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What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for Our Current Moment?

On September 24, 1970, the Rolling Stones interrupted their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris to invite a French Maoist called Serge July onstage. News of an earthshaking event called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been trickling out of China since 1966. Information was scarce, but many writers and activists in the West who were opposed to the United States and its war in Vietnam were becoming fascinated with Mao Zedong , their earlier infatuation with Soviet-style Marxism having soured. Jean-Paul Sartre hawked copies of a banned Maoist newspaper in Paris, and Michel Foucault was among those who turned to China for political inspiration, in what Sartre called “new forms of class struggle in a period of organized capitalism.”

Editors at the influential French periodical Tel Quel learned Chinese in order to translate Mao’s poetry. One of them was the feminist critic Julia Kristeva , who later travelled to China with Roland Barthes . Women’s-liberation movements in the West embraced Mao’s slogan “Women hold up half the sky.” In 1967, the Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale financed the purchase of guns by selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book. In 1971, John Lennon said that he now wore a Mao badge and distanced himself from the 1968 Beatles song “Revolution,” which claimed, “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.” But the Rolling Stones’ Paris concert was Maoism’s biggest popular outing. July, who, with Sartre, later co-founded the newspaper Libération , asked the throng to support French fellow-Maoists facing imprisonment for their beliefs. There was a standing ovation, and then Mick Jagger launched into “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Western intellectuals and artists would have felt much less sympathy for the Devil had they heard about the ordeals of their counterparts in China, as described in “ The World Turned Upside Down ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a thick catalogue of gruesome atrocities, blunders, bedlam, and ideological dissimulation, by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng. Yang mentions a group of elderly writers in Beijing who, in August, 1966, three months after Mao formally launched the Cultural Revolution, were denounced as “ox demons and snake spirits” (Mao’s preferred term for class enemies) and flogged with belt buckles and bamboo sticks by teen-age girls. Among the writers subjected to this early “struggle session” was the novelist Lao She, the world-famous author of “ Rickshaw Boy .” He killed himself the following day.

There were other events that month—“bloody August,” as it came to be called—that might have made Foucault reconsider his view of Maoism as anti-authoritarian praxis. At a prestigious secondary school in Beijing, attended by the daughters of both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping , students savagely beat a teacher named Bian Zhongyun and left her dying in a handcart. As detailed in a large-character poster that was adopted by cultural revolutionaries across China, one of the indictments against Bian was her inadequate esteem for Mao. While taking her students through an earthquake drill, she had failed to stress the importance of rescuing the Chairman’s portrait.

Red Guards—a pseudo-military designation adopted by secondary-school and university students who saw themselves as the Chairman’s sentinels—soon appeared all over China, charging people with manifestly ridiculous crimes and physically assaulting them before jeering crowds. Much murderous insanity erupted after 1966, but the Cultural Revolution’s most iconic images remain those of the struggle sessions: victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks. Such pictures, and others, in “ Forbidden Memory ” (Potomac), by the Tibetan activist and poet Tsering Woeser, show that even Tibet, the far-flung region that China had occupied since 1950, did not escape the turmoil. Woeser describes the devastation wrought on Tibet’s Buddhist traditions by a campaign to humiliate the elderly and to obliterate what were known as the Four Olds—“old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes.” The photographs in Woeser’s book were taken by her father, a soldier in the Chinese military, and found by her after he died. There are vandalized monasteries and bonfires of books and manuscripts—a rare pictorial record of a tragedy in which ideological delirium turned ordinary people into monsters who devoured their own. (Notably, almost all the persecutors in the photographs are Tibetan, not Han Chinese.) In one revealing photo, Tibet’s most famous female lama, once hailed as a true patriot for spurning the Dalai Lama, cowers before a young Tibetan woman who has her fists raised.

Closer to the center of things, in Xi’an, the Red Guards paraded Xi Zhongxun, a stalwart of the Chinese Communist Revolution who had fallen out with Mao, around on a truck and then beat him. His wife, in Beijing, was forced to publicly denounce their son— Xi Jinping , China’s current President. Xi Jinping’s half sister was, according to official accounts, “persecuted to death”; most probably, like many people tortured by the Red Guards, she committed suicide. Xi spent years living in a cave dwelling, one of sixteen million youths exiled to the countryside by Mao.

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According to estimates quoted by Yang, as many as a million and a half people were killed, thirty-six million persecuted, and a hundred million altogether affected in a countrywide upheaval that lasted, with varying intensity, for a decade—from 1966 to 1976, when Mao died. Mao’s decrees, faithfully amplified by the People’s Daily , which exhorted readers to “sweep away the monsters and demons,” gave people license to unleash their id. In Guangxi Province, where the number of confirmed murder victims reached nearly ninety thousand, some killers consumed the flesh of their victims. In Hunan Province, members of two rival factions filled a river with bloated corpses. A dam downstream became clogged, its reservoir shimmering red.

In 1981, the Chinese Communist Party described the Cultural Revolution as an error. It trod carefully around Mao’s role, instead blaming the excesses on his wife, Jiang Qing, and three other ultra-Maoists—collectively known, and feared, as the Gang of Four. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader supervising this pseudo-autopsy, had been maltreated during the Cultural Revolution, but he had also abetted it, and was eager to indefinitely postpone close scrutiny. He urged the Chinese to “unite and look forward” ( tuanjie yizhi xiang qian kan ). As class struggle gave way to a scramble for upward mobility, the sheer expediency of this repudiation of the past was captured in a popular pun on Deng’s slogan: “look for money” ( xiang qian kan ).

In the four decades since, China has moved from being the headquarters of world revolution to being the epicenter of global capitalism. Its leaders can plausibly claim to have engineered the swiftest economic reversal in history: the redemption from extreme poverty of hundreds of millions of people in less than three decades, and the construction of modern infrastructure. Some great enigmas, however, remain unsolved: How did a well-organized, disciplined, and successful political party disembowel itself? How did a tightly centralized state unravel so quickly? How could siblings, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates turn on one another so viciously? And how did victims and persecutors—the roles changing with bewildering speed—live with each other afterward? Full explanations are missing not only because archives are mostly inaccessible to scholars but also because the Cultural Revolution was fundamentally a civil war, implicating almost all of China’s leaders. Discussion of it is so fraught with taboo in China that Yang does not even mention Xi Jinping, surely the most prominent and consequential survivor today of Mao’s “chaos under heaven.”

Notwithstanding this strategic omission, Yang’s book offers the most comprehensive journalistic account yet of contemporary China’s foundational trauma. Memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, first appearing in the nineteen-eighties, belong by now to a distinct nonfiction genre—from confessions by repentant former Red Guards (Jung Chang’s “ Wild Swans ,” Ma Bo’s “ Blood Red Sunset ”) to searing accounts by victims (Ji Xianlin’s “ The Cowshed ”) to family sagas (Aiping Mu’s “ The Vermilion Gate ”). The period’s outrages animate the work of many of China’s prominent novelists, such as Wang Anyi, Mo Yan , Su Tong, and, most conspicuously, Yu Hua , whose two-volume novel “ Brothers ” includes an extended description of a lynching, with details that seem implausible but that are amply verified by eyewitness testimony.

