of Four” in 1976. Estimates of the number of deaths vary widely, from several hundred thousand to well over a million, and historians remain cautious about precise figures. The Chinese Communist Party later described the period as a catastrophe. Its legacy included damaged schooling, lost cultural heritage, and a deep suspicion of mass campaigns.