cultural revolution essay

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

By Pankaj Mishra

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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"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.”

Stanford University

SPICE is a program of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Introduction to the Cultural Revolution

The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” usually known simply as the Cultural Revolution (or the Great Cultural Revolution), was a “complex social upheaval that began as a struggle between Mao Zedong and other top party leaders for dominance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and went on to affect all of China with its call for “continuing revolution.” 1 This social upheaval lasted from 1966 to 1976 and left deep scars upon Chinese society.

The roots of the Cultural Revolution date back to the early 1960s. After the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, in which more than 20 million people died, Chairman Mao Zedong decided to take a less active role in governing the country. More practical, moderate leaders, such as Vice-Chairman Liu Shaoqi and Premier Zhou Enlai, introduced economic reforms based on individual incentives—such as allowing families to farm their own plots of land—in an effort to revive the battered economy. Mao detested such policies, as they went against the principles of pure communism in which he so firmly believed. Nevertheless, China’s economy grew strongly from 1962 to 1965 with the more conservative economic policies in place.

At the same time, Mao started to worry that local party officials were taking advantage of their positions to benefit themselves. Rather than resolving such cases internally to preserve the prestige of the CCP, Mao favored open criticism and the involvement of the people to expose and punish the members of the ruling class who disagreed with him; he framed this as a genuine socialist campaign involving the central struggle of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie.

Buildup to the Cultural Revolution

Overall, Mao began to fear that the CCP was becoming too bureaucratic and that Party officials and planners were abandoning their commitment to the values of communism and revolution. 2 Since the Great Leap Forward, he believed that he had been losing influence among his revolutionary comrades, and thus, the battle for China’s soul.

Some members of the Communist leadership argued for a new campaign of radicalism to overcome what they perceived as the stagnation of the country. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and other officials argued that artistic and cultural works were beginning to criticize communism and should focus more on promoting a revolutionary spirit. Lin Biao, the head of the national army (called the People’s Liberation Army or PLA), was perhaps Mao’s strongest ally. Lin organized hundreds of Mao’s quotes into a book called Quotations from Chairman Mao, better known as the “Little Red Book.” Lin required every soldier to read the book and emphasized adherence to the Party line and loyalty to CCP leaders in the Army. Mao praised the PLA as an example for the Chinese people, and Mao’s status and image reached new heights when all Chinese began to study his book of quotations and memorize passages of the book; Mao became a prophet-figure in the minds of many Chinese.

The Beginning of the Cultural Revolution

When Jiang Qing and her allies complained in late 1965 that various cultural productions were openly criticizing the Communist leadership, Mao decided that China needed a new revolutionary movement. Beginning in May 1966, Jiang Qing’s allies purged key figures in the cultural bureaucracy and criticized writers of articles seen as critical of Mao.

That same month, the top party official in Beijing University’s Philosophy Department wrote a big character poster, or dazibao , attacking the administration of her university. Faculty at the country’s other universities soon began to do the same, and radicals among faculty and students began to criticize Party members. This wave of criticisms spread swiftly to high schools in Beijing. Radical members of the leadership, such as Jiang Qing, distributed armbands to squads of students and declared them to be “‘Red Guards—the front line of the new revolutionary upheaval.” 3

Mao endorsed the revolutionary discourse and the attacks on authority figures, whom he believed had grown complacent, bureaucratic, and anti-revolutionary. Local Red Guards attacked anyone whom they believed lacked revolutionary credentials, and then turned on those who simply failed to wholeheartedly support their efforts. In August 1966, the Central Committee issued a directive entitled the “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (a.k.a. the Sixteen Points) in an effort to define the revolution’s goals. Later that month, Mao began to greet huge parades of Red Guards holding aloft the “Little Red Book.”

However, despite official directives and encouragement from the Party leadership, local forces were left to act according to their own definitions, and many of them ended up inflicting violence upon their communities and clashing with each other. Nobody wanted to be considered a “reactionary,” but in the absence of official guidelines for identifying “true Communists,” everyone became a target of abuse. People tried to protect themselves by attacking friends and even their own families. The result was a bewildering series of attacks and counterattacks, factional fighting, unpredictable violence, and the breakdown of authority throughout China.

Some believe that this chaotic, violent response stemmed from the two decades of repression that the Party had imposed on China. Two particularly effective methods by which the CCP controlled the Chinese population were assigning class labels to each person, and giving the boss of each work unit nearly unlimited control over and knowledge of the lives of all the workers accountable to him or her. As a result, freedom of expression was denied, people were totally dependent on their bosses and were obliged to sacrifice and remain completely obedient to the Chinese nation, and only Party members exercised direct influence over their own lives. Thus, to the youth of the day, the Cultural Revolution represented a release from all their shackles, frustrations, and feelings of powerlessness. It also gave them the freedom to enact revenge on those whom they believed exercised undue influence over them or whom they had been told were “class enemies.”

Descent into Chaos

The chaos and violence increased in the autumn and winter of 1966, as schools and universities closed so that students could dedicate themselves to “revolutionary struggle.” They were encouraged to destroy the “Four Olds”—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking—and in the process damaged many of China’s temples, valuable works of art, and buildings. They also began to verbally and physically attack authority figures in society, including their teachers, school administrators, Communist Party members, neighbors, and even their friends, relatives, and parents. At the same time, purges were carried out in the high ranks of the Communist Party.