Yang provides the larger political backdrop to these granular accounts of cruelty and suffering. At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, he was studying engineering at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, and he was one of the many students who travelled around the country to promote the cause. In 1968, he became a reporter for Xinhua News Agency, a position that gave him access to many otherwise unreachable sources. This vantage enabled him to write “ Tombstone ” (2012), a well-regarded history of the Great Famine, caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The new book is almost a sequel, and Mao remains the central figure: China’s unchallenged leader, as determined as ever to fast-forward the country into genuine Communism. With the Great Leap Forward, Mao had hoped to industrialize China by encouraging household steel production. With the Cultural Revolution, he seemed to sideline economic development in favor of a large-scale engineering of human souls and minds. Social equality, in this view, would come about by plunging the Chinese into “continuous revolution,” a fierce class struggle that would permanently inflame the political consciousness of the masses.

Yang describes the background to Mao’s change of direction. The spectacle of Khrushchev denouncing Stalin, in 1956, only to be himself removed and disgraced, in 1964, made Mao increasingly prone to see “revisionists” at every turn. He feared that the Chinese Revolution, achieved at tremendous cost, risked decaying into a self-aggrandizing, Soviet-style bureaucracy, remote from ordinary people. Mao was also smarting from the obvious failure of his economic policies, and from implicit criticism by colleagues such as Liu Shaoqi, China’s de-jure head of state from 1959 onward. Yang describes, in often overwhelming detail, the intricate internal power struggle that eventually erupted into the Cultural Revolution—with Mao variously consulting and shunning a small group of confidants, including his wife, a former actress; China’s long-standing Premier, Zhou Enlai; and the military hero Lin Biao, who had replaced Peng Dehuai, a strong critic of Mao, as the Minister of Defense in 1959, and proceeded to turn the People’s Liberation Army into a pro-Mao redoubt.

Sensing political opposition in his own party, Mao reached beyond it, to people previously not active in politics, for allies. He tapped into widespread grievance among peasants and workers who felt that the Chinese Revolution was not working out for them. In particular, the Red Guards gave Mao a way of bypassing the Party and securing the personal fealty of the fervent rank and file. As the newly empowered students formed ad-hoc organizations, and assaulted institutions and figures of authority, Mao proclaimed that “to rebel is justified,” and that students should not hesitate to “bombard the headquarters.” In 1966, he frequently appeared in Tiananmen Square, wearing a red armband, with hundreds of thousands of Red Guards waving flags and books. Many of his fans avoided washing their hands after shaking his. Mao’s own hands were once so damaged by all the pressing of callow flesh that he was unable to write for days afterward. Predictably, though, he soon lost control of the world he had turned upside down.

Late in 1966, the younger Red Guards were challenged by an older cohort, who formed competing Red Guard units; they, in turn, were challenged by heavily armed “rebel forces.” All factions claimed recognition as the true voice of the Chairman. By early 1967, workers had joined the fray, most significantly in Shanghai, where they surpassed Red Guards in revolutionary fervor. Mao became nervous about the “people’s commune” they established, though he and his followers had often upheld the Paris Commune, from 1871, as a model of mass democracy. So ferocious was one military mutiny, in Wuhan, that Mao, who had arrived in the city to mediate between rival groups, had to flee in a military jet, amid rumors that a swimmer with a knife in his mouth had been spotted in the lake by Mao’s villa. “Which direction are we going?” the pilot asked Mao as he boarded the plane. “Just take off first,” Mao replied.

Growing alarmed by the sight of continuous revolution, Mao tried to restore order in the cities, exiling millions of young urban men and women to the countryside to “learn from the peasants.” He purged Liu Shaoqi, who died shortly thereafter, and Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor-repair factory in a remote rural province. Mao increasingly turned to the People’s Liberation Army to establish control. He replaced broken structures of government with “revolutionary committees.” These committees, dominated by Army commanders, were effectively a form of military dictatorship in many parts of China. Partly in order to keep the military on his side, Mao named his Defense Minister, Lin Biao, as his official successor, in October, 1968. But a border conflict with the Soviet Union the following year further expanded the military’s power, and a paranoid Mao, soon regretting his move, sought to isolate Lin. In an extraordinary turn of events, in 1971, Lin died in a plane crash in Mongolia with several of his family members; allegedly, he was fleeing China after failing to assassinate Mao.

Prompted, even forced, by internal crises and external challenges, Mao opened China’s doors to the United States and, in early 1972, received Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Beijing, much to the bewilderment of those in the West who had seen China as leading a global resistance to American imperialism. (When Kissinger flattered Mao, saying that students at Harvard University had pored over his collected works, he demurely replied, “There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.”) The following year, Mao brought back Deng Xiaoping, entrusting him with China’s ailing economy. Then he changed his mind again, once it became apparent that the lingering malevolence of the Gang of Four was causing people to rally behind Deng. Mao had just re-purged Deng and launched a new campaign against Deng’s “capitalist roading” when, in September, 1976, he died. Within a month, the Gang of Four was in prison. (Jiang Qing, given a life sentence, spent her time in jail making dolls for export, until authorities noticed that she embroidered her name on all of them; she killed herself in 1991.) The Cultural Revolution was over, and Deng was soon ushering China into an era of willed amnesia and “looking for money.”

The surreal events of the Cultural Revolution seem far removed from a country that today has, by some estimates, the world’s largest concentration of billionaires. Yet Xi Jinping’s policies, which prioritize stability and economic growth above all, serve as a reminder of how fundamentally the Cultural Revolution reordered Chinese politics and society. Yang, although obliged to omit Xi’s personal trajectory—from son of Mao’s comrade to China’s supreme leader—nonetheless leaves his readers in no doubt about the “ultimate victor” of the Cultural Revolution: what he calls the “bureaucratic clique,” and the children of the privileged. Senior Party cadres and officials, once restored to their positions, were able to usher their offspring into the best universities. In the system Deng built after the Cultural Revolution, a much bigger bureaucracy was conceived to “manage society.” Deeply networked within China’s wealthy classes, the bureaucratic clique came to control “all the country’s resources and the direction of reform,” deciding “who would pay the costs of reforms and how the benefits of reform would be distributed.” Andrew Walder, who has published several authoritative books on Maoist China, puts it bluntly: “China today is the very definition of what the Cultural Revolution was intended to forestall”—namely, a “capitalist oligarchy with unprecedented levels of corruption and inequality.”

Yang stresses the need for a political system in China that both restricts arbitrary power and cages the “rapaciousness” of capital. But the Cultural Revolution has instilled in many Chinese people a politically paralyzing lesson—that attempts to achieve social equality can go calamitously wrong. The Chinese critic Wang Hui has pointed out that criticisms of China’s many problems are often met with a potent accusation: “So, do you want to return to the days of the Cultural Revolution?” As Xi Jinping turns the world’s largest revolutionary party into the world’s most successful conservative institution, he is undoubtedly helped by this deeply ingrained fear of anarchy.

