China’s Cultural Revolution at 50

China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago. On May 16, 1966, the Communist Party’s Central Committee declared that capitalist agents had sneaked into leading positions:

Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev, for example, who are still nestling beside us.

With these astonishing words, Maoists called for an overthrow of the political order created in 1949. This “May 16 Circular” effectively marks the moment when all hell broke loose, initiating an era of dramatic and turbulent politics that lasted until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. Any Chinese citizen over 60 was shaped by that difficult decade, and many younger Chinese have felt its lingering, if sometimes shadowy, influence. The Cultural Revolution’s drama lay in its politics. Four broader perspectives put these politics in context: their impact upon personal relations, economic growth, ties to the global community, and the question of whether the Cultural Revolution could happen again.

Great Disorder Under Heaven: Cultural Revolutionary Politics

The 1949 revolution enjoyed many successes in its early years, including the end of domestic civil war, rapid economic growth, and fighting the United States to a truce in the Korean War. But the Party stumbled badly with the 1958 Great Leap Forward and its subsequent famine. Mao’s reputation was tarnished, and other leaders gained influence, notably President Liu Shaoqi and Party Secretary-General Deng Xiaoping. These urged more conservative policies: limited experiments with capitalist agriculture to temper collectivization, reliance upon the knowledge of experts instead of the enthusiasm of amateurs, and a broader loosening of political controls. Maoists believed such initiatives imperiled the revolution, leading to a stand-off in the early 1960s.

Many initiatives later associated with the Cultural Revolution first appeared after 1962. Mao began to speak of the inevitability of class struggle after the revolution. He placed Lin Biao, an ardent supporter, as head of the army. Military propaganda workers devised the “Little Red Book” of quotations from Chairman Mao to indoctrinate peasant recruits. The army backed Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, to convene a national conference on reorganizing cultural institutions. According to Mao and his followers, the 1949 Chinese revolution, while superficially successful, was incomplete. Privileged families used social and cultural capital, slowing progress for workers and peasants. The solution was to remove cautious leaders and press forward with revolutionary politics.

The story of the Cultural Revolution would have been shorter and less significant if Mao were just a petulant old boss, unhappy with his successors, who turned to his wife and a few loyal generals to resist his successors’ changes. But Mao changed the rules of Chinese politics by mobilizing new forces into the political arena, ultimately crushing his enemies. The Party had created an array of institutions to organize important social groups: labor unions, the Women’s Federation, the Youth League, an association for poor and lower-middle peasants (those who most benefited from the revolution). These were ultimately mechanisms for control, which collapsed when the Cultural Revolution began in earnest. The most dramatic new participant in Chinese politics were the teenage Red Guards.

The Red Guards responded to the Chairman’s call for young people to take part in the revolution first hand. They brought enthusiasm and energy, serving as the shock-troops of Mao’s great purge. Red Guard organizations were local and spontaneous, following passions which did not always fit Mao’s political agenda. Most Red Guards were high school students, and thus a small and relatively privileged minority. Schools were closed, giving revolution some of the flavor of spring break. Free train travel provided opportunities for revolutionary tourism; Red Guards, who had never before left home, visited distant shrines to revolutionary history, including stops along the Red Army’s Long March of the 1930s. Many flocked to Beijing, where a series of mass rallies (encompassing up to a million Red Guards) were greeted by Maoist leaders. Mao himself wore a Red Guard armband, and gave encouragement by writing his own “big character poster,” the medium Red Guards used to denounce their foes.

Mao Zedong had always been celebrated in the People’s Republic, but during the Cultural Revolution an unprecedented cult bound young people together, competing to demonstrate their political virtue by carrying out the Chairman’s bidding. Mao took a theatrically publicized swim in the Yangtze River, demonstrating the old man’s vigor and solidarity with the young. Some may have joined because of the shared excitement. More steely-eyed young people understood that the 1949 revolution installed a set of relatively young leaders who were still in their jobs in the 1960s, blocking promotion opportunities for the younger generation.