On New Year’s Day 1967, many newspapers urged coalitions of workers and peasants to overthrow the entire class of decision-makers in the country. The Red Guards were instructed to treat the Cultural Revolution as a class struggle, in which “everything which does not fit the socialist system and proletarian dictatorship should be attacked.” 4 Radical revolutionary groups responded with fervor, attempting to gain control over local organizations. However, the end result was that local authorities and Party leaders were now dragged into the fighting that was quickly enveloping the rest of society. In the absence of coordination, rival “revolutionary units” fought Party leaders and each other, and the unending series of local power struggles multiplied even further.

Overall, the Red Guards and other groups of workers and peasants terrorized millions of Chinese during the 1966–1968 period. Intellectuals were beaten, committed suicide, or died of their injuries or privation. Thousands were imprisoned, and millions sent to work in the countryside to “reeducate” themselves by laboring among the peasants.

The breakdown of order reached its peak in the summer of 1967: opposing worker and student factions clashed throughout the country, with particularly intense violence in Beijing and Guangzhou, and massive fighting between local militant groups and the PLA in Wuhan led to the deaths of more than a thousand protestors. In perhaps the final straw, radicals assumed control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1967 and began to appoint their own radical diplomats to Chinese embassies around the world.

Return to Order

At this point, most party leaders, including Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, and Jiang Qing, agreed that the disorder was becoming too widespread to control and the country was in serious danger of falling into anarchy. They began to emphasize studying Mao’s works rather than attacking class enemies, used workers’ groups to control student groups, and generally championed the PLA while denouncing “ultra-left tendencies.” Nevertheless, armed clashes continued until the summer of 1968, when Mao called on troops to quell an uprising at Qinghua University in Beijing. Five people were killed and 149 wounded in the confrontation, including workers who were shot by students. After this final gasp of violence, a semblance of order returned to the country: “Revolutionary Committees” consisting of representatives from the PLA, “the masses,” and “correct” Communist Party cadres were established to decide on leadership positions and restore order.

Although its most chaotic phase had ended, the Cultural Revolution officially continued, and with it the unpredictable persecution of many Chinese. For example, the “Campaign to Purify Class Ranks,” which lasted from late 1967 until 1969, attempted to rid the Party of those with “bad” class backgrounds. Its goal was to identify Communist Party cadres who had ties to the West or to landlords or rightists and subject them to psychological pressure in group sessions to confess their mistakes. Ironically, this led to the persecution of many of the most militant Red Guards: these were people who had tried to abandon their poor class background and prove their “Redness” by acting militantly during the Cultural Revolution. Despite their previous revolutionary fervor, they were now tortured and banished from the CCP.

Many Chinese accused of being counterrevolutionaries were sent to the countryside to engage in hard rural labor as a complement to their political indoctrination. They were urged to praise Mao and Lin Biao and to condemn Liu Shaoqi as a revisionist bourgeois. Their conditions were extremely basic, and many who were old or weak suffered from the demanding labor and lack of comforts.

Lin Biao’s Downfall

In 1969, Lin Biao was named Mao’s successor at the National Party Congress. The same year, Soviet troops clashed with Chinese troops on China’s northern border, leading to widespread support of the PLA, which Lin Biao led. However, in 1970, Mao began to criticize some of Lin’s top officers and changed the constitution so that Lin could not ascend to a higher post. Then, in late 1971, the CCP announced that Lin had attempted to assassinate Mao due to frustration over seeing his political ambitions blocked. Lin had then tried to flee China with his family in a plane, which crashed in Mongolia in September 1971, killing all on board. This story was impossible to prove, and many believe it was fabricated. Nevertheless, the Party now painted Lin Biao as a “renegade and traitor” and condemned him as an enemy of the people. However, after revering Lin Biao as one of the country’s greatest heroes for nearly a decade, the about-face caused many Chinese to doubt, perhaps for the first time, the honesty of the Communist Party and its leaders. Most historians believe that Mao felt threatened by Lin’s growing power and popularity and began to worry that Lin would overthrow him. Thus, Mao eliminated Lin to consolidate his role as uncontested leader of the Party.

The Later Years of the Cultural Revolution

The early years of the Cultural Revolution had left the educational system in disarray. High schools and universities were gradually reopened in the late 1960s and especially the early 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1973 that examinations for entrance into universities were reinstated. These examinations replaced “revolutionary purity” as the basis for college admissions. Overall, it is estimated that some 16 million urban Chinese youth had been sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. While they were supposedly there to develop solidarity with the peasants and contribute their labor to the revolution, they were also relocated to ease the overcrowding of Chinese cities. Years of living in the countryside meant that this generation lost out on educational opportunities and that its intellectual capacity was underdeveloped.

Another result of the 1969 border clashes with the Soviet Union was China’s quest to find friends abroad. China reestablished ties with the West after President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and signed trade deals with Western nations. To ensure that the influx of elements of Western culture would not dilute the Cultural Revolution’s ideals, Mao simultaneously launched the “Anti-Lin Biao Anti-Confucius” campaign, urging Chinese to stay true to Marxist values.

End of the Cultural Revolution

By 1974, China’s two most powerful leaders, Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, were chronically ill and unable to govern effectively. The four main remaining leaders of the Cultural Revolution, led by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, engaged in an internal power struggle with more moderate, pragmatic Party members like Deng Xiaoping.

