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Cultural Revolution
As the clash over issues in the autumn of 1965 became
polarized, the army initially provided the battleground. The issues
concerned differences over policy directions and their implications
for the organization of power and the qualifications of senior
officials to lead. Much of the struggle went on behind the scenes;
in public it took the form of personal vilification and ritualized
exposés of divergent worldviews or, inevitably, "two lines" of
policy. Lin Biao, in calling for the creative study and application
of Mao's thought in November and at a meeting of military commissars
the following January, consistently placed the army's mission in the
context of the national ideological and power struggle. In these
critical months the base of operations for Mao and Lin was the large
eastern Chinese city of Shanghai; and newspapers published in that
city, especially the Liberation Army Daily, carried the
public attacks on the targets selected.
Attacks on cultural
figures
The first target was the historian Wu Han, who doubled as the
deputy mayor of Peking. In a play, Wu supposedly had used
allegorical devices to lampoon Mao and laud the deposed former
minister of defense, Peng Dehuai. The denunciation of Wu and his
play on Nov. 10, 1965, constituted the opening volley in an assault
on cultural figures and their thoughts.
As the Cultural Revolution gained momentum, Mao turned for
support to the youth as well as the army. In seeking to create a new
system of education that would eliminate differences between town
and country, workers and peasants, and mental and
manual labour, Mao struck a responsive chord within the youth; it
was their response that later provided him with his best shock
troops. As a principal purpose, the Cultural Revolution was launched
to revitalize revolutionary values for the successor generation of
Chinese young people.
During the spring of 1966 the attack against authors,
scholars, and propagandists emphasized the cultural dimension of the
Cultural Revolution. Increasingly it was hinted that behind the
visible targets lay a sinister "black gang" in the fields of
education and propaganda and high up in party circles. Removal of
Peng Zhen (P'eng Chen) and Lu Dingyi (Lu Ting-yi) and subsequently
of Zhou Yang, then tsar of the arts and literature, indicated that
this was to be a thoroughgoing purge. Clearly, a second purpose of
the Cultural Revolution would be the elimination of leading cadres
whom Mao held responsible for past ideological sins and alleged
errors in judgment.
Attacks on party
members
Gradual transference of the revolution
to top echelons of the party was managed by a group centred on Mao
Zedong, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Chen Boda. In May 1966
Mao secretly assigned major responsibilities to the army in cultural
and educational affairs. Another purpose of the Cultural Revolution,
as then conceived, would be a "revolution in the superstructure": a
transformation from a bureaucratically run machine to a more
popularly based system led personally by Mao and a simplified
administration under his control.
Following the May instructions, the educational system
received priority. "Big-character posters," or large wall newspapers
(ta-tzu-pao), spread from the principal campuses in Peking
throughout the land. University officials and professors were
singled out for criticism, while their students, encouraged by the
central authorities, held mass meetings and began to organize. In
June the government dropped examinations for university admissions
and called for a reform of entrance procedures and a delay in
reopening the campuses. Party officials and their wives circulated among the campuses to gain favour and
to obstruct their opponents. Intrigue and political maneuvering
dominated, although political lines were not at
first sharply drawn or even well understood. The centres of this
activity were Peking's schools and the inner councils of the Central
Committee; the students were the activists in a game they did not
fully comprehend.
This phase of the Cultural Revolution ended in August 1966
with the convening of a plenary session of the Central Committee.
Mao issued his own big-character poster to "Bombard the
Headquarters," a call for the denunciation and removal of senior
officials, and a 16-point Central Committee decision was issued, in
which the broad outlines for the Cultural Revolution were laid down
and supporters were rallied to the revolutionary banner. The
immediate aim was to seize power from "bourgeois" authorities. The
locus of the struggle would be their urban strongholds. Now more
than ever, Mao's thought became the "compass for action."
(J.W.Le.)
(K.G.L.)
Evidently fearing that China would develop along the lines of
the Soviet revolution, and concerned about his own place in history,
Mao threw China's cities into turmoil in a gigantic effort to
reverse the historic processes then under way. He ultimately failed
in his quest, but his efforts generated problems with which his
successors would have to struggle for decades. Mao adopted four
goals for his Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated
successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking, to
rectify the CCP, to provide China's youth with a revolutionary
experience, and to achieve specific policy changes to make the
educational, health-care, and cultural systems less elitist. He
initially pursued those goals through a massive mobilization of the
country's urban youths--organized in groups called the Red
Guards--while ordering the CCP and the PLA not to suppress the
movement.