China seemed to have been handed over to gangs of high school students. No one dared rein them in for fear of seeming counterrevolutionary. August and September 1966 saw a Red Guard rampage, including a rough search for imagined class enemies. In Beijing, Red Guard teams raided more than 100,000 homes in search of reactionary materials, typically books or pictures dismissed as relics of the old society (Red Guards were determined to “smash the four olds” – a reference to old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas). They forced intellectuals and local officials to make humiliating public self-criticisms, often wearing dunce caps or incriminating signs, and assuming physically painful positions. Some Red Guards beat people with belt buckles and tortured them with boiling water. In Beijing, 1,700 died.

Horrible as the violence was, this opening rage soon burned out, as Maoist authorities strained to limit these public assaults. One should not imagine a decade of beatings and murders. The majority of the millions of Red Guards were not violent, and many spoke out against violence, albeit with mixed effect. Those who were violent turned their fury against rival Red Guard factions. Red Guard groups fought each other, sometimes armed with Soviet weapons stolen from trains bound for Vietnam. Instead of helping the Maoists consolidate power, they dug too deeply into local political factions.

By late 1967 the Red Guards had overstayed their welcome. A solution was to send them into internal exile, under the guise of “learning from the poor and lower-middle peasants” in the countryside. Even prior to the Cultural Revolution Maoists had backed a program to send “educated youth” to work among peasants, affirming their ideology and simultaneously diminishing pressure for jobs. Now this voluntary program became mandatory, and the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution had come to a close by 1968.

It is helpful to think of two Cultural Revolutions. The first was the noisy overthrow of existing authority in 1966 and 1967. The second, less familiar, Cultural Revolution was the effort to put things back together again between 1968 and 1976. The former was about rebellion, the latter about control.

The greatest violence of the Cultural Revolution came not from the brutality of the Red Guard but from Maoist suppression of spontaneous mass organizations. Maoist leaders investigated a bogus “May 16 Conspiracy,” arresting leading radical politicos charged with the imaginary plot. As the campaign spread to the provincial level, millions were investigated and tens of thousands killed. A related campaign to “purify class ranks” killed even more, as political and family histories were scrutinized for political sins. This viciousness partially reflects the tenuous hold by China’s newly promoted leaders, coupled with their zeal in striking down potential rivals to their new positions. Newly established Revolutionary Committees consolidated their own power by demobilizing organizations that resisted their legitimacy. Much violence took place in suburban or rural counties, where it was less visible than the early Red Guard violence. Hong Kong citizens, for example, noted bodies in the Pearl River, floating downstream from Guangdong. To many observers, however, violence against young radicals may have seemed less noteworthy than violence against intellectuals and officials.

The rebuilding of the Communist Party was jolted by the 1971 Lin Biao affair. The veteran revolutionary, who had been designated Mao’s “closest comrade in arms” and presumed successor, was charged with organizing a coup against Mao Zedong. As the plot failed, Lin, probably drugged, was bundled aboard a plane to flee China. Lin and several family members perished when their plane crashed in Mongolia. The episode remains poorly explained (China’s equivalent of the Kennedy assassination in the United States), but the political consequences included cancellation of National Day festivities scheduled for the following month, a purge of military leaders, a public crisis of confidence, and the rehabilitation of some officials who had lost power in the opening battles of the Cultural Revolution. Many Chinese date their cynicism to this episode, which was so shocking that for a year it remained a secret from ordinary people.

The politics of the late Cultural Revolution revolved around Mao’s court, where he played civilian radicals, led by his wife Jiang Qing, off against newly rehabilitated officials. President Liu Shaoqi died under shocking conditions in 1969, but Deng Xiaoping, whose purge had been gentler, was recalled to serve as deputy prime minister in 1973. Although Mao’s hand was politically strengthened, he was physically weakened by Parkinson’s disease. Competing factions manipulated the ailing chairman, and as his speech and handwriting deteriorated, claimed to find oracular support for their favored initiatives in his poorly understood comments.

Premier Zhou Enlai was a steady hand in keeping things going, and in protecting many in his bureaucracy. When Zhou died in early 1976, many wanted Deng Xiaoping to take his place. Instead, Deng lost his position after controversial public demonstrations ostensibly mourning Zhou Enlai, but also questioning China’s political course. When Mao died in September, the army, the Public Security Ministry, and the Party security unit which protected top leaders, staged a coup against the radicals. They arrested the Gang of Four (the top civilian radical leaders, including Jiang Qing), clearing a path for Deng’s ascension to de facto State and Party leadership in 1979, and the subsequent abandonment of Cultural Revolution policies and goals.