Zhou Enlai died in January 1976. Many Chinese deeply mourned his death because they believed that he was a moderating force who had put the well- being of the Chinese people before all else. On April 5, 1976, thousands of Chinese gathered in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Zhou and to ask for “more openness in government, an end to dictatorship, and a return to the true spirit of Marxism-Leninism.” 5 As with all previous such requests under the CCP, these demonstrations were suppressed.

Chairman Mao Zedong, China’s supreme leader for 27 years, died on September 9, 1976. The entire country entered an extended period of grief over Mao but did not protest as they had after Zhou’s death. Hua Guofeng, the CCP’s second-in-command, seized power and arrested the four remaining leaders of the Cultural Revolution, labeling them the “Gang of Four.” They were accused of dozens of crimes, including masterminding most of the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution against Mao’s wishes. They made handy scapegoats for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, leaving Mao’s reputation officially unblemished. The arrest of the Gang of Four on October 6, 1976, is thus considered by many to mark the end of the Cultural Revolution.

The reversal of the extreme policies of the Cultural Revolution continued in December 1978, when a conference of Party leaders declared victory in the struggle against Lin Biao and the Gang of Four and proclaimed that China could now progress to “socialist modernization,” which in practice meant opening up to the West and transitioning to capitalism. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping became the undisputed leader of China. He led the country down a definitive road toward capitalism, greater economic freedom, and stronger links with the outside world. The Cultural Revolution had ended, and in its place was something quite nearly its opposite: pragmatism, interdependence, openness to outside influences, and capitalism. The CCP’s monopoly on power and attempts to control the population remained, but the Cultural Revolution had severely damaged the CCP’s legitimacy, and it would no longer enjoy the trust and absolute power it had during that tumultuous 10-year period of modern Chinese history.

1 Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001). 2 The example of the Soviet Union haunted Mao. When Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953, he criticized Stalin, instituted political and economic reforms, and backed away from the absolutism that characterized Stalin’s rule. Mao greatly admired Stalin, so he was shocked at Khrushchev’s reforms and believed that the Soviet Union had abandoned true communism. These tensions resulted in a break in relations between the two former allies in the early 1960s. 3 Spence, 604. 4 Spence, 607. 5 Spence, 621.

China's Cultural Revolution: shockwaves still felt, yet it's largely unknown

'it's impossible to understand china today without understanding the cultural revolution,' says tania branigan.

Social Sharing

Before 1989, there was 1966

Tiananmen Square is best remembered today for the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations that were eventually crushed by the government.

But in 1966, Tiananmen Square was ground zero for an event that was the ideological negative of 1989: it was a pro-government gathering, which marked the start of the Cultural Revolution. The movement lasted a decade, claiming the lives of up to two million people, and derailing the lives of up to 36 million more. "It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution," said Tania Branigan, whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution won the  2023 Cundill History Prize .

Yet given the Communist Party's internal intrigues, and the shifting alliances as well as the conflicting motives within it, Tania Branigan also believes that the Cultural Revolution is in many ways incomprehensible.

"It takes in everybody," she told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed. "It goes right across the country geographically. It goes from Beijing's top leaders — both of Mao's heirs apparent would die within this decade… also people in remote provinces, farmers, infants even — who were killed simply because they were part of a landlord family," said Branigan.

Origin story of Red Memory

Branigan went to China in 2008. It was then that her interest in the Cultural Revolution began.

"I went for lunch one day with an analyst I knew… he started telling me about a trip that he'd made a few years before to a village where his wife's father had been held by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. And they had gone looking for his body." 

Local farmers remembered the father-in-law, but couldn't understand why anyone would go looking for his remains, because there were so many buried bodies that it was impossible to identify any one of them.

"And so that was the moment when I really realized how present it was, the fact that the Cultural Revolution wasn't in fact history, but something that people were living with."

Why a Cultural Revolution?

Mao wanted to force China into what he believed would be its political utopia. That was the justification for what he called the Great Leap Forward.

It began in 1958 and ended four years later, and as Branigan says, "was this extraordinarily hubristic attempt to overhaul the economy, to industrialize China, to collectivize agriculture… but that was driven through with such zealotry and went so disastrously wrong that it resulted in the deaths of probably 40 million people in the Great Famine, maybe more."

The failure of the Great Leap Forward threatened Mao's authority. He blamed the population, believing that people weren't Communist enough.

"He wanted to transform China, not only in its political or economic structures, but I think he believed that to do that, you also had to reform people's souls," Branigan said.

And to reform the soul of the nation, Mao turned to younger people, who formed the core of the Red Guards, often called the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution.

Mao viewed the family unit with suspicion, as counter-revolutionary, so disrupting the structures of family, traditionally the backbone of Chinese society, was merely the sociological means to his ideological ends.

The political and personal were identical

Political purity was absolutely paramount, but arbitrarily judged, at times weaponized cynically to settle old scores; while at others, accusations of class betrayal were levelled just for amusement. Neighbours turned on neighbours. Employees on bosses. Students on teachers. In fact, the first victim of the Cultural Revolution was a teacher, beaten to death publicly by girls at her school. 

Branigan recounts a heartbreaking conversation she had with one man, Zhang Hongbing, who lost his mother to the Cultural Revolution. But it was Zhang himself who was responsible for her death.

As he recounted to Branigan, his mother had criticized Chairman Mao.

Zhang warned her to stop, but she persisted. He then threatened to kill her.

