The Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was a decade of engineered political violence launched by Mao Zedong to reassert his supremacy and purge "bourgeois" and "revisionist" elements from Chinese society. Mobilized bands of Red Guards attacked teachers, officials, and "class enemies"; somewhere between several hundred thousand and two million people died, millions more were persecuted, and a vast share of China's cultural inheritance — temples, texts, art, and living traditions, including martial-arts lineages — was deliberately destroyed.

What happened

Mao's May 1966 directive set the campaign in motion. Students formed Red Guard units, brandished the Quotations from Chairman Mao ("Little Red Book"), and launched the "Destroy the Four Olds" campaign against old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Teachers and intellectuals were paraded in "struggle sessions," beaten, and driven to suicide; millions of urban youth were "sent down" to the countryside; and factional fighting between Red Guard groups escalated, in places, into armed conflict. Religious sites and traditional practitioners — Buddhist and Daoist clergy, doctors of Chinese medicine, martial-arts masters — were attacked as feudal relics; the The Shaolin Temple and countless other sites were vandalized.

Why it matters

The Cultural Revolution traumatized a generation, gutted China's education and cultural transmission, and severed lineages of traditional knowledge — much of which survived only where it had already spread beyond the mainland. It remains a defining national wound the state permits to be named but not fully examined.

Background — what led here

Sidelined after the catastrophe of the The Great Leap Forward, Mao feared that "capitalist roaders" like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were steering China away from revolution. The Cultural Revolution was his instrument to destroy his rivals and rebuild a cult of personal authority.

Consequences

The decade ended only with Mao's death in September 1976 and the arrest of the "Gang of Four" weeks later. Deng Xiaoping, twice purged, returned to launch the "reform and opening" that reshaped China. The Party's 1981 "Resolution on Party History" labeled the era a catastrophe — but pinned blame on the Gang of Four and Lin Biao while shielding Mao's overall standing.

Perspectives

Officially the CCP calls it the "ten years of turmoil" — conceding disaster while carefully limiting culpability to protect Mao's legacy and the Party's legitimacy; independent memorialization, archives, and research inside China are restricted. Survivor memoirs and outside scholarship — notably Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals' Mao's Last Revolution — document the full scale of the violence and Mao's central, deliberate responsibility.

Sources

1. Roderick MacFarquhar & Michael Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution (2006).

2. Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 (2016).

3. Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991) — survivor memoir.