Undermining Universalist Values with Personal Networks

Great political movements often have unintended consequences. The cascading uncertainties of the Cultural Revolution drove people away from idealism and the pursuit of universalist values to seek refuge in personal networks and to protect themselves by scapegoating others. Despite Maoism’s universalistic rhetoric, informal networks based upon kinship, shared native place, education, or work experience provided practical havens against disorder. Citizens sought security against unpredictable political campaigns which disrupted established political institutions. After the suppression of the Red Guards, a new cynicism spread as citizens relied on gifts and bribes to secure a “backdoor” advantage for better housing, permission to move from countryside to city, or specialized medical care. Although Maoists pressed the slogan “smash the private, establish the public,” society became laced with systematic petty corruptions that paved the way for greater criminality after the Cultural Revolution.

Political anxieties heightened the theme of revenge. At a time when Western art enjoyed little favor in China, Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 revenge novel The Count of Monte Cristo found wide readership. Indeed, its Chinese title (The Monte Cristo Record of Gratitude and Revenge) heightened its appeal to an audience hoping for security in a vicious and unreliable public world. Even at the political center, Mao relied on his wife Jiang Qing because of her personal loyalty in a duplicitous world. According to Jiang, “Everything I did, Chairman Mao told me to do. I was his dog. What he said to bite, I bit.”

The obverse of finding protection and reliable allies was to scapegoat weaker citizens. Campaigns targeted the “five black elements:” landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries (who had resisted Communist rule), bad elements (who had committed nonpolitical crimes), and rightists (who had been victims of the 1957 campaign against critics of the Party). Other easily disadvantaged people had “complicated” political histories, such as former service in the army of Chiang Kai-shek, or a brother-in-law living in Taiwan or Seattle.

Early in the Cultural Revolution, conservative Red Guards (even children of officials under fire formed their own Red Guard units) put forth the idea that class was inherited, so that a worker’s child would always be a worker, and the child of a rich peasant would never outlast the taint of class origin. Maoists rejected this idea, which undercut the Cultural Revolution by rehashing past conflicts rather than pressing forward with current concerns. However, in daily life, those from un-revolutionary social backgrounds found that they were always at a disadvantage in accessing good jobs and scarce resources. Even marriage prospects were diminished. Who would want to pass on to one’s child membership in the five black elements?

At the very end of the Cultural Revolution, even the leaders of the post-Mao coup acted from anxiety as well to remove their rivals. They feared that a majority of the Central Committee might support Jiang Qing and her allies in a showdown. And in justifying their act, the conspirators posited a personal network, the “Gang of Four.” This had a shaky basis in reality. They were not much of a gang, as three of the four did not even support the other alleged gang member, Wang Hongwen, in his bid to be Mao’s successor. But few were unhappy to see Mao’s imperious wife Jiang Qing removed. The four, along with Lin Biao’s generals, became the final scapegoats for the Cultural Revolution. Their 1981 show trial was a televised public spectacle which assured China that the massive disruptions of the past decade were over, and that these individuals were uniquely responsible for the Cultural Revolution – not Mao, and not the millions of citizens who responded to his call for rebellion.

The Cultural Revolution Economy

The Cultural Revolution initially threw the Chinese economy into chaos. Some resisted the political disruptions, urging young rebels to “make revolution by promoting production.” The restoration of Party authority led to two years of extraordinary growth; by Mao’s death, China had had a decade of moderate economic expansion. China’s gross domestic product increased nearly 6 percent annually. This is slightly slower than earlier years of the People’s Republic, but was nonetheless a respectable rate. China grew somewhat less rapidly than Indonesia, but twice as fast as India. All three poor and populous Asian nations grew more slowly than Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, smaller states whose export-driven economies grew by 8 to 9 percent.