"I felt it wasn't my mother — it wasn't a person. She suddenly became a monster." He and his father reported her to the authorities. Two weeks later, she was executed.

"And so he has spent the following decades carrying that guilt and trying to come to terms with it," said Branigan. 

Impact on Xi Jinping

As Tania Branigan asserts, China's present leader [Xi Jinping] "had a very hard Cultural Revolution." His father had fallen out of favour with Mao, and Red Guards ordered his mother to publicly denounce him.

"At one stage, the family was under such pressure that his half sister would later kill herself," she said.

Then came Mao's directive to have young, urban people go to the countryside and work on farms and rural communities. Seventeen million left home, including Xi. 

"They went to labour in these really brutal circumstances," Branigan explained. "It was not just going hundreds of miles away from their families at a very young age, but also really going back a century. So they were going to places without electricity or running water. They were struggling to scrape a living… And for many, it was an incredible struggle for years on end, not knowing if they'd ever return home."

Like Mao, Xi knows the value of recasting of national history to suit present political needs.

"And what's fascinating," Branigan elaborates, "is that this has now become the one part of the Cultural Revolution that's not just accepted as a matter of discussion in China, but is even celebrated in official propaganda."

Yet it's celebrated in a highly selective way, with little meaningful discussion of the social or historical context of the Cultural Revolution itself.

"It's become repackaged as the sort of creation myth, which is the story of how he [Xi] found his way to manhood, how he found his purpose in life, the fact he was tough, resilient, that he understands how ordinary people live at the bottom of society," said Branigan.

Unknowability

Tania Branigan doesn't try to resolve the paradox that lies at the heart of Red Memory : that the Cultural Revolution is both central to understanding China, yet impossible to comprehend fully. Instead, she looks towards the future, and to within China itself.

"I hope we can get closer [to a fuller understanding]. It's really important to say that there have been extraordinary Chinese scholars working on this… who have in some cases published their work outside China. In other cases, I think sort of publishing underground, or perhaps even sitting on it — in the hopes that one day, it will come to light."

Listen to the full conversation with Nahlah Ayed by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.  

*This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.

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Chinese Cultural Revolution Resources: Primary Resources

Archival materials, newspapers/archives, the cr/10 project: china's cultural revolution in memories.

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For E-resources off-campus access is limited to UNC faculty, students, and staff.

• Chinese Cultural Revolution Database (中国文化大革命文库) The most comprehensive source covering primary sources on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The database contains more than 10,000 Central Party documents, Communist party leaders' speeches, official newspaper articles from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, selections of some of the key Red Guard texts, and hard-to-reach archives that often buried within diverse Chinese newspapers many of which are not publicly available The database is updated annually. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users. Language: Chinese
• “Talk to Leaders of the Centre.” Pages 253-255.
• “Speech at a Meeting with Regional Secretaries and Members of the Cultural Revolutionary Group of the Central Committee.” Pages 256-259.
• “A Letter to the Red Guards of Tsinghua University Middle School.” Pages 260-261.
• “Talk at a Meeting of the Central Cultural Revolution Group.” Pages 275-276.
• Essays p.16-18, 22
• Selected readings from the works of Mao Tsetung
• Resolution On Certain Questions In The History Of Our Party Since The Founding Of The People's Republic Of China (March 1980 - June 1981) by Deng Xiaoping Between March 1980 and the Sixth Plenary Session of the Party's Eleventh Central Committee in June 1981, Deng Xiaoping gave his opinions on the drafting and revision of the resolution. These are excerpts from nine of his talks.
• The Chinese cultural revolution; selected documents
• China during the cultural revolution, 1966-1976 : a selected bibliography of English language works
• CIA World Factbook more... less... Access: No restrictions.
• The Caesar, Polo, and Esau Papers (historical collection, international)
• Interview with Mao BY EDGAR SNOW (FEBRUARY 26, 1965)
• Hong wei bing zi liao [electronic resource] = Red Guard publications.
• 红衛兵资料 [electronic resource] = Red Guard publications
• Hong wei bing zi liao. Xu bian er = Red Guard publications. Supplement 2. / 紅衛兵資料. 續編二 = Red guard publications. supplement 2. Oakton, Va. : Center for Chinese Research Materials.
• [Hong wei bing zi liao. Xu bian] = Red Guard publications. Supplement. 紅衛兵資料續編 = Red Guard publications; Supplement.
• Wu chan jie ji wen hua da ge ming wen jian hui bian. / 无产阶级文化大革命文件汇编. Beijing hua gong xue yuan Mao Zedong si xiang xuan chuan yuan [bian]./北京化工学院毛泽东思想宣传员[编].

See also resources at  Center for Reserch Libraries    

   Search by keywords: Chinese cultural revolution, China, 1966-1976, Mao Zedong

• Cultural Revolution, 50 Years On A multimedia report by the South China Morning Post examining the pain, passion and power struggle that shaped China today.
• Down to the Countryside Movement Documenting the cultural memory of this period as experienced by the participants provides a unique perspective on the Down to the Countryside Movement. Since 2016, the Dartmouth Library has been collecting original materials from the rustication period including diaries, letters, photographs, and artifacts. These materials include participants' first-hand accounts reflecting on their experiences, shifting their perspectives, and recalling their living conditions during rustication.

Off-campus access is limited to UNC faculty, students, and staff.