Outside China, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is even more complex. Julia Lovell, in her recent study, “ Maoism: A Global History ,” demonstrates how ill-informed Western fervor for Mao eventually helped discredit and divide the left in Europe and in America, enabling the political right to claim a moral high ground. Many zealous adepts of Maoism in the West turned to highlighting the evils of ideological and religious extremism. Sympathy for nonwhite victims of imperialism and slavery, and struggling postcolonial peoples in general, came to be stigmatized as a sign of excessive sentimentality and guilt. This journey from Third Worldism to Western supremacism can be traced in the titles of three books from the past four decades by Pascal Bruckner, one of the French dabblers in Maoism—“The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt” (1983), “The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism” (2006), and “An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt” (2017).

Misperceptions of China abound in this sectarian discourse. As the Soviet Union imploded after a failed experiment with political and economic reform, China, the last surviving Communist superpower, was presumed to have no option but to embrace Western-style multiparty democracy as well as capitalism. But China has managed to postpone the end of history—largely thanks to the Cultural Revolution. In the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his hopeful plans for perestroika and glasnost, the Communist Party and the military had faced little domestic challenge to their authority since the death of Stalin; along with bureaucratic cliques that had serenely fattened themselves during decades of economic and political stagnation, they were able to contest, and finally thwart, Gorbachev’s vision. In China, by contrast, such institutions had been greatly damaged by the Cultural Revolution, with the result that Deng, setting out to rebuild them in his image, faced much less opposition. Class struggle during the Cultural Revolution had left the old power holders as well as the revolutionary masses utterly exhausted, desperate for stability and peace. Deng shored up his authority and appeal by reinstating purged and disgraced officials and by rehabilitating many victims of the Red Guards, including, posthumously, the novelist Lao She.

During the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had rejected all emendations to his economic playbook. Even when China seemed on the verge of economic collapse, he railed against “capitalist roading.” Deng not only accelerated the marketization of the Chinese economy but also strengthened the party that Mao had done so much to undermine, promoting faceless officials known for their administrative and technical competence to senior positions. China’s unique “model”—a market economy supervised by a technocratic party-state—could only have been erected on ground brutally levelled by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

“History,” E. M. Cioran once wrote, “is irony on the move .” Bearing out this maxim, cultural revolutions have now erupted right in the heart of Western democracies. Chaos-loving leaders have grasped power by promising to return sovereignty to the people and by denouncing political-party apparatuses. Mao, who was convinced that “anyone who wants to overturn a regime needs to first create public opinion,” wouldn’t have failed to recognize that the phenomenon commonly termed “populism” has exposed some old and insoluble conundrums: Who or what does a political party represent? How can political representation work in a society consisting of manifold socioeconomic groups with clashing interests?

The appeal of Maoism for many Western activists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies came from its promise of spontaneous direct democracy—political engagement outside the conventional framework of elections and parties. This seemed a way out of a crisis caused by calcified party bureaucracies, self-serving élites, and their seemingly uncontrollable disasters, such as the endless war in Vietnam. That breakdown of political representation, which provoked uprisings on the left, has now occurred on an enlarged scale in the West, and it is aggravated by attempts, this time by an insurgent ultra-right, to forge popular sovereignty, overthrow the old ruling class, and smash its most sacred norms. The great question of China’s Maoist experiment looms over the United States as Donald Trump vacates the White House: Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?

The Trumpian assault on the West’s “olds” has long been in the making, and it is, at least partly, a consequence of political decay and intellectual ossification—akin to what Mao diagnosed in his own party. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, a consensus about the virtues of deregulation, financialization, privatization, and international trade bound Democrats to Republicans (and Tories to New Labour in Britain). Political parties steadily lost their old and distinctive identities as representatives of particular classes and groups; they were no longer political antagonists working to leverage their basic principles—social welfare for the liberal left, stability and continuity for the conservative right—into policies. Instead, they became bureaucratic machines, working primarily to advance the interests of a few politicians and their sponsors.

In 2010, Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through “mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties”—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.” Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments.

Trump failed to purge all the old élites, largely because he was forced to depend on them, and the Proud Boys never came close to matching the ferocity and reach of the Red Guards. Nevertheless, Trump’s most devoted followers, whether assaulting his opponents or bombarding the headquarters in Washington, D.C., took their society to the brink of civil war while their chairman openly delighted in chaos under heaven. Order appears to have been temporarily restored (in part by Big Tech, one of Trump’s enablers). But the problem of political representation in a polarized, unequal, and now economically debilitated society remains treacherously unresolved. Four traumatic years of Trump are passing into history, but the United States seems to have completed only the first phase of its own cultural revolution. ♦

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Cultural Revolution

Introduction, general overviews.

• Bibliographies, Primary Documents, and Reference Works
• Origins and Prelude
• Mass Politics and Red Guard Factionalism
• Violence and Political Victimization
• Education and Culture
• Mao Zedong and His Cult
• The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces

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Cultural Revolution by Yiching Wu LAST REVIEWED: 25 February 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 25 February 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0125

The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and ended with the close of the Mao era in 1976, was the most profound crisis that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has ever undergone. The sight of widespread rebel attacks on the party-state authorities, instigated by the head of the same apparatus, was extraordinary. Beginning in the late 1950s, Mao’s increasing dissatisfaction with the Soviet model of centralized, bureaucratic socialism was exemplified by his theory of “continuous revolution,” which stressed that taking state power was not the end point of the revolution. He had also lost faith in the methods of top-down mobilization that had been the hallmark of party campaigns. The ferocious movement erupted in 1966 with Mao mobilizing the country’s youth to attack the alleged “capitalist power-holders” in the ruling Communist Party and remnants of prerevolutionary elites, who he believed had corrupted the revolutionary ranks. Within months, party and state authorities across the country became paralyzed and virtually collapsed, and the Red Guard movement unleashed by Mao degenerated into rampant factional conflicts. Only slowly and painfully was demobilization of the divided mass movement, restoration of order, and political recentralization achieved by deploying the Chinese army, and by establishing the so-called “revolutionary committees” as new organs of local administrative power. While the freewheeling mass politics had been largely terminated by 1968–1969, militant ideological rhetoric continued, and radical educational and cultural policies were advocated until the end of the Mao era. In post-Mao China, scholarly and public discussion of the Cultural Revolution in particular and the Mao era in general is subject to severe restrictions. History textbooks continue to abide by the official view of party history originally formulated in the early 1980s (collected in Schoenhals 1996 , cited under Bibliographies, Primary Documents, and Reference Works ). Government archives from the mid-1960s onward remain largely inaccessible. That the Chinese government displays heightened sensitivities around the subject is indicative of its anxiety that academic probing and popular discussions may undermine the legitimacy of the ruling party in a rapidly changing country fraught with social and political tensions.

A number of scholarly works in both English and Chinese aim to provide an overview of the Cultural Revolution; its origins and causes; key figures, events, and developments; and consequences. Students and general readers new to the topic will gain the most by starting with Kraus 2012 , in which a veteran scholar of the Mao era provides the most concise and accessible account of the Cultural Revolution. Wang 2006 (originally published in 1988) is an early general account published in China. Even though it was authored more than a quarter of a century ago by a CCP party historian, this well-researched and detailed account still provides one of the best accounts in the Chinese language. MacFarquhar and Fairbank 1991 synthesizes the status of the field of Cultural Revolution scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006 and Bu 2008 provide the most detailed and authoritative general accounts of the Cultural Revolution to date, in English and Chinese, respectively. Esherick, et al. 2006 represents the new wave of scholarship on the Cultural Revolution that draws from a wide variety of recently available primary sources. Providing comprehensive coverage of the Mao era in its entirety, both Meisner 1999 and Walder 2015 also contain detailed discussions of key developments and events of the Cultural Revolution decade, as well as its aftermath and multifaceted legacies in post-Mao Chinese society and politics.

