China

Attacks on party members

Gradual transference of the revolution to top echelons of the party was managed by a group centred on Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Chen Boda. In May 1966 Mao secretly assigned major responsibilities to the army in cultural and educational affairs. Another purpose of the Cultural Revolution, as then conceived, would be a “revolution in the superstructure”: a transformation from a bureaucratically run machine to a more popularly based system led personally by Mao and a simplified administration under his control.

Following the May instructions, the educational system received priority. “Big-character posters,” or large wall newspapers (dazibao), spread from the principal campuses in Beijing throughout the land. University officials and professors were singled out for criticism, while their students, encouraged by the central authorities, held mass meetings and began to organize. In June the government dropped examinations for university admissions and called for a reform of entrance procedures and a delay in reopening the campuses. Party officials and their wives circulated among the campuses to gain favour and to obstruct their opponents. Intrigue and political maneuvering dominated, although political lines were not at first sharply drawn or even well understood. The centres of this activity were Beijing’s schools and the inner councils of the Central Committee; the students were the activists in a game they did not fully comprehend.

This phase of the Cultural Revolution ended in August 1966 with the convening of a plenary session of the Central Committee. Mao issued his own big-character poster as a call to “Bombard the headquarters” (“Paoda silingbu”), a call to denounce and remove senior officials, and a 16-point Central Committee decision was issued in which the broad outlines for the Cultural Revolution were laid down and supporters were rallied to the revolutionary banner. The immediate aim was to seize power from “bourgeois” authorities. The locus of the struggle would be their urban strongholds. Now more than ever, Mao’s thought became the “compass for action.”

Evidently fearing that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet revolution and concerned about his own place in history, Mao threw China’s cities into turmoil in a gigantic effort to reverse the historic processes then under way. He ultimately failed in his quest, but his efforts generated problems with which his successors would have to struggle for decades. Mao adopted four goals for his Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking, to rectify the CCP, to provide China’s youth with a revolutionary experience, and to achieve specific policy changes to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. He initially pursued those goals through a massive mobilization of the country’s urban youths—organized in groups called the Red Guards—while ordering the CCP and the PLA not to suppress the movement.

When Mao formally launched the Cultural Revolution in August 1966, he had already shut down the schools. During the following months, he encouraged the Red Guards to attack all traditional values and “bourgeois” things and to put CCP officials to the test by publicly criticizing them. These attacks were known at the time as struggles against the Four Olds (i.e., old ideas, customs, culture, and habits of mind), and the movement quickly escalated to committing outrages. Many elderly people and intellectuals were physically abused, and many died. Nonetheless, Mao believed that this mobilization of urban youths would be beneficial for them and that the CCP cadres they attacked would be better for the experience. John Wilson Lewis Kenneth G. Lieberthal