• Foreign Office Files for China, 1949-1980 more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
• Chinese Foreign Policy Database An online resource containing nearly 1,500 declassified documents on the international relations of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1949. Documents in the new database--the vast majority available with English translation--include diplomatic cables, high level correspondence, meeting minutes, and other internal documents retrieved from dozens of archives around the world. Over 600 records from the now-closed Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing are included. more... less... Access: No restrictions. Language: English, Chinese
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers Search hundreds of thousands of pages of full-text and full-image newspaper articles. Includes news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements; historical photos, graphics, and advertisements are also included; display the complete image of any page in any issue or browse the database to scan individual issues page by page. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
• Wall Street Journal Access full-text articles from The Wall Street Journal: Eastern Edition, published 6 days a week. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users. North Carolina residents with a borrower's card may access from off campus by visiting NCLive directly. Contact the Davis Library Service Desk for the NCLive password (instructions) . Coverage: 1984-present.
• Washington Post Historical Newspaper Offers hundreds of thousands of pages of full-text and full-image newspaper articles covering the entire publishing history of the newspaper from 1877 to 1990. Researchers and students can use the images to find not only news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements, but also historical photos, stock photos, and advertisements. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
• Newspaper Source Plus Provides complete full-text coverage of 149 national and international newspapers, such as Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Times (London), Toronto Star, Washington Post, and Washington Times. Additionally offered is selective full text from over 400 regional U. S. newspapers and transcripts from CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NPR, etc. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users. Coverage: 1995-present
• People's Daily (人民日报) 1946 - Present The Chinese Communist Party official mouthpiece, first published in 1946. The digital People's Daily was developed in early 2000 by the People's Daily Press in Beijing China. more... less... Access: Off Campus Access is available for: UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users.
• Chinese Local Newspapers, pre-1966 This resource contains three newspapers, Anqing Daily《安庆报》, Huainan Daily《淮南日报》, and Wuhu Daily《芜湖报》 published in the Anhui Province, during 1951-1966. Local newspapers are primary materials for understanding local politics and social life during this period. more... less... Access: Onyen log in is always required for UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty, and staff; UNC Hospitals employees; UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated AHEC users. Coverage: 1949-1970 Language: Chinese

CR/10 (Cultural Revolution: 10) is an oral history project initiated by the University of Pittsburgh in 2015, which was developed as a crowd-sourcing project in 2016. UNC Library contributed to the source content with interviews of CR witnesses or family members who lived in North Carolina. You may visit The CR/10 Project site for more information. 

Here are three audio/video interviews that were conducted in person in Cary and Chapel Hill of North Carolina. The interviewees are asked to discuss the experiences that left the deepest impressions on them—what they most want to share with the audience. At the interviewee's request, some of the videos have been replaced with a still photo obscuring the interviewee's identity.

"You may not believe in me, you may doubt me, but you may not doubt the Communist Party."

The interview subject was born in the 1960s and lived in a small city in Anhui from 1966 to 1976. Her family background was classified as military and her occupation during the Cultural Revolution was a student. The highest level of education she has achieved is college.

"Each person carried a bit of dust when the Cultural Revolution ended."​

The interview subject was born in the 1950s and lived in an urban area of Heilongjiang from 1966 to 1976. His family background was classified as intellectual and his occupation during the Cultural Revolution was a student. The highest level of education he has achieved is college.

"[We] were all brainwashed."

The interview subject was born in the 1960s and lived in an urban area of Beijing from 1966 to 1976. His family background was classified as intellectual and his occupation during the Cultural Revolution was a student. The highest level of education he has achieved is graduate. 

Memorabilia (open access sites)

Cultural Revolution Posters

Photographs of the Cultural Revolution by Li Zhensheng

Cultural Revolution Propaganda Posters

Cultural Revolution Propaganda by Univ. of Washington

Cultural Revolution Propaganda

Images of Daily Life in China during the Cultural Revolution

Feature-length documentary: The Revolution They Remember (in English) 口述文革历史

The Revolution They Remember presents the Chinese Cultural Revolution era of 1966-1976 via the memories of those who experienced it and have reflected on its legacies. The Revolution They Remember is based on two video oral history projects: one by the EAL and the other by Dartmouth Library. Initiated by the EAL in 2015, The Cultural Revolution: 10 (CR/10) Project recorded, preserved, and published video interviews with Chinese citizens sharing their memories and impressions of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. 

The Revolution They Remember features selections from the interviews from these two projects, as well as images contributed by interview participants, archival footage, and photos. The film also comprises commentary by scholars of modern Chinese history.

Click this link to view the trailer .

Click this link to view the full documentary film.

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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

About this sample

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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The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style Essay

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In the year 1966, Mao Zedong felt that the leaders of the communist party in china were leading not only the party but the entire country in the wrong direction. 1 He, therefore, decided to initiate a revolution that would lead the country back to its traditional leadership style, where power is not with the bourgeoisie but with the people. His call was for the youth to eliminate all the foreign and new elements in Chinese society and bring back the spirit that had won them the civil war decades before. 2 With the help of other radical leaders such as Lin Biao, he mobilized the youths to form paramilitary groups, which they called the Red Guards, to fight against the bourgeoisie mentality perpetrated by the then leaders of the CCP, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping. 3

The Red Guards formed by the youths later disintegrated into different factions, all of which fighting for supremacy. This forced Mao to bring in the army to help in restoring order in the country. The army pushed all the youth paramilitary groups to the rural areas, subduing the movement. 4 Out of these groups, there emerged a radical group that envisioned a new thought of the revolution. They called themselves Shengwulian and were based in Hunan Province. 5 They were opposed to both the ideologies of Mao and the other leaders of the party. According to them, the revolution was about one class overthrowing the other. 6 They also added that “the revolution had turned the relationship between the people and party leaders from that of leaders and the led to that of rulers and the ruled and between exploiters and the exploited.” 7

I think Mao’s intentions were good but his approach was dictatorial. He envisioned a nation where all the citizens are equal. He detested the leadership that was in power at the time for their bourgeoisie spirit and wanted all the citizens to live as one equal community. However, his use of the military in the suppression of the Red Guards was uncalled for. That was very autocratic.