Bu Weihua 卜伟华. Zalan jiushijie: Wenhua dageming de dongluan yu haojie, 1966–1968 (砸烂旧世界：文化大革命的动乱与浩劫, 1966–1968). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2008.

A highly detailed account of the most turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution, authored by one of the most respected Cultural Revolution scholars in China. The best and most up-to-date general account of the Cultural Revolution published in the Chinese language.

Esherick, Joseph, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder, eds. The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

A collection of eight case studies that explore how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary people. The volume represents the wave of scholarship that draws from a wide range of newly available materials including local gazetteers, archival sources, biographies, and memoirs, as well as interviews of participants.

Kraus, Richard. The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Condenses the extraordinarily complex history of the Cultural Revolution into a slim, highly lucid volume. Offers readers a quick overview of topics ranging from Mao and elite politics, to changes in everyday life, culture and art, the economy, and foreign relations.

MacFarquhar, Roderick, and John King Fairbank, eds. The Cambridge History of China . Vol. 15, The People’s Republic , Part 2: Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Includes thirteen essays by veteran China scholars commissioned to synthesize the status of knowledge in the study of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. The volume is divided into four parts, examining, respectively, political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural and educational aspects of Mao’s last decade.

MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Based on extensive reading in primary sources, this 800-page book provides a comprehensive account of the entire Cultural Revolution decade, with a special focus on high-level politics around Mao and those close to him. Authored by two of the most respected experts of the Cultural Revolution.

Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic . 3d ed. New York: Free Press, 1999.

A widely used textbook on the history of the Mao era, covering the PRC’s early years, the Hundred Flowers movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution decade, and early post-Mao transitions. Part Four of the book (over 120 pages) provides a comprehensive and mostly balanced account of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.

Walder, Andrew. China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.4159/9780674286689

A synthesis of the scholarship on Mao’s China, authored by one of the most established experts in the field. More than one-third of the book (chapters 9–13) is devoted to the Cultural Revolution years, based on both secondary scholarship and the author’s own extensive research.

Wang Nianyi 王年一. Dadongluan de niandai (大动乱的年代). Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2006.

Originally published 1988. A chronologically arranged general history of the Cultural Revolution, authored by a prominent Chinese party historian. Based on research conducted and primary sources available in the first decade after the closure of the Mao era.

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"Mao's Last Revolution": China's Cultural Transformation

• Denise Y. Ho

The beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 heralded a decade-long period of political turmoil that included attacks on alleged class enemies, the toppling of Party officials high and low, and the reinstatement of political control via revolutionary committees supported by the military. The Cultural Revolution was simultaneously a political and a cultural movement, aiming not only at political upheaval but also the transformation of social and cultural life through Mao Zedong Thought.

An exhibition of Mao badges at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Anren, Sichuan Province, a private collection of Mao-era artifacts. Photo by the author. 

Historians refer to China’s Mao years as the period from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until his death in 1976. The Cultural Revolution decade that concluded the Mao years has been called “Mao’s Last Revolution,” the peak of high socialism. In 1981, the Chinese Communist Party offered its verdict of this era, but both popular memory and recent scholarship challenge the official interpretation.

The Cultural Revolution as Anniversary

What was the official beginning of the Cultural Revolution?

The scholars Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals call Mao’s attacks on the historian Wu Han in early 1966 the Cultural Revolution’s “first salvos.” This year journalists and others—including the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily —chose May 16 as the date when Mao Zedong articulated the justification for Cultural Revolution.

This article uses August 8 as the date when the central leadership adopted a decision on the Cultural Revolution, one that was published in the newspaper the following day.

The convention for marking the end of the Cultural Revolution is less ambiguous; most link it to Mao’s death in September of 1976, or to the subsequent arrest and trial of the Gang of Four , a group of political allies that included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing.

By the Communist Party’s own official verdict in 1981, known as the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party,” the Cultural Revolution lasted from May 1966 to October 1976. The resolution acknowledged the period’s tragedies and called them mistakes, laying blame at the feet of the Gang of Four and others, including Mao himself.

However, it was also a document of affirmation, one that—in condemning the Cultural Revolution’s excesses as leftist mistakes—underscored the priorities of socialism, the leadership of the Party, and Mao’s revolutionary legacy. Thirty-five years later this official pronouncement remains the accepted interpretation. Writing on the fiftieth anniversary this May, the  People’s Daily reiterated that the resolution “gave correct conclusions on a succession of major historical issues,” and that these conclusions “possess unshakable scientific truth and authority.”

But the very need to state that the official historical interpretation is true belies a uniform and authoritative understanding. The Cultural Revolution, on the contrary, remains a period for historical debate. Just as we might debate what date marked its beginnings, we might also debate what the Cultural Revolution was. New accounts, both popular and scholarly, reveal multiple understandings of the Cultural Revolution: what it was, what it was to whom, and why it mattered.

The Cultural Revolution as High Politics

In its beginnings, the Cultural Revolution was viewed from the lens of high politics. The journalists who observed as it unfolded made note of hierarchies of power, and the political scientists who wrote its first histories used the sources then accessible, official news reports and speeches that were shaped and given by those in political control.

The Cultural Revolution as high politics is the story of Mao and his inner circle, of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, of loyalty and betrayal. The milestones of this narrative include the attack on and fall of Liu Shaoqi , the Chinese head of state, and later the alleged planned coup and mysterious death of Lin Biao , Mao’s right hand man.

“The Chinese People's Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought,” a propaganda poster from the Cultural Revolution featuring Mao, 1969.

The 1981 resolution is in large part a story of high politics; it exonerates Liu and excoriates Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. Though the resolution makes brief mention of the “masses” and the “people” as workers, peasants, soldiers, intellectuals, youth, and officials, they are a faceless and nameless backdrop to the drama of central power.

And yet we know that the Cultural Revolution as a political movement was far more than high politics. As ordinary people experienced it, the Cultural Revolution was decidedly local, whether it became factional fighting within one’s school or work unit, or attacks on local powerholders and the creation of new revolutionary committees, or punishment and violence meted on class enemies old and new.

In a recent book, historians Jeremy Brown and Matthew Johnson highlight the difficulty of trying to separate out state officials from others in society. They call instead for a focus on everyday life at the grassroots because this was a time when state and society at the local level shared the same face. To look beyond high politics is also to acknowledge that there were many Cultural Revolutions.

The Cultural Revolution as Red Guards

Use the word “Cultural Revolution” and people think immediately of the iconic Red Guards . There is good reason for this: Mao himself celebrated youth, young people were truly inspired to make revolution, the Red Guards were—through their actions and their portrayal—made a symbol of the Cultural Revolution.

