The Cultural Revolution

Podcast Transcript

In 1966, the People’s Republic of China entered what became one of the most tumultuous periods in its history.

In a spasm of revolutionary upheaval primarily led by students, almost everyone in the country, including high-ranking communist officials, was a potential target for public humiliation, denunciations, torture, and hard labor.

The result was an entire generation of Chinese whose educations and careers were lost, and who vowed never to let political extremism run amok again.

Learn more about the Cultural Revolution, what caused it, and what its purpose was on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Cultural Revolution was one of the defining periods in the history of communist China. It was a decade-long political and social upheaval from 1966 to 1976, with the most extreme periods taking place from 1966 to 1968.

It led to mass persecution, chaos, and the destruction of cultural and educational institutions throughout the country.

To understand why it happened, we need to understand China in the early 1960s and, in particular, Mao Zedong.

The Great Leap Forward, which took place from 1958 to 1962, which I covered in a previous episode, caused a famine that killed tens of millions of people.

Mao found his authority within the party significantly diminished. More pragmatic leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping had taken control of day-to-day governance and were implementing market-oriented reforms to revive the economy.

Events that had taken place in the Soviet Union also alarmed Mao. Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin after his death and the broader campaign of de-Stalinization that followed felt to Mao like an ideological retreat dressed up as reform.

He saw the new Soviet line of “peaceful coexistence” with the West, the rehabilitation of purged party members, and the elevation of expert rule as a slide toward bourgeois habits inside a socialist system.

In the Chinese communist party of language of the early 1960s, this became “revisionism,” a label that would later justify purging Chinese officials who favored stability, planning by specialists, and material incentives.

Furthermore, the Hungarian Uprising in the autumn of 1956 looked to Mao like the political price of loosening ideological control. Mao drew the lesson that once a party relaxes its grip, counterrevolution can surface, and that leaders who apologize for past excesses risk opening the door to internal political challenges.

It was in this environment that the Cultural Revolution began with what seemed a very innocuous thing.

It was a criticism of a historical play that kicked things off. The play, titled Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, was released in 1961.

The play had been written by Wu Han, a respected historian and deputy mayor of Beijing, who was also known for his scholarship on the Ming dynasty official Hai Rui, who is the subject of the play.

In the story, Hai Rui courageously criticizes the emperor for corruption and injustice, is dismissed from office, but later vindicated as a symbol of moral integrity and loyalty to the people. The play was first staged in 1961 and was popular with audiences.

At the time, Mao himself had praised historical dramas as a way to discuss politics indirectly. However, as Mao grew increasingly suspicious of his colleagues’ direction after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, he began to see the play as a veiled criticism of his own rule.

Mao’s allies, particularly his wife Jiang Qing, also known as Madam Mao, and the radical theorist Yao Wenyuan, saw an opportunity to strike at what they called “bourgeois” elements inside the Party by framing the play as evidence of counterrevolutionary thinking.

Although initially most top Party leaders viewed it as a local or academic controversy, Mao used it to expose what he considered an ideological drift among high-ranking officials.

With that seemingly minor opening, Mao then encouraged students in the spring and summer of 1966 to create posters denouncing teachers and other party officials.

By encouraging students, Mao was doing an end run around the entire Communist Party apparatus, where many of his opponents may have had positions of power.

Despite all of the communist rhetoric, this was ultimately about Mao staying in power and eliminating any opposition.

The Party then issued the “Sixteen Points” that August, a guiding document that endorsed mass criticism of “capitalist roaders.”

The term capitalist roaders comes from a direct translation of a Chinese word, which means someone is on the capitalist road.

He called upon students to form Red Guard organizations and rebel against authority figures who were supposedly taking the “capitalist road.”

The response was overwhelming.

Millions of young people, many in their teens, formed Red Guard units across the country. They saw themselves as defenders of Mao’s revolutionary vision and wielded his “Little Red Book” of quotations as both scripture and weapon.

The Red Guards unleashed a campaign to destroy the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. They ransacked homes, destroyed temples and cultural artifacts, burned books, and attacked anyone associated with traditional culture or suspected of harboring bourgeois sympathies.

Teachers, intellectuals, former landlords, and party officials became targets of humiliation and violence. Victims were subjected to “struggle sessions,” which were public denunciations where they were forced to confess their supposed crimes while being beaten, humiliated, and psychologically tortured.

By 1967, the movement had descended into widespread chaos. Red Guard factions, each claiming to be the truest followers of Mao, began fighting among themselves.

Workers formed their own revolutionary organizations, and the violence escalated dramatically. In many cities, armed battles broke out between rival groups. The economy ground toward collapse as production halted and transportation networks were disrupted.

China’s educational system essentially ceased to function. Universities closed, and secondary schools became battlegrounds for ideological warfare rather than places of learning.

An entire generation, often called the “lost generation,” had their education interrupted or terminated entirely. Millions of urban youth were eventually sent to the countryside for “re-education” by peasants, a policy that would affect their life trajectories permanently.