He should have listened to all their grievances and consolidated them into a philosophy that would help him lead them as a united group. Worse still, his betrayal of a former ally, Liu Biao, portrayed him as a very selfish individual whose only interest was power. He interpreted Liu’s actions as a way of usurping his position. As a result, he decided to go after him, causing his death. Liu was involved in a fatal plane crash while fleeing from Mao.

Mao’s course was both ill and well-intentioned. His good intentions are seen in his struggle to rid the country of capitalistic and bourgeoisie mentality. According to him, the country was better off with communism, where they lived as one community with no superior and inferior citizen, and not with a set up where leaders want to get rich at the expense of the majority of the citizens.

He wanted the change to happen in the shortest time possible. Hence, he had to use radical means to ensure that this happened as fast as he wanted it. However, a critical view of the revolution shows that he might have used the revolution as an avenue to restore his power and influence, having lost it six years earlier. 8 Besides, the use of the army in suppressing the Red Guards and his former ally, Liu, shows that his interests were not in the equality he claimed to stand for, but in getting power.

Blum, Susan Debra, and Lionel M Jensen. China off Center . Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2006.

Wu, Yiching. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, London: Harvard University Press, 2014.

• Yichang Wu. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, London: Harvard University Press, 2014, 146.
• Ibid., 147.
• Ibid., 148.
• Ibid., 149.
• Ibid., 152.
• Ibid., 166.
• Susan Debra Blum and Lionel M Jensen. China off Center . Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2006, 120.
• Ibid., 125.
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"The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." IvyPanda , 25 July 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style'. 25 July.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." July 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." July 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

IvyPanda . "The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Traditional Leadership Style." July 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-chinese-cultural-revolution/.

The Beat Movement: a Cultural Revolution in 20th Century America

This essay about the Beat Movement explores its profound impact on 20th-century American culture. It discusses how figures like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs challenged societal norms through literature, music, and art. The Beat ethos rejected conformity and celebrated spontaneity, influencing subsequent generations of artists, writers, and activists. The movement’s emphasis on individualism, multiculturalism, and social critique remains relevant today, serving as a reminder of the power of art to provoke change.

How it works

In the annals of American literary and cultural history, few movements have left as indelible a mark as the Beat Generation. Emerging in the 1950s, the Beat movement was a countercultural phenomenon that challenged the prevailing norms of post-World War II society. Spearheaded by luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beats rejected conformity, celebrated spontaneity, and sought spiritual fulfillment through art and experience. Their impact resonates to this day, influencing not only literature but also music, film, and social activism.

At its core, the Beat movement was a reaction against the stifling conformity and materialism of mainstream American culture in the postwar era. In contrast to the prevailing ethos of suburban conformity and consumerism, the Beats embraced a bohemian lifestyle characterized by spontaneity, creativity, and a rejection of societal norms. Their writings often explored themes of alienation, disillusionment, and the search for authentic experience in an increasingly homogenized world.

Central to the Beat aesthetic was the idea of “spontaneous prose” championed by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s groundbreaking novel “On the Road,” published in 1957, epitomized this approach, capturing the restless energy and wanderlust of a generation disillusioned with the American Dream. Drawing inspiration from his own experiences traveling across the United States, Kerouac eschewed traditional narrative conventions in favor of a stream-of-consciousness style that mirrored the rhythms of jazz music, another key influence on the Beat movement.

While literature was the primary medium through which the Beat ethos was expressed, the movement encompassed a broader cultural sensibility that found expression in music, art, and politics. Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti experimented with form and content, pushing the boundaries of language and challenging societal taboos. Ginsberg’s seminal poem “Howl,” with its searing critique of the dehumanizing effects of industrial society, became a rallying cry for a generation disillusioned with the status quo.

Beyond literature, the Beat movement exerted a profound influence on the cultural landscape of the 20th century. Beatniks, as adherents of the movement came to be known, embraced an eclectic mix of influences, from Eastern spirituality to African American jazz, and their embrace of multiculturalism prefigured the ethos of the 1960s counterculture. The Beats also played a significant role in the civil rights and anti-war movements, their rejection of mainstream values serving as a catalyst for social and political change.

In conclusion, the Beat movement remains a pivotal moment in American cultural history, challenging the status quo and inspiring subsequent generations of artists, writers, and activists. Its legacy can be seen in the continued celebration of individualism, creativity, and nonconformity in contemporary society. As we navigate the complexities of the 21st century, the spirit of the Beats serves as a reminder of the power of art to provoke, challenge, and ultimately transform the world around us.

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Article Contents

Decolonization and the new ‘cultural revolution’.