They flooded the streets in military uniforms to destroy the “old world,” they gathered by the million in rallies on Tian’anmen Square , and they went on epic journeys to reenact the Red Army’s historic Long March and to “exchange revolutionary experience.” Red Guards were both the sources of terror and the subjects of propaganda, Chairman Mao’s “revolutionary successors.” They were demobilized and sent to the country by 1968, becoming the generation of the “sent-down youth” and coming of age in exile.

Holding a copy of ”Selected Works of Mao Zedong," Red Guards are featured on the cover of a Guangxi elementary school textbook, 1971.

For young people the Cultural Revolution had its own chronology: the heady days of 1966, their rustification (moving from urban areas to the countryside) in 1968, and then long years of waiting before opportunities to go home were even possible.

But if Red Guards were the most visible—and today most remembered—group of participants, they were by no means the only one. Many young people did not participate in the Red Guard movement, and for them these years were marked by political apathy or other kinds of intellectual searching. Unmoored by the strictures of school and adult authority, they wandered and read forbidden books.

And of course, our focus on young people who would have been at school is to privilege a certain group. In Shanghai, for example, the Cultural Revolution’s participants included the industrial city’s workers, many of whom were discontent with stagnant economic conditions and systemic and rigid class structures. Other cities were engulfed with such factional violence to such an extent that order was restored only through military takeover.

However, it is the Red Guards who come to mind first, for a number of reasons—they were and are an icon that inspired others in the Global 1960s, and the youth of this generation became today’s leadership. In the Red Guards rest two central tropes of the Cultural Revolution: the utopianism of youth and the danger of chaos. The hot blood of youth is easier to forgive than the machine of the state, and chaos is easier to blame than power.

The Cultural Revolution as Urban and Intellectual

Scholars of the Mao period often make the point that we know much more of the Cultural Revolution, with its estimated over one million deaths, than we know of the Great Leap Forward movement and its subsequent rural famine (1958-1961), which claimed an estimated thirty million deaths. This is partly because many of those who suffered in the Cultural Revolution were intellectuals, but this is also because intellectuals are people who write, and after the Cultural Revolution these victims’ memoirs, literature, and essays were ways in which people could make sense of its suffering.

When people refer to a Cultural Revolution’s “lost generation,” they usually mean the young people who were sent to the countryside and who received limited schooling. But another way to think of a “lost generation” is to think of the elder generations who were silenced by previous political campaigns, who spent the decade imprisoned in so-called “ox pens” and assigned to menial labor, and who lost the opportunity to build “New China,” a chance some even returned from abroad to pursue. And of course many did not live to see the Cultural Revolution’s conclusion nor their names rehabilitated.

Without denying the tragedy of urban intellectuals, new scholarship has turned to the countryside to uncover different narratives. Some scholars, comparing the Mao years to the post-Mao years of reform , argue that some Cultural Revolution policies had a leveling effect that brought positive benefits to the countryside, including educational opportunities at all levels. Others have found the emergence of economic strategies that went against the planned economy, suggesting that reform-era policies built on a previous record of success.

But the countryside also had its tragedies. The sociologist Yang Su, for example, has shown how episodes of collective killings unfolded in the countryside in Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, the distance from a center of power creating the conditions for violence against supposed class enemies. Systemic and targeted violence continued to unfold in later Cultural Revolution campaigns; unlike the Red Guard movement, this violence took place away from the public eye. We are only starting to explore the Cultural Revolution experience of those doubly marginalized: in rural areas and of ethnic minority status.

The Cultural Revolution as Social Transformation

The Cultural Revolution was the culmination of Mao’s efforts to transform Chinese society. This was manifest not only in slogans to “bombard the headquarters” and “overturn heaven-and-earth,” but also in the movement’s very premise. If others in the Communist Party leadership had believed that transforming society’s economic structure would ultimately lead to cultural transformation, Mao suggested otherwise: cultural transformation would herald the victory of China’s revolution.

"Eliminate the Four Olds and Establish the Four News," 1967 propaganda poster.

To be sure, the Cultural Revolution—and the Mao years at large—did change Chinese society: it overturned traditional family relationships, it called knowledge into question (substituting “red” for “expert”), it discredited authority political and intellectual, and it defined class not just in terms of property but also through history, standpoint, and behavior. Some critics of the Cultural Revolution today regard it as period in which traditional Chinese society was destroyed, with deep repercussions in our present.

Yet there is another way of framing the narrative of social transformation, one that takes Cultural Revolution rhetoric at face value. That is, that the Cultural Revolution was truly—in its origins—an attempt to prevent revisionism from taking hold in China’s Communist Revolution, that it was an attack on the class privilege that arose from socialist China’s bureaucratic system, and that it was an argument that class behavior should matter more than class background.

Studying bottom-up responses, what he calls “the Cultural Revolution at the margins,” anthropologist Yiching Wu makes the case that some individuals did take all of Mao’s claims seriously, but in their—sometimes brutal—silencing, the state foreclosed discussion of both these critiques and their alternate utopian visions. This version of the Cultural Revolution story is a foundation narrative for today’s authoritarianism.

The Cultural Revolution as History

Can the Cultural Revolution be history?

For the Chinese Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution is history in the sense that it is past. There was a verdict in 1981, and an historical accounting that rendered Mao Zedong seventy percent good and thirty percent bad. If the 1981 resolution concluded by discussing economic gains—among others—achieved during the ten years of turmoil, today’s Chinese regime under Xi Jinping claims that the same document has “withstood the test of experience, the test of the people, and the test of history.”

What the People’s Daily means by “the test of the people” is unclear, but by “the test of history” the editorialist argues that the post-Mao era of reform was successful because it negated the Cultural Revolution. He also criticizes “meddling from the left and the right that focuses on the problems of the Cultural Revolution,” suggesting that somehow any investigation that does not accord with official interpretation might lead China on a backward slide to 1966.

On the side of the former home of the landlord Liu Wencai in Anren, Sichuan Province, remnants of a Mao Zedong quotation linger from the Cultural Revolution. Photo by the author.

But if “being history” is to be examined, researched, analyzed, critiqued, and debated, then the official history of the Cultural Revolution is not history. In China today, many individuals—from amateur historians who seek their family history to academics who must publish in limited ways or abroad—are doing history, even if they cannot do so openly.

Some of these scholars are doing the work of preservation, hoping that future generations may be able to write a people’s history of the Cultural Revolution. Outside of China more can be published, but these scholars also work with limited sources and restricted access. The Cultural Revolution will become history when all of these historians can submit to “the test of history,” to see if the images we make are indeed an accurate mirror.

The Cultural Revolution will be history when it belongs to the public, when it allows for grassroots accounts, access to sources, social reckoning, and the right to memorialize. In China today there is but one officially designed Cultural Revolution historic site, a graveyard in the city of Chongqing where Red Guards who died in factional fighting are buried—but it is locked, off-limits to all but descendants.

On university campuses, one can see busts and statues of individuals whose dates reveal that they died in the ten years of turmoil—but such monuments are celebrations of lives rather than investigations into their endings. There are few other traces, save glimpses of faded slogans on old buildings—but these markings are an idle curiosity, often slated for demolition (see photo above). Only when ordinary citizens can choose how to mourn, what to remember, and which traces to preserve can historical event face “the test of the people.”