When Mao formally launched the Cultural Revolution in August
1966, he had already shut down the schools. During the following
months he encouraged the Red Guards to attack all traditional values
and "bourgeois" things and to put CCP officials to the test by
publicly criticizing them. These attacks were known at the time as
struggles against the Four Olds (i.e., old ideas, customs,
culture, and habits of mind), and the movement quickly escalated to
the committing of outrages. Many elderly people and intellectuals
were physically abused, and many died. Nonetheless, Mao believed
that this mobilization of urban youths would be beneficial for them
and that the CCP cadres they attacked would be better for the
experience.
Seizure of power
The period from mid-1966 to early 1969 constituted the Red
Guard phase of the Cultural Revolution, and these years in turn
included several important turning points. The latter half of 1966
witnessed not only the Red Guard mobilization (including Red Guard
reviews of more than 1,000,000 youths at a time by Mao Zedong and
Lin Biao in Peking) but also the removal from power of key Political
Bureau (Politburo) leaders, most notably Pres. Liu Shaoqi and CCP
General Secretary Deng Xiaoping. In October 1966 both Liu and Deng
engaged in public self-criticism. Mao, however, rejected both acts
as inadequate. At the same meeting, Mao heard bitter complaints from
provincial party leaders about the chaos of the political campaign.
While acknowledging the validity of much of what was said, Mao
nevertheless declared that it would do more good than harm to let
the Cultural Revolution continue for several more months.
In January 1967 the movement began to produce the actual
overthrow of provincial CCP committees and initial attempts to
construct new organs of political power to replace them. The first
such "power seizure" took place in Shanghai and was followed by
temporary confusion as to just what kind of new political structure
should be established to replace the discredited municipal CCP and
government apparatuses. The final form adopted was called a "revolutionary
committee," and that appellation was given to Chinese government
committees until the late 1970s.
The chaos involved in the overthrow of the Shanghai
authorities combined with political outrages throughout the country
to lead many remaining top CCP leaders to call in February 1967 for
a halt to the Cultural Revolution. During this attempt to beat back
radicalism, more conservative forces clamped down on Red Guard
activism in numerous cities. The movement, dubbed the "February
adverse current," was quickly defeated and a new radical upsurge
began. Indeed, by the summer of 1967 large armed clashes occurred
throughout urban China, and even Chinese embassies abroad
experienced takeovers by their own Red Guards. The Red Guards
splintered into zealous factions, each purporting to be the "true"
representative of the thought of Mao Zedong. Mao's own personality
cult, encouraged so as to provide momentum to the movement, assumed
religious proportions. The resulting anarchy, terror, and paralysis
threw the urban economy into a tailspin. Industrial production for
1968 dipped 12 percent below that of 1966.
During 1967 Mao called on the PLA
under Lin Biao to step in on behalf of the Maoist Red Guards, but
this politico-military task produced more division within the
military than unified support for radical youths. Tensions surfaced
in the summer, when Chen Zaidao (Ch'en Tsai-tao), a military
commander in the key city of Wu-han, arrested two key radical CCP
leaders. Faced with possible widespread revolt among local military
commanders, Mao tilted toward the reestablishment of some
order.
In 1968 Mao decided to rebuild the CCP and bring things under
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
hinterlands to live, thereby removing the most disruptive force from
the cities. These drastic measures reflected Mao's disillusionment
with the Red Guards' inability to overcome factional differences.
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which greatly
heightened China's fears for its security, gave these measures added
urgency.
The end of the radical
period
Thus in 1968 the society began to return to business, though
not as usual. China's regular schools began to reopen, although the
number of students in higher institutions represented only a small
percentage of those three years before. In July yet another of Mao's
"latest instructions" approved science and engineering education and
called for the "return to production" of all graduates. In October
1968 a plenary session of the Central Committee met to call for the
convening of a party congress and the rebuilding of the CCP
apparatus. From that point on, the issue of who would inherit
political power as the Cultural Revolution wound down became a
central question of Chinese politics. (The answer came only with a
coup against the radicals a month after Mao Zedong's death on Sept.
9, 1976.)
China's actions following the meeting of October 1968
suggested the degree to which fear of a Soviet invasion contributed
to the closing down of the Cultural Revolution's most radical phase.