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Maria Rubins, Decolonization and the New ‘Cultural Revolution’, Forum for Modern Language Studies , 2024;, cqae037, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqae037

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In 2020, the authors of the paper offered for our commentary published an edited volume that argued for ‘transnationalizing Russian Studies’ or, otherwise put, breaking out of the tacit methodological nationalism that took ‘“Russianness” for granted’. 1 They proposed to treat Russia as ‘a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual formation’ and sought ‘to place the mobility of language, culture, ideas and people within, across and beyond national boundaries’. 2 They now return to reassess the premises and conclusions of their volume in the context of ever more vocal calls for the decolonization of Russian Studies. Hence their central question: ‘To what extent was our “transnational” approach still necessary – or even valid – at a time when the Russian army was literally transgressing national borders?’. 3 After discussing the historical evolution of Russian Studies, the ambivalence of Western academics’ positioning within it and the pros and cons of the current decolonizing approaches for our field, they reconfirm the relevance of their original conceptual lens but propose to combine transnationalism with decolonization as ‘mutually corrective’. 4

With respect to the central question, I am not convinced that we as scholars should use military invasions as our primary benchmark, rushing to reassess well-tested methodologies on account of a volatile geopolitical situation, no matter how tragic and emotional it may be for many concerned. This is especially the case since, as Byford, Doak and Hutchings acknowledge towards the end of their essay, the very epistemic foundations of our field today ‘are not just symbolically mirroring the war’s violence and brutality but are also shaped by them’. 5 This is clearly an abnormal and deplorable situation for any sphere of human activity, particularly the intellectual one.

Moreover, I fail to see, at least at present, any direct benefit from combining the transnational paradigm with decolonization. Apart from the fact that ‘decolonizing Russian Studies’ has itself become a transnational trend, hastily adopted in university circles from North America to Europe to Japan, these phenomena remain fundamentally distinct.

While ‘transnationalism’ has gained wide currency in social, business and everyday parlance, having experienced a considerable semantic expansion, as a conceptual framework in literary and cultural studies it connotes something quite specific. It arose in response to a rapidly shifting cultural reality informed by unprecedented migrations and global connectivity, which destroyed neatly circumscribed mono-national units (if they ever existed in practice). Transnational theory articulated a defining role in contemporary culture of cross-border mobility, fusion and interstitiality – processes that have decoupled conventional associations between nation, language and geographical territory. This approach reached Russian Studies later than other fields. It was not a common view even ten years ago when I was finishing a book on Russian Montparnasse as a transnational community. 6 Since then, however, the transnational paradigm began to inform research on Russian culture both beyond and within national borders. In the years 2018 to 2020, when I was conducting an international collaborative project on Russian diasporic literature, we argued for diverse conceptions of ‘Russianness’, a multiplicity of literary canons and a plurality of historical and cultural narratives. 7 Other publications, including Transnational Russian Studies by Byford, Doak and Hutchings, contributed to consolidating the transnational approach to Russian humanities. And as long as Russian culture (or, as some scholars insist, Russian cultures) 8 remains global, multifocal and translingual, there seems no reason to doubt the relevance of this approach. Indeed, the two million-strong emigration from the Russian Federation over the last two years has only accelerated the further diversification and hybridization of Russian literary and political discourses and the establishment of new distinct geo-cultural formations in various corners of the planet.

By contrast, decolonization is, in the first instance, an ideology with a prescriptive character. Decolonization of Russian Studies has become a form of political activism, which is, in my view, incompatible with academic work (both research and teaching) because it tends to replace the transmission of knowledge with indoctrination. Political activism is the opposite of education, since it teaches students what to think and not how to think. Education is about introducing alternative narratives and discussing their respective values and flaws, rather than ‘cancelling’ views that appear ‘offensive’, ‘conservative’, ‘controversial’ or otherwise incompatible with the sensibilities of those who shape current mainstream opinion. Education also implies studying phenomena in their original historical and ideological contexts, rather than judging them only by the standards of today. Decolonization, as currently practised in Western academia, particularly in our field, does the opposite.

The authors of the essay point out very sensibly that this ideological framework was developed in other contexts and for other purposes, primarily in Latin American area studies. The indiscriminate application of this vocabulary to Russian culture for the primary purpose of illustrating the pervasiveness and persistence of Russian imperialism is unprofessional and reminiscent of selective and distorted Soviet interpretations of Western culture (and, generally, of anything that clashed with the Soviet ideological paradigm). It would be unproductive to read Pushkin and Tolstoy through Putin, Goethe through Hitler or Firdousi through the policies of current Iranian rulers. Our students will only become true experts on Russia if they acquire deep and thorough knowledge about the country and its complex and chequered history, rather than blindly assimilating a picture informed by fashionable ideologies. 9 The forceful implementation of the decolonizing paradigm in the academic context will breed Russophobia rather than training students to make reasonable predictions about the country’s trajectory.

We have already seen how the academic community, including renowned Western experts in Russian politics and social studies, failed to anticipate the dramatic events of February 2022. Indeed, they were taken by complete surprise. And this happened despite Russia’s alleged ‘epistemic centrality’, which, as Byford, Doak and Hutchings remark, ‘has consistently generated a gravitational pull on limited institutional and epistemic resources at the expense of the many smaller, peripheral, non-Russian elements within this field’s elastic remit’. 10 Does this mean that these apparently disproportionate resources allocated for grants and research projects were wasted without producing any reliable results? Perhaps one of the reasons for the failure of Western academics to generate adequate expert knowledge is that Russia has been generally studied at a distance, with research driven by the application of trendy theoretical frames rather than old-fashioned ‘field work’?