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The early period (1966–68)

• Rise and fall of Lin Biao (1969–71)
• Final years (1972–76)

What were the goals of the Cultural Revolution?

• Who was Mao Zedong?
• What is Maoism?
• How has China changed since Mao Zedong’s death?
• What is Mao Zedong's legacy?

Cultural Revolution

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• Table Of Contents

What was the Cultural Revolution?

The Cultural Revolution was an upheaval launched by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong during his last decade in power (1966–1976) to renew the spirit of the Chinese Revolution.

Why was the Cultural Revolution launched?

Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution because he feared that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet model, which he did not approve of, and because he was concerned about his own place in history.

Mao Zedong had four goals for the Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist.

When did the Cultural Revolution occur?

The Cultural Revolution took place from August 1966 to the autumn of 1976. It was officially ended by the Eleventh Party Congress in August 1977.

Cultural Revolution , upheaval launched by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong during his last decade in power (1966–76) to renew the spirit of the Chinese Revolution . Fearing that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet model and concerned about his own place in history, Mao threw China’s cities into turmoil in a monumental effort to reverse the historic processes underway.

During the early 1960s, tensions with the Soviet Union convinced Mao that the Russian Revolution had gone astray, which in turn made him fear that China would follow the same path. Programs carried out by his colleagues to bring China out of the economic depression caused by the Great Leap Forward made Mao doubt their revolutionary commitment and also resent his own diminished role. He especially feared urban social stratification in a society as traditionally elitist as China. Mao thus ultimately adopted four goals for the Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. He initially pursued these goals through a massive mobilization of the country’s urban youths. They were organized into groups called the Red Guards , and led by students such as Song Binbin . Mao ordered the party and the army not to suppress the movement.

Mao also put together a coalition of associates to help him carry out the Cultural Revolution. His wife, Jiang Qing , brought in a group of radical intellectuals to rule the cultural realm. Defense Minister Lin Biao made certain that the military remained Maoist. Mao’s longtime assistant, Chen Boda , worked with security men Kang Sheng and Wang Dongxing to carry out Mao’s directives concerning ideology and security. Premier Zhou Enlai played an essential role in keeping the country running, even during periods of extraordinary chaos . Yet there were conflicts among these associates, and the history of the Cultural Revolution reflects these conflicts almost as much as it reflects Mao’s own initiatives .

Mao’s concerns about “bourgeois” infiltrators in his party and government—those not sharing his vision of communism—were outlined in a Chinese Communist Party Central Committee document issued on May 16, 1966; this is considered by many historians to be the start of the Cultural Revolution, although Mao did not formally launch the Cultural Revolution until August 1966, at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee. He shut down China’s schools, and during the following months he encouraged Red Guards to attack all traditional values and “bourgeois” things and to test party officials by publicly criticizing them. Mao believed that this measure would be beneficial both for the young people and for the party cadres that they attacked.

The movement quickly escalated; many elderly people and intellectuals not only were verbally attacked but were physically abused. Many died. The Red Guards splintered into zealous rival factions, each purporting to be the true representative of Maoist thought. Mao’s own personality cult , encouraged so as to provide momentum to the movement, assumed religious proportions. The resulting anarchy , terror, and paralysis completely disrupted the urban economy. Industrial production for 1968 dipped 12 percent below that of 1966.

During the earliest part of the Red Guard phase, key Politburo leaders were removed from power—most notably President Liu Shaoqi , Mao’s designated successor until that time, and Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping . In January 1967 the movement began to produce the actual overthrow of provincial party committees and the first attempts to construct new political bodies to replace them. In February 1967 many remaining top party leaders called for a halt to the Cultural Revolution, but Mao and his more radical partisans prevailed, and the movement escalated yet again. Indeed, by the summer of 1967, disorder was widespread; large armed clashes between factions of Red Guards were occurring throughout urban China.

During 1967 Mao called on the army under Lin Biao to step in on behalf of the Red Guards. Instead of producing unified support for the radical youths, this political-military action resulted in more divisions within the military. The tensions inherent in the situation surfaced vividly when Chen Zaidao, a military commander in the city of Wuhan during the summer of 1967, arrested two key radical party leaders.

In 1968, after the country had been subject to several cycles of radicalism alternating with relative moderation, Mao decided to rebuild the Communist Party to gain greater control. The military dispatched officers and soldiers to take over schools, factories, and government agencies. The army simultaneously forced millions of urban Red Guards to move to the rural hinterland to live, thus scattering their forces and bringing some order to the cities. This particular action reflected Mao’s disillusionment with the Red Guards because of their inability to overcome their factional differences. Mao’s efforts to end the chaos were given added impetus by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which greatly heightened China’s sense of insecurity.

Two months later, the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee met to call for the convening of a party congress and the rebuilding of the party apparatus. From that point, the issue of who would inherit political power as the Cultural Revolution wound down became the central question of Chinese politics.

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Cultural Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 3, 2020 | Original: November 9, 2009

The Cultural Revolution was launched in China in 1966 by Communist leader Mao Zedong in order to reassert his authority over the Chinese government. Believing that current Communist leaders were taking the party, and China itself, in the wrong direction, Mao called on the nation’s youth to purge the “impure” elements of Chinese society and revive the revolutionary spirit that had led to victory in the civil war 20 years earlier and the formation of the People’s Republic of China. The Cultural Revolution continued in various phases until Mao’s death in 1976, and its tormented and violent legacy would resonate in Chinese politics and society for decades to come.

The Cultural Revolution Begins

In the 1960s, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong came to feel that the current party leadership in China, as in the Soviet Union , was moving too far in a revisionist direction, with an emphasis on expertise rather than on ideological purity. Mao’s own position in government had weakened after the failure of his “ Great Leap Forward ” (1958-60) and the economic crisis that followed. Chairman Mao Zedong gathered a group of radicals, including his wife Jiang Qing and defense minister Lin Biao, to help him attack current party leadership and reassert his authority.

Did you know? To encourage the personality cult that sprang up around Mao Zedong during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, Defense Minister Lin Biao saw that the now-famous "Little Red Book" of Mao's quotations was printed and distributed by the millions throughout China.

Mao launched the so-called Cultural Revolution (known in full as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) in August 1966, at a meeting of the Plenum of the Central Committee. He shut down the nation’s schools, calling for a massive youth mobilization to take current party leaders to task for their embrace of bourgeois values and lack of revolutionary spirit. In the months that followed, the movement escalated quickly as the students formed paramilitary groups called the Red Guards and attacked and harassed members of China’s elderly and intellectual population. A personality cult quickly sprang up around Mao, similar to that which existed for Josef Stalin , with different factions of the movement claiming the true interpretation of Maoist thought. The population was urged to rid itself of the “Four Olds”: Old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

Lin Biao's Role in the Cultural Revolution

During this early phase of the Cultural Revolution (1966-68), President Liu Shaoqi and other Communist leaders were removed from power. (Beaten and imprisoned, Liu died in prison in 1969.) With different factions of the Red Guard movement battling for dominance, many Chinese cities reached the brink of anarchy by September 1967, when Mao had Lin send army troops in to restore order. The army soon forced many urban members of the Red Guards into rural areas, where the movement declined. Amid the chaos, the Chinese economy plummeted, with industrial production for 1968 dropping 12 percent below that of 1966.