Almost immediately after the meeting, China called on the United
States to resume ambassadorial-level talks in Warsaw. Peking also
renewed its conventional diplomacy--it had reduced its level of
ambassadorial representation abroad to a single ambassador in
Egypt--and quickly sought to expand the range of countries with
which it enjoyed diplomatic relations.
China's concern stemmed partly from the Soviet leadership's
articulation of the Brezhnev
Doctrine in the wake of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. That
doctrine explained the invasion in terms of the obligation of the
Soviet Union and other Socialist countries to set things right if
"scientific socialism" became threatened in any country in which a
Communist Party had held power. To Peking's horror, even Hanoi came
out in support of this threatening posture. Moscow had long made
clear that it believed that a "military-bureaucratic dictatorship"
had seized power from the "true Communists" in Peking. To add to
Peking's concern, since 1966 the Soviet Union had been building up a
sizable military force along the formerly demilitarized Sino-Soviet
border. While the forces deployed as of late 1968 were not adequate
for a full-scale invasion of China, they certainly posed a serious
menace, especially given the political division and social chaos
that still prevailed in much of the country.
When the Party Congress convened in April 1969, it did so in
the wake of two bloody Sino-Soviet border clashes that had occurred
in early and mid-March. Written into the new party constitution was
an unprecedented step--Defense Minister Lin Biao was named as Mao's
successor--and the military tightened its grip on the entire
society. Both the Central Committee and the new party committees
being established throughout the country were dominated by military
men. Indeed, less than 30 percent of the Eighth Central Committee
members elected in 1956 were reelected in 1969, and more than 40
percent of the members of the Ninth Central Committee chosen in 1969
held military posts.
Premier Zhou Enlai tried to cut back Lin Biao's power and to
relieve some of the threat to China's security by engaging the
Soviets in direct negotiations on the border dispute. A series of
serious military clashes along the border, culminating in a limited
but sanguinary Soviet thrust several miles into the Uighur
Autonomous Region of Sinkiang, heightened tensions. Zhou briefly met
with Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin at the Peking airport in early
September, and the two agreed to hold formal talks. Nevertheless,
Lin Biao declared martial law and used it to rid himself of some of
his potential rivals. Several leaders who had been purged during
1966-68, including Liu
Shaoqi, died under the martial law regime of 1969, and many
others suffered severely.
Lin quickly encountered opposition, however. Mao became wary
of a successor who seemed to want to assume power too quickly and
began to maneuver against Lin. Premier Zhou Enlai joined forces with
Mao in that effort, as possibly did Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. Mao's
assistant, Chen Boda, decided to support Lin's cause, however.
Therefore, while in 1970-71 many measures were undertaken to bring
order and normalcy back to society, increasingly severe strains
split the top leadership.
Social changes
By 1970 many of the stated goals of the Cultural Revolution
had been translated into at least somewhat operational programs.
These included initiatives designed to reduce what were termed the
"three major differences"--those separating
intellectual from manual labour, worker from peasant, and urban from
rural.
Many measures had been taken to make the educational system
less elitist. The number of years at each level of schooling was
shortened, and admission to a university became based on the
recommendations of a student's work unit rather than on competitive
examination. All youths were required to engage in
at least several years of manual labour before attending a
university. Within schools, formal scholarship yielded in large
measure to the study of politics and to vocational training.
Examinations of the traditional type were abolished, and stress was
placed on collective study. The authority of teachers in the
classroom was seriously eroded. These trends reached their most
extreme form when a student in the Northeast was made a national
hero by the radicals because he turned in a blank examination paper
and criticized his teacher for having asked him the examination
questions in the first place.
Many bureaucrats were forced to leave the relative comfort of
their offices for a stint in "May 7 cadre schools," usually farms
run by a major urban unit. People from the urban unit had to live on
the farm, typically in quite primitive conditions, for varying
periods of time. (For some, this amounted to a number of years,
although by about 1973 the time periods in general had been held to
about six months to one year.) While on the farm the urban cadre would both engage in rigorous manual labour
and undertake intensive, supervised study of ideology. The object
was to reduce bureaucratic "airs."
Millions of Chinese youths were also sent to the countryside
during these years. Initially, these were primarily Red Guard
activists, but the program soon achieved a more general character,
and it became expected that most middle-school graduates would head
to the countryside. While in the hinterlands, these young people
were instructed to "learn from the poor and lower middle peasants."
Quite a few of these people were merely sent to the counties
immediately adjacent to the city from which they came. Others,
however, were sent over very long distances. Large groups from
Shanghai, for instance, were made to settle in Sinkiang. This
rustication was, in theory, permanent, although the vast majority of
these people managed to stream back to the cities in the late 1970s,
after Mao's death and the purge of his radical followers.