In the period immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, academics tended to expect eventual ‘convergence’ between Russia and the West, leading to the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government, as Francis Fukuyama famously argued in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992). 11 While there were certainly critics of Fukuyama’s teleological argument, few cared to explore in earnest the viability of alternative scenarios or to examine more broadly why in some regions, nations and countries Western-style democracy appears unable to displace more authoritarian forms of government. For a political scientist conditioned by the Western academic culture, it could have been risky to start this conversation, posing uncomfortable questions about the universal applicability and stability of contemporary democracy and the inefficiency of national and international institutions created (and funded) to promote democratic values around the world. Rather than challenging the sacred cow of democracy as the ultimate end point of political evolution, many scholars prefer to explain the endurance of non-democratic regimes by delusion, ignorance or oppression. So, the problem is not that Russianists have come so close to their object of study as to require ‘decolonization’ to liberate themselves from Kremlin influence. On the contrary, they need to examine their subject at a closer range. If they continue to observe Russia through a telescope, they will add very little to our understanding of it, just when we need that knowledge most. 12

If any ‘self-decolonization’ is indeed necessary, it is precisely this kind of re-evaluation of preconceived notions that inform Russian Studies today, along with a return to bottom-up research. As for periodic reviewing of one’s own beliefs, strategies and positioning: professional and responsible academics have always done this anyway, long before the buzzword ‘decolonization’ was adopted, and they will continue to do so. But subjecting everyone simultaneously to this mandatory exercise can only do harm, intimidating those who should be able to think independently and to teach their students to express their thoughts and doubts freely. We already see blatant violations of free speech and free thought and censoring of those who hold dissenting opinions. While paying lip service to inclusiveness and diversity, this ideology thrives on the exclusion of specific groups, cultures and systems of thought.

In their essay, Byford, Doak and Hutchings point out the imminent dangers of blind application of the decolonization paradigm to Russian Studies. And they do it in a very polite and reserved way that contrasts favourably with the uncompromising rhetoric that marks the written and oral expression of those who promote decolonization today. However, rather than looking for a way to reconcile decolonization with more appropriate scholarly methods, the time seems ripe to resist the aggressive ideologization of our field before it is too late. Those of us who remember the Soviet past cannot help seeing the familiar outlines of intellectual repression under a different guise. A rather unpleasant déjà vu …

Transnational Russian Studies , ed. by Andy Byford, Connor Doak and Stephen Hutchings (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). The quotation is taken from the authors’ summary of this volume in their contribution to this Talking Point: Andy Byford, Connor Doak and Stephen Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing the Transnational, Transnationalizing the Decolonial: Russian Studies at the Crossroads’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies , 60.3 (2024).

Maria Rubins, Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020 , ed. by Maria Rubins (London: UCL Press, 2021).

Global Russian Cultures , ed. by Kevin Platt (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2019).

We are already seeing the result of the proliferation of various disciplines that easily shift into ideological dogma, each offering its own reductive optic for the examination of sophisticated cultural production. Among others, the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has pointed out the impact of such disciplines as Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Race Critical Theory and Queer Studies on the intellectual environment and the decline in university education. See ‘Prof. Alan Dershowitz Describes the Ivy League Universities’ Double Standard’, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzTpGpGLeeA > [accessed 8 April 2024]. Conditioned to view the world only in pre-defined categories with set normative associations (oppressor/oppressed, colonizer/colonized, dominant/subaltern), students are not prepared to assimilate the complexities of historical context, critically to assess conflicting sources of information or to engage in a dialogue. Analysis and reflection give way to superficial pasting of the assigned categories onto each new situation. This phenomenon is illustrated by the current anti-Israel rallies on campuses. The cause of the present war in Gaza – the barbaric attack by Hamas terrorists on Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 (the worst atrocities perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust) – was quickly de-emphasized, with left-wing propaganda flipping the narrative to demonize Israel. Crowds on campuses reproduce the claims and statistics of Hamas leaders, chant their slogans and resort to occupation of public places and bullying Jewish students and professors. Meanwhile polls show that half of these activists know next to nothing about the prehistory of the conflict and have no idea that the call to ‘free Palestine’ ‘from the river to the sea’ necessarily implies the destruction of the State of Israel, which is located precisely between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea (see Ron E. Hassner, ‘From Which River to Which Sea? College Students Don’t Know, Yet They Agree With the Slogan’, Wall Street Journal , 5 December, 2023). This astounding ignorance coupled with a self-righteous tone and verbal aggression is unsurprising, when even the presidents of top US universities, including Harvard, UPenn and MIT, are unable to answer the simple question of whether calls for genocide of the Jews violates the university code of conduct (as demonstrated by the Congressional hearing on antisemitism at college campuses on 5 December 2023). After ‘instruction’ from academics like these, the younger generation naturally finds itself in a state of moral chaos and intellectual confusion.

Byford, Doak and Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing the Transnational’.

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

The current efforts to isolate Russian researchers (usually irrespective of their political position), to suspend all exchange programmes, to terminate joint academic projects and alliances, to ban experts who still reside in the Russian Federation from publishing in Western journals and participating in conferences will inevitably lead to a major global setback because science and scholarship today are inconceivable without international cooperation.

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