In 1969, Lin was officially designated Mao’s successor. He soon used the excuse of border clashes with Soviet troops to institute martial law. Disturbed by Lin’s premature power grab, Mao began to maneuver against him with the help of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, splitting the ranks of power atop the Chinese government. In September 1971, Lin died in an airplane crash in Mongolia, apparently while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union. Members of his high military command were subsequently purged, and Zhou took over greater control of the government. Lin’s brutal end led many Chinese citizens to feel disillusioned over the course of Mao’s high-minded “revolution,” which seemed to have dissolved in favor of ordinary power struggles.

Cultural Revolution Comes to an End

Zhou acted to stabilize China by reviving educational system and restoring numerous former officials to power. In 1972, however, Mao suffered a stroke; in the same year, Zhou learned he had cancer. The two leaders threw their support to Deng Xiaoping (who had been purged during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution), a development opposed by the more radical Jiang and her allies, who became known as the Gang of Four. In the next several years, Chinese politics teetered between the two sides. The radicals finally convinced Mao to purge Deng in April 1976, a few months after Zhou’s death, but after Mao died that September, a civil, police and military coalition pushed the Gang of Four out. Deng regained power in 1977 and would maintain control over Chinese government for the next 20 years.

Long-Term Effects of the Cultural Revolution

Some 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation. The Cultural Revolution’s short-term effects may have been felt mainly in China’s cities, but its long-term effects would impact the entire country for decades to come. Mao’s large-scale attack on the party and system he had created would eventually produce a result opposite to what he intended, leading many Chinese to lose faith in their government altogether.

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The origins of the cultural revolution.

The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961–1966, Volume 3

Roderick MacFarquhar

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: November 1999

ISBN: 9780231110839

Format: Paperback

List Price: $60.00 £50.00

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An awe-inspiring work of historical scholarship.... MacFarquhar has exposed the inner workings of Mao's China with a depth of detail that raises the standards for Sinological research. Lucien W. Pye, Harvard Magazine

With this volume, Roderick MacFarquhar completes his monumental trilogy on the origins of the Cultural Revolution in China. The volume...surpasses the earlier efforts and marks the probable definitive treatment of Chinese elite political history until CCP archives become fully available. Journal of Asian Studies

All in all, readers from several disciplines will welcome the appearance of this volume by one of the most dedicated China watchers. Meanwhile we look forward to the author's collaborative work on the Cultural Revolution itself. Dali Yang, University of Chicago, China Review International

A mighty and eloquent work. Jonathan Mirsky, New York Review of Books

This great intellectual effort, under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, has taken more than 25 years to complete, and has produced the most sparkling gem of modern Sinology.... MacFarquhar's careful but devastating prose and his insights make... other books seem shallow by comparison. The Economist

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Readers Respond: The Cultural Revolution’s Lasting Imprint

A fur coat that kept a family’s three children warm at night, seized and still in the home of their tormentors. A 5-year-old’s finger, broken while fleeing from the scene of a terrifying beating. A stone memorial in a village to a “good” family that was largely wiped out.

These are some of the things readers recalled when asked how their families were affected by the Cultural Revolution , a decade of political upheaval unleashed by Mao Zedong half a century ago that left a million or more in China dead and many more traumatized . In dozens of responses, the message was clear: People remember. Families talk. The imprint of old fears remains. Those who suffered teach their grandchildren that it is safer to work hard and keep quiet. “The Cultural Revolution is over,” wrote Huang Xin, a reader from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. “But the Cultural Revolution is never far away.”

Here is a selection of the responses. Some have been condensed and edited for clarity, or translated from Chinese.

Chen Xuanzhuo , Tianjin, China

When the Cultural Revolution began, my grandfather was in Tibet. Because the government was paralyzed he didn’t come back until it was over, and didn’t see his family for more than 10 years. My grandmother had to raise their three children on her own and couldn’t manage, so one daughter was given away to another family. This led to estrangement between mother and daughter that was never resolved.

My uncle had a cold when the Red Guards raided our house. The fright worsened his illness, and he developed pneumonia and died. From that day on, my grandmother was never the same.

Both of my parents’ families were cadres who took part in the revolution during the war against Japan and the Chinese civil war, and entered the cities with the Communist Party. They were upright and their offspring were “red,” but even so they were treated like that. My parents used to say our family’s troubles were pretty minor. They knew people who were labeled “Five Black Categories” [enemies of the revolution] and committed suicide, educated youth who were sent to the countryside and never returned, and those whose families remained separated.

Voices From China’s Cultural Revolution

Our correspondents talked to academics and writers who lived through the Cultural Revolution. Here are their stories.

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Chinese Revolution

Chinese revolution essay questions, imperial china.

1. What was the Mandate of Heaven? By the end of the 1800s, why might some Chinese have believed that the Qing had lost this mandate?

2. Describe the ethnicity and culture of the Qing dynasty, its leaders and high officials. How did these factors shape the relationship between the Qing and other Chinese people?

3. How did the teachings of Confucius shape political and social views and values in 19th century imperial China?

4. What was the status of women in 19th century China? Explain how social structures and values excluded women and prevented their independence.

5. Discuss three significant problems faced by the Qing regime as it attempted to govern China in the 1800s.

6. Explain how the Qing regime was challenged by foreign imperialism and the actions of Westerners in China during the 1800s.

7. What was the Self-Strengthening Movement? Evaluate the success of this movement and the impact it had on China’s government, economy and society?

8. Discuss the role of Japan in contributing to rising nationalism and anti-Qing sentiment during the late 19th and early 20th century.

9. Summarise and discuss the Guangxu Emperor’s attempts at reform in the 1890s. What was the emperor seeking to achieve and how successful was he?

10. Explain how Dowager Empress Cixi was able to dominate Qing government, despite her nominally inferior status as a woman and a former concubine.

The last years of Qing rule

1. Discuss and evaluate three nationalist uprisings in China between 1895 and mid-1911. Who was responsible for these uprisings, what was their objective and why did they fail?

2. Who were the Fists of Righteous Harmony? Explain the conditions and factors that motivated this group and their ultimate objectives.

3. Why did Dowager Empress Cixi decide to support the rebellious Boxers? What were the implications of this decision?

4. What was the Boxer Protocol? What impact did it have on the Qing government and the rising Chinese nationalist movement?

5. Discuss the late Qing reforms and the extent to which they were successful. Did these reforms bolster Qing rule or weaken it?

6. Describe the ideas, values and objectives of groups like the Tongmenghui. Where and how did these groups acquire and develop their ideology?

7. The New Army was formed to bolster Qing rule but instead contributed to its downfall. Why was this? Discuss the role of the New Army in the last years of the Qing.

8. Identify three conditions, factors or events that contributed to the outbreak of the Wuchang uprising in October 1911.