The Maoist political economy substituted China’s abundant labor for scarce capital. Instead of using material incentives, campaigns mobilized this labor by fueling political enthusiasm. Campaigns were effective for some purposes, but ill-suited and inefficient for many. Economic growth rested on individual austerity. Spartan consumption became the Maoist ideal to free funds for greater public investment. These investments were often inefficiently allocated. The military dominated one large and secret investment program, called the “Third Front,” which built factories and infrastructure in China’s interior, removed from the range of U.S. bombers and missiles based in Taiwan. The Third Front investment benefited old revolutionary areas, an important Maoist constituency and symbol, although large regional gaps persisted. The service sector, mistrusted as bourgeois, lagged. There was only one restaurant per 8,000 citizens. Ration coupons regulated the purchase of cloth, grain, meat, cooking oil, and other essentials. Most economists agree that Maoists relied on labor because that is what they had, and that it reached a point of diminishing returns.

Amid these inefficiencies, the Cultural Revolution improved China’s human capital. Better nutrition, lower infant mortality, and control of infectious disease helped increase life expectancy at birth from only 35 in 1949, to 65 by 1980. Nearly two million peasants trained as “barefoot doctors” in an ambitious paramedic network. While they were neither sophisticated nor well-equipped, they were accessible and their services nearly free. They were the best-known aspect of a vast increase in rural medical care. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, two-thirds of China’s hospital beds were located in the countryside, where nearly 80 percent of the population lived.

The Cultural Revolution expanded educational opportunities for people at the bottom, but severely constricted elite access to universities. Increases in literacy reflected a 15-fold increase in rural junior middle schools between 1965 and 1976. Ninety percent of Chinese aged 15 to 19 were literate in 1982. Adult literacy also increased markedly. Schools put work projects into the curriculum, in an effort to make the classrooms relevant, rejecting the Confucian ideal that education’s goal is to produce a sophisticated elite.

Against these achievements, high schools closed during the height of Red Guard activism, although primary schools remained open. High schools resumed instruction by 1967, when leaders were desperate to get the Red Guards off the streets. However, universities did not admit new students until 1970. This reflected Maoist suspicion that universities formed a base for conservative elites. Radicals addressed elitism by recruiting “worker-peasant-soldier” students, a kind of affirmative action scheme.

Fortifying China’s Re-entry to the World Economy

The relationship between the 1966-1976 era and the newly powerful China of the contemporary global economy is complex. A conventional narrative treats the Cultural Revolution as a decade of xenophobic chaos and economic ruin that was only put right when a shrewd Deng Xiaoping recognized reality and reintegrated China with the world economy. This is too simplistic.

Anti-foreign aspects of the Cultural Revolution are striking. Red Guards burned a British diplomatic building. Soviet diplomats found themselves working at a newly renamed Anti-Revisionism Street. It is easy to mock a foreign policy that regarded Albania as China’s best friend. China was isolated from polite international society, but earned friends in earthier quarters; support from new third world nations became the basis for replacing Taiwan in China’s United Nations seat in 1971.

Even so, China managed to find itself simultaneously at odds with both the United States and the Soviet Union (the two had discussed a joint strike on China’s nuclear capabilities). Chinese and Soviet soldiers battled along the border in 1969. Nixon’s 1972 visit to Mao resolved this potential disaster by shaking up global power blocs. This dramatic bit of Cultural Revolution diplomacy established the framework for Deng Xiaoping’s later expansion of China’s role in the international economy.

The rapid economic growth of the Deng Xiaoping era could not have happened without the physical infrastructure and human resources created by Mao Zedong’s regime. An obvious aspect of Mao’s radical politics was a desperate effort to sustain China’s revolution beyond the lifespan of the revolutionary generation, producing a political turbulence that has followed other great revolutions. Less obvious were the contributions of modernization, ending illiteracy, combating chronic disease, and setting the foundations for industrialization. For all of Maoist China’s shortcomings, the subsequent economic boom built upon its achievements. China found greater international opportunities after the Cultural Revolution than before. The world economy did not need China’s huge labor pool in the 1960s. The economic reintegration of China and world capitalism took place when a rapidly expanding global economy sought offshore production in China to discipline workers in Japan and the West with threats of job loss, as wages stagnated and labor unions weakened.