The system of medical care was also revamped. Serious efforts
were made to force urban-based medical staffs to devote more effort
to serving the needs of the peasants. This involved both the
reassignment of medical personnel to rural areas and, more
importantly, a major attempt to provide short-term training to rural
medical personnel called "barefoot doctors." This latter initiative
placed at least a minimal level of medical competence in many
Chinese villages, and ideally the referral of more serious matters
would be made to higher levels. Another prong of the effort in the
medical arena was to place relatively greater stress on the use of
Chinese traditional medicine,
which relied more heavily on locally available herbs and on such
low-cost methods as acupuncture. Western medicine was simply too
expensive and specialized to be used effectively throughout China's
vast hinterlands.
The Cultural Revolution was primarily an urban political
phenomenon, and thus it had a very uneven effect on the peasants.
Some villages, especially those near major cities, became caught up
in the turmoil, but many peasants living in more remote areas
experienced less interference from higher-level bureaucratic
authorities than would normally have been the case.
Nevertheless, there were two dimensions of the Cultural
Revolution that did seriously affect peasants' lives. First, the
country adopted a policy of encouraging local rural self-sufficiency
in foodstuffs. This policy stemmed from ideological and security
considerations, and it had begun before the onset of the Cultural
Revolution. Its major consequence was a stress on grain production
so great that a quite irrational and uneconomical cropping pattern
emerged. Second, great stress was placed on separating income from
the amount of work performed by a peasant. Pressure was applied to
raise the unit of income distribution to the brigade rather than the
team (the former was several times larger than the latter), and an
increasing share of the collective income was to be distributed on
the basis of welfare and political criteria rather than on the basis
of the amount of work performed.
Struggle for the
premiership
As these programmatic aspects of the Cultural Revolution were
being put into place and regularized, the political battle to
determine who would inherit power at the top continued and
intensified. Tensions first surfaced at a meeting of the Central
Committee in the summer of 1970, when Chen
Boda, Lin Biao, and their supporters made a series of remarks
that angered Mao Zedong. Mao then purged Chen as a warning to Lin.
At the end of 1970 Mao also initiated a criticism of Lin's top
supporters in the military forces, calling them to task for their
arrogance and unwillingness to listen to civilian authority. The
situation intensified during the spring of 1971 until Lin Biao's
son, Lin Liguo (Lin Li-kuo), evidently began to put together plans
for a possible coup against Mao should this prove the only way to
save his father's position.
During this period, Zhou Enlai engaged in extremely delicate
and secret diplomatic exchanges with the United States, and Mao
agreed to a secret visit to Peking by the U.S. national security
adviser Henry
Kissinger in July 1971. That visit was one of the most dramatic
events of the postwar international arena. At a time when the
Vietnam War continued to blaze, China and the United States took
major steps toward reducing their mutual antagonism in the face of
the Soviet threat. Lin Biao strongly opposed this opening to the
United States--probably in part because it would strengthen the
political hand of its key architect in China, Zhou Enlai--and the
Kissinger visit thus amounted to a major defeat for Lin.
Finally, in September 1971 Lin was killed in what the Chinese
assert was an attempt to flee to the Soviet Union after an abortive
assassination plot against Mao. Virtually the entire Chinese high
military command was purged in the weeks following Lin's
death.
Lin's demise had a profoundly disillusioning effect on many
people who had supported Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Lin had
been the high priest of the Mao cult, and millions had gone through
tortuous struggles to elevate this chosen successor to power and
throw out his "revisionist" challengers. They had in this quest
attacked and tortured respected teachers, abused elderly citizens,
humiliated old revolutionaries, and, in many cases, battled former
friends in bloody confrontations. The sordid details of Lin's
purported assassination plot and subsequent flight cast all this in
the light of traditional, unprincipled power struggles, and untold
millions concluded that they had simply been manipulated for
personal political purposes.
Initially, Zhou Enlai was the major beneficiary of Lin's
death, and from late 1971 through mid-1973 he tried to nudge the
system back toward stability. He encouraged a revival and
improvement of educational standards and brought numerous people
back into office. China began again to increase its trade and other
links with the outside world, while the domestic economy continued
the forward momentum that had begun to build in 1969. Mao blessed
these general moves but remained wary lest they call into question
the basic value of having launched the Cultural Revolution in the
first place. In Maoist thought it had always been possible for
formerly wayward individuals to reform under pressure and again
assume power.