9. Discuss and evaluate the impact that Yuan Shikai had on the national government of China between 1898 and 1912.

10. Evaluate the political activities of Sun Yixian between 1905 and March 1912. To what extent was Sun Yixian responsible for the fall of the Qing?

Years of division: 1912-1927

1. How and why did Yuan Shikai become president of the Republic of China? What were the implications of this decision?

2. Explain how Yuan Shikai attempted to weaken and usurp the democratic national government between 1912 and 1916.

3. Sun Yixian’s mission was to reunify China and restore a republican national government. What steps did he take between 1912 and 1924 to achieve this?

4. Explain the events and factors that led to the Warlord Era of 1916-1927. Who were the warlords, what motivated them and how did they control their regions?

5. What was the Beiyang government that existed during the Warlord Era? To what extent did this constitute a ‘Chinese national government’?

6. What events or factors led to the May Fourth Movement of 1919? What ideas emerged from this movement and how did they shape future revolutionary groups?

7. How and why did the Soviet Union and Comintern support Sun Yixian and the Guomindang during the 1920s?

8. The Huangpu (or Whampoa) Military Academy was opened in 1924. Who operated the academy and why was it important for the restoration of a unified China?

9. To what extent was Jiang Jieshi the natural successor of Sun Yixian as the leader of the Guomindang? How did Jiang’s ideological position differ from Sun’s?

10. Explain how Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang reduced the influence of warlords in 1926-27, leading to the restoration of an effective national government.

War and civil war: 1927 to 1949

1. Discuss the relationship between China and Japan between 1915 and 1945. What were Japan’s intentions and how did they impact on China’s national government?

2. What happened in Shanghai in April 1927? Why did this occur and how did it shape the next two decades in China’s history?

3. Discuss the policies of the Guomindang government between 1927 and 1937. To what extent did they build a republican society and improve the lives of ordinary people?

4. Explain the causes and participants in the Central Plains War. What did this conflict reveal about the Guomindang and the leadership of Jiang Jieshi?

5. What was the New Life Movement? Was this movement intended to achieve modernisation and reform – or an attempt to reinforce traditional Chinese values?

6. Evaluate the political and military leadership of Jiang Jieshi between 1927 and 1949. Was Jiang a victim of circumstance or a victim of his own misjudgements?

7. Who were the parties involved in the Xi’an incident? How did this incident alter the political and military situation in China?

8. The Second United Front existed from early 1937 to the Japanese surrender in 1945. To what extent was it really ‘united’?

9. Using evidence and specific examples, explain why the Guomindang and Nationalist army was unable to gain support from the Chinese people.

10. Identify and discuss the three most important reasons for the CCP victory in the Chinese Civil War.

Chinese communism

1. Discuss the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Which people, groups and ideas contributed to the CCP in its early years?

2. Describe Mao Zedong’s contribution to the CCP and Chinese communism during the first ten years of the party (1921 to 1931).

3. Explain how the CCP and its members responded to the Shanghai Massacre and the collapse of the First United Front.

4. Discuss the role of the Comintern and foreign agents in shaping the ideology, tactics and direction of the CCP from 1927 onwards.

5. What steps did the CCP and its leadership take to establish a working socialist system in Jiangxi between 1931 and 1934?

6. Explain how Mao Zedong, Zhu De and others organised and trained the Red Army so that it was an important political tool as well as a military force.

7. Why is the Zunyi conference considered an important turning point in the history of the CCP?

8. Critically evaluate Mao’s strategic and military leadership during the Long March, referring to different sources or historians.

9. Why did Mao Zedong describe the Long March as “a propaganda force, a seeding machine”? How has the legacy of the Long March been exploited by the CCP?

10. According to propaganda, the Yan’an Soviet was a period of great success, unity and optimism in the CCP. To what extent is this true?

The CCP in power: 1949 to 1959

1. Evaluate power structures in the Chinese national government after October 1949. To what extent was the “People’s Republic” answerable to the people?

2. Describe the land reform policies implemented by the government after 1949. What were these policies intended to achieve?

3. What were ‘Speak Bitterness’ meetings? Why did Mao Zedong and other communist officials encourage these meetings?

4. Discuss China’s involvement in the Korean War. Why did Mao and his government risk war with the West?

5. Explain what was targeted during the ‘Three-Anti’ and ‘Five-Anti’ campaigns of the early 1950s. What methods were used during these campaigns?

6. Evaluate China’s economic growth and development – from October 1949 to the end of the First Five Year Plan.

7. Discuss Mao’s relationship with the Soviet Union and its leaders, Stalin and Khrushchev. How did this relationship evolve in the 1950s?

8. Was the Hundred Flowers Campaign an error of judgement on Mao’s behalf? Or a political device to identify and deal with critics?

9. Explain the economic objectives of the Great Leap Forward. What policies or methods were adopted to fulfil these objectives?

10. What were the outcomes and consequences of the Great Leap Forward, both for the Chinese people and for Mao Zedong?

The struggle for control: 1960 to 1976

1. Discuss Mao Zedong’s position in the Chinese Communist Party between 1960 and 1966. How did Mao restore his position in the party by 1966?

2. What were the objectives of the People’s Communes, established by Mao in the late 1950s? Did they fulfil these objectives?

3. Why were Chinese people taught to “live like Lei Feng” and “learn from the PLA”? How successful were these campaigns?

4. Explore the sources and causes of the Cultural Revolution. To what extent was it really a popular revolution?

5. Referring to three specific events, explain how the Cultural Revolution forced ordinary people into compliance, obedience and loyalty.

6. Discuss the fate of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping during the 1960s. How and why were they removed from positions of influence in the CCP?

7. What was the ‘Down to the Countryside’ movement and what was it intended to achieve? What impact did it have on its participants?

8. Evaluate the contribution of Lin Biao to the development of post-1949 China. How and why did Lin fall from grace?

9. How did China’s foreign policy evolve between 1960 and 1976, particularly with regard to Soviet Russia and the United States?

10. Who were the Gang of Four and what political, social and economic vision did they have for the People’s Republic of China?

Information and resources on this page are © Alpha History 2018-23. Content on this page may not be copied, republished or redistributed without the express permission of Alpha History. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use . This website uses pinyin romanisations of Chinese words and names. Please refer to this page for more information.

Home — Essay Samples — History — Mao Zedong — The Chinese Cultural Revolution And Its Impact On Society

The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Its Impact on Society

• Categories: Chinese Culture Mao Zedong

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Words: 1049 |

Published: Nov 8, 2021

Words: 1049 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Chan, A. (2014). Mao's Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China's Great Leap Forward. Oxford University Press.
• Chen, J. (2019). Mao's China and the Cold War. The Journal of Contemporary China, 28(115), 187-203.
• Clark, P. (2008). The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976. Random House.
• Dikötter, F. (2010). Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Gao, M. (2008). The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Pluto Press.
• MacFarquhar, R., & Schoenhals, M. (2006). Mao's Last Revolution. Harvard University Press.
• Roderick, M. (2017). The Transformation of Chinese Socialism. Routledge.
• Schoppa, R. K. (2016). The Columbia Guide to Modern Chinese History. Columbia University Press.
• Spence, J. D. (1999). The Search for Modern China. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Yang, D. L. (2008). Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford University Press.

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