The persecution was systematic and brutal. Liu Shaoqi, once China’s president and Mao’s designated successor, was denounced, imprisoned, and died in custody in 1969 under horrific conditions. Deng Xiaoping was purged and sent to work in a factory.

Countless other party officials, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary citizens were imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or driven to suicide. The death toll remains disputed, with estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to several million, not counting those who died from the broader social and economic disruption.

Cultural destruction reached staggering proportions. Ancient temples were razed, historical artifacts smashed, classical literature burned, and traditional practices banned. The assault on China’s cultural heritage was unprecedented in its scope and intensity. Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, Buddhist monks, Confucian scholars, and anyone associated with pre-revolutionary culture faced persecution.

By 1968, the chaos had become so severe that even Mao recognized the need to restore some order. He called in the People’s Liberation Army to stabilize the situation and began sending Red Guards to the countryside en masse. The most violent phase subsided, but the Cultural Revolution continued, albeit in an altered form.

The period from 1969 to 1976 saw continued political campaigns, including the “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” movement, but with somewhat less chaos than the initial years.

The tale of Lin Biao is one of the most interesting to come out of the Cultural Revolution.

Lin Biao was a top military leader who rose to prominence during the Cultural Revolution. As a Mao supporter, he kept getting promoted. Eventually, he was appointed as the successor to Mao, which was a position that neither he nor anyone else wanted.

Being number two to Mao instantly put a target on your back.

Once put in this position, he did….nothing. Absolutely nothing. He expressed no opinions and said nothing other than supporting and extolling anything Mao said. This was his survival mechanism.

It didn’t do him any good because Mao eventually turned on him, primarily due to not getting along with Mao’s wife.

He was accused of plotting a coup and was killed in a plane crash in Mongolia in 1971. He is worthy of his own future episode.

The Gang of Four, led by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, consolidated power and continued to promote radical policies. However, behind the scenes, Zhou Enlai and later the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping worked to moderate the extremism and restore some functionality to the government and economy.

The Cultural Revolution officially ended with Mao’s death in September 1976. Within weeks, the Gang of Four were arrested, and the party began the long process of repudiating the movement’s excesses while carefully preserving Mao’s overall legacy.

The Cultural Revolution’s impact on China was profound. Economically, the country had lost a full decade of development. While China never experienced complete collapse, the disruption to education, research, and industrial production set the nation back significantly compared to its East Asian neighbors.

The social fabric had been torn apart in ways that would take generations to heal. The movement had encouraged children to denounce their parents, students to attack their teachers, and neighbors to betray each other.

Trust, the foundation of social cohesion, had been systematically destroyed. Families were fractured, with some members branded as revolutionaries and others as class enemies. The psychological trauma was immense and largely unaddressed.

It also has to be remembered that this was on top of the tens of millions that died in the Great Leap Forward just a few years before the start of the Cultural Revolution.

The subject of the Cultural Revolution in contemporary China remains sensitive. While officially condemned, open discussion of its details is limited. Victims have never received systematic compensation or a formal apology. There has been no truth and reconciliation process comparable to those in other countries that experienced similar traumas.

The legacy can still be seen in China’s current political culture. The Communist Party’s emphasis on stability and its suspicion of grassroots organizing partly reflects the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

The party’s tight control over education and culture similarly stems from fear of ideological movements spiraling out of control. At the same time, the nationalism and emphasis on Chinese civilization that characterizes contemporary China represent a partial restoration of the traditional culture the Cultural Revolution sought to destroy.

The final thing I’ll note is that, in an unintentional roundabout way, the Cultural Revolution played a role in China’s subsequent explosion in economic growth in the 1980s and 90s.

The Cultural Revolution didn’t just stagnate the Chinese economy; in many ways, it actually made China worse off than it had been before the revolution, especially compared to its neighbors.

Deng Xiaoping, who had been twice purged during the Cultural Revolution, embodied China’s pragmatic turn. When he regained power in 1977–78, he and other veteran officials concluded that Mao’s insistence on political purity over competence had held China back for decades.

They used the Cultural Revolution’s failures as a powerful argument for abandoning constant class struggle and reintroducing merit-based governance. The “Boluan Fanzheng” period after Mao’s death, which means “bringing order out of chaos”, restored the civil service, reopened schools and universities, reinstated entrance exams, and rehabilitated millions of intellectuals and officials who had been persecuted.

This revival of expertise and education supplied the human capital China needed for modernization.

At the same time, the trauma of the Cultural Revolution pushed the Communist Party to prioritize economic performance over ideology as its new source of legitimacy. Having seen how ideological campaigns could destroy the nation, Deng and his allies reframed Chinese communism in practical terms by noting, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

Finally, oddly enough, many of the Communist Party officials who might have objected to the reforms of Deng had been purged and were no longer around to stop the changes.

The Cultural Revolution can be considered the last in a long string of events in Chinese history, beginning in the 1800s during the century of humiliation, which hobbled and weakened China.

Once they had gotten through the terror and chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the country was finally ready for subsequent transformation.