During 1972 Mao suffered a serious stroke, and Zhou learned
that he had a fatal cancer. These developments highlighted the
continued uncertainty over the succession. In early 1973 Zhou and
Mao brought Deng Xiaoping back to power in the hope of grooming him
as a successor. But Deng had been the second most important victim
purged by the radicals during the Cultural Revolution, and his
reemergence made Jiang
Qing, by then head of the radicals, and her followers desperate
to return things to a more radical path. From mid-1973 Chinese
politics shifted back and forth between Jiang and her
followers--later dubbed the Gang
of Four--and the supporters of Zhou and
Deng. The former group favoured political mobilization, class
struggle, anti-intellectualism,
egalitarianism, and xenophobia, while the latter promoted economic
growth, stability, educational progress, and a pragmatic foreign
policy. Mao tried unsuccessfully to maintain a balance among these
different forces while continuing in vain to search for a suitable
successor.
The balance tipped back and forth--nudged by Mao first this
way, then that--between the two groups. The radicals gained the
upper hand from mid-1973 until mid-1974, during which time they
whipped up a campaign that used criticism of Lin
Biao and of Confucius as an allegorical vehicle for attacking
Zhou and his policies. By July 1974, however, economic decline and
increasing chaos made Mao shift back toward Zhou and Deng. With Zhou
hospitalized, Deng assumed increasing power from the summer of 1974
through the late fall of 1975. During this time Deng sought (with
Zhou's full support) to put the Four Modernizations (of agriculture,
industry, science and technology, and defense) at the top of the
country's agenda. To further this effort Deng continued to
rehabilitate victims of the Cultural Revolution, and he commissioned
the drafting of an important group of documents much like those
developed in 1960-62. They laid out the basic principles for work in
the party, industry, and science and technology. Their core elements
were anathema to the radicals, who used their power in the mass
media and the propaganda apparatus to attack Deng's
efforts.
The radicals finally convinced Mao that Deng's policies would
lead eventually to a repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and even
of Mao himself. Mao therefore sanctioned
criticism of these policies in the wall posters
that were a favourite propaganda tool of the radicals. Zhou died in
January 1976 and Deng delivered his eulogy. Deng then disappeared
from public view and was formally purged (with Mao's backing) in
April. The immediate reason for Deng's downfall was a group of
massive demonstrations in Peking and other cities that took
advantage of the traditional Ch'ing-ming festival to pay homage to
Zhou's
memory and thereby challenge the radicals.
In the immediate wake of Deng's purge, many of his followers
also fell from power, and a political campaign was launched to
"criticize Deng Xiaoping and his right deviationist attempt to
reverse correct verdicts [on people during the Cultural
Revolution]." Only Mao's death in September and the purge of the
Gang of Four by a coalition of political, police, and military
leaders in October 1976 brought this effort to vilify Deng to a
close. Although it was officially ended by the 11th Party Congress
in August 1977, the Cultural Revolution had in fact concluded with
Mao's death and the purge of the Gang of
Four.
Consequences of the Cultural
Revolution
Although the Cultural Revolution largely bypassed the vast
majority of the people, who lived in the rural areas, it had very
serious consequences for the Chinese system as a whole. In the short
run, of course, the political instability and zigzags in economic
policy produced slower economic growth and a decline in the capacity
of the government to deliver goods and services. Officials at all
levels of the political system had learned that future shifts in
policy would jeopardize those who had aggressively implemented
previous policy. The result was bureaucratic timidity. In addition,
with the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, nearly
3,000,000 CCP members and other citizens awaited reinstatement after
having been wrongfully purged.
Bold actions in the late 1970s went far toward coping with
these immediate problems, but the Cultural Revolution also left more
serious, longer-term legacies. First, a severe generation gap had
been created in which young adults had been denied an education and
had been taught to redress grievances by taking to the streets.
Second, there was corruption within the CCP and the government, as
the terror and accompanying scarcities of goods during the Cultural
Revolution had forced people to fall back on traditional personal
relationships and on extortion in order to get things done. Third,
the CCP leadership and the system itself suffered a loss of
legitimacy when millions of urban Chinese became disillusioned by
the obvious power plays that took place in the name of political
principle in the early and mid-1970s. Fourth, bitter factionalism
was rampant as members of rival Cultural Revolution factions shared
the same work unit, each still looking for ways to undermine the
power of the other.
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