This is not to say that Mao imagined steering China on the course it has pursued since his death, or that the Cultural Revolution was some kind of ideal economic preparation. A decade of Cultural Revolution left the workforce better educated, but also exhausted and unhappy with stagnant wages. Mao was certainly serious about stopping so-called revisionist obstacles to his policies, but Mao had mellowed by 1972, when he dealt with Nixon in Beijing, or when he recalled Deng Xiaoping from disgrace in 1973 to make him a top economic administrator. A further continuity between the late Mao era and reform-era China is the state-directed character of economic policy, however more liberal it has become. China’s revolution, including the Cultural Revolution, shaped a long-term movement to strengthen China to compete in the broader world. Hiring out its cheap labor supply to global capitalism was a politically crafted strategy, much like earlier Maoist efforts to harness these same workers through political campaigns.

Is the Cultural Revolution Relevant Today?

Coming to terms with the Cultural Revolution has been difficult. The political wound has never completely healed, even half a century from its outset. But it is not quite true that the period is a taboo topic in China. The Cultural Revolution and especially its impact have been aired in novels, memoirs, poems, and films because most urban middle class Chinese families were caught up in this vast movement, often in multiple ways. They want to understand what happened, whether from nostalgia for lost youth or a conviction that past wrongs must be righted. Immediate post-Mao discussion of the Cultural Revolution was channeled against the Gang of Four. But as major participants have died, treatments of the movement have become less strident and more nuanced, even if they remain cautious.

The Cultural Revolution has joined pop culture with a mix of fondness and irony through disco versions of Maoist tunes, or restaurants serving food modeled on meals once eaten by former Red Guards in the countryside. There have been revivals of The Red Detachment of Women and other model theatrical works favored by Jiang Qing. Politically, today’s Communist Party members were all participants in the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Xi Jinping was a member of a politically prominent family – one that suffered humiliation, and then was restored to great eminence.

Xi’s authoritarian politics sometimes seems to echo Mao Zedong. How could they not? Mao remains the model for grand, theatrical gestures, and a symbol of Party authority binding China together. Yet Xi is no Maoist. Mao, the revolutionary, indicted an entire political establishment. Xi, a more conventional politician, uses corruption charges to destroy individual political rivals. One of the lessons Xi learned from being (temporarily) on the losing side of the Cultural Revolution was to distrust mass mobilizing politics. Xi also distrusts free expression in the arts and journalism, and favors tighter Party control. But so did Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s arch-enemy.

Could Cultural Revolutionary politics return to China? The political formula in 1966 featured an extended national crisis with widespread popular frustration at perceived corruption and injustice, a divided central leadership, and a Party chairman who dared to act decisively against his rivals. This describes 1966, as well as the 1989 crisis which ended in the Beijing massacre. Young demonstrators in 1989 drew widely upon the Cultural Revolutionary repertory of political tools, including posters, mass demonstrations, and forging networks among the disaffected. But they had no mass struggle sessions, no house raids to smash the “four olds,” or no armed conflict among different factions of demonstrators. Deng Xiaoping followed Mao with his decisive violence to suppress the movement. Although the 1989 demonstrators disassociated themselves from rebels of 1966, Deng’s government was quick to accuse them of using Red Guard tactics, knowing this would blemish them as disturbers of public order. Deng knew this was no second Cultural Revolution, but the Party nonetheless tightened its regulation of public spaces, even redesigning public squares with trees, fountains, and plantings to render them unsuitable for spontaneous mass demonstrations.

If the Cultural Revolution seemed remote in 1989, by its 50th anniversary it appears to a distant concern for memoirists, where-are-they-now stories, and tales from the grandparents. The post-Mao economic boom has dramatically remade society: China has become wealthy. It is no longer a nation of peasants; most citizens are urban and use technically savvy communications. Big character posters have their electronic analog, and mass protests might take place online, even as the Party seeks to control the Internet. If there should be a national political crisis comparable to 1966 or 1989, this generation will adapt its own tools to deal with it. Of course, any crisis in China will be discussed in Cultural Revolution terms, so deeply have they been embedded in the national consciousness.