The Cultural Revolution

• The Four olds campaign (1966)

  
  

  • Was a campaign to destroy old ideas, culture, customs and habits.
  • Bird keeping was punished as a traditional custom.
  • Surgeons cancelled appointments as if it went wrong they were accused of class revenge.
  • Customers were checked of class origin before served at restaurants.
  • Children's names were changed to Red Glory or Face The East.
  • Changed traffic lights so that red meant go.
  • Changed road names so the British embassy was on 'Anti-imperialism Road'.
• The mass rallies of 1966


  
  

  • Started when guards from a uni sent Mao a big character poster that said 'long live the proletarian revolution spirit of rebellion'.
  • Mao published his own poster that said 'bombard the headquarters!'
  • Invited young people to travel on free public transport to Tiananmen square to get involved in 1 of 8 rallies.
  • They had Mao badges and Little Red Books.
  • Those who got close enough were disappointed by how old and weak their hero's looked after seeing them presented as God-like for so long.
• Mao's hold on young people

  
  

  • Indoctrinated by his control of the education system
  • They had little recollection of his Great Leap Forward failure and didn't blame him for the famine
  • Propaganda taught them that the Little Red Book was like the words of God
  • After years of a Confusion based hierarchal society, Mao told the youth to 'rebel' against authority
  • This excited them and led to millions joining the revolution
  • Teacher called Zheng, who criticised Mao, was made to sleep in a cow shed with her baby by her students
• Divisions between Mao's supporters and opponents

  
  

  • Had to be subtle to not raise concern when ridding of his enemies.
  • Wu Han's play 'Hai Rui Dismissed From Office' which had a character criticise the Ming-era emperor, who then had him dismissed.
  • Comparisons were made to Peng and the Great Leap Forward.
  • Mao praised it in 1961, but ordered a negative review in 1965. Han was deputy mayor of Beijing, under mayor Peng Zhen, both of which were forced to resign.
  • They were allies of Liu and Deng, Mao had subtly weakened his enemies.
• The quest for permanent revolution

  
  

  • Mao feared party had become bureaucratised.
  • After removing China's old rulers, the new elites had taken advantage of the masses and were now living in luxury.
  • Only way to fix this would be a permanent revolution, where you are constantly replacing those in authority.
  • "A proletarian party must also get rid of the stale and take in the fresh, for only thus can it be full of vitality" - Mao.
• Divisions within the CCP

  
  

  • Mao became distrusting of Zhou, as he criticised the Great Leap Forward targets, and Liu, who had dismissed the bad weather claim at the 1962 7000 cadres conference.
  • Jealous that the new economic policies, that replaced his focus on mass mobilisation, seemed to be far more successful.
  • Party was split between Ideologues and Pragmatists.
• Use of violence during the Red Terror

  
  

  • Denunciation gave way to brutality.
  • Re-education in labour camps.
  • People saw suicide as the only escape.
  • Intellectuals kidnapped and killed.
  • Renowned playwright Lao She's house was burned by middle school Red Guards.
  • Lao had to wear a dunce hat at struggle meetings.
  • To escape harassment he drowned himself in Taiping Lake in 1966.
  • Ding Ling was forced to stand in an airplane position for hours and sleep in a stable.
• Cultural destruction during the Red Terror

  
  

  • Homes of people with Western books, traditional gardens or musical instruments were ransacked
  • 1100 libraries closed
  • 7 million library books lost, stolen or destroyed
  • The Confucius Temple attacked by 200 teachers and students
  • Destroyed 6618 registered cultural artifacts
  • 928 paintings, 2700 books, 200 graves
  • Old 19th century hero Wu Xan was declared elitist and his corpse was exhumed, his body was torn apart and burned
• Attack on Liu Shaoqi

  
  

  • He supported the sending of party work teams to campuses to control the student uprisings, used as evidence of his traitorous rightism
  • His wife was embarrassed in front of 300,000 Red Guards and his children sent to countryside to work as peasants
  • Jiang Qing asked him to be left alive to be used as a 'living target'
  • Accused of being a CIA informant after Jiang interrogated over 28,000 people.
  • Resigned as Head of State in 1967
  • Locked in an unheated Beijing building and his hair grew to his feet in jail
  • Contracted pneumonia
• Attack on Deng Xiaoping


  
  

  • Accused of trying to establish his own 'independent kingdom'.
  • Sent to a tractor factory in rural Jiangxi.
  • His son jumped out a window to avoid punishment and was paralysed from the neck down.
• The purging of party members

  
  

  • Regional and provisional - 70-80% of all party cadres purged.
  • Yunnan - 14,000 party cadres were executed as 'traitors'.
  • Only 9/23 Politburo members were left.
  • 2/3 of the Central Committee had been deposed.
• The purging of capitalist roaders and foreigners

  
  

  • Red Guards attacked 3 embassies in Beijing: Burma, Indonesia and India.
  • Shops, restaurants and hotels put up signs declaring that Soviet citizens would no longer be served.
  • Posters in train stations saying 'smash Brezhnev's head'.
  • Staff at the British Embassy in Beijing were manhandled and beaten and the building was set on fire.
• 'Up to the mountains and down to the villages' campaign

  
  

  • Had to end their terror when they took over the Beijing Foreign Ministry for 2 weeks
  • 18 million Red Guards sent away
  • Being chosen was treated as a privilege, as you were learning from the peasants to reach true unity.
  • Not welcomes by the peasants as they feared their involvement would disrupt agriculture.
  • Had little spare food to give the newcomers.
  • Formerly ideologically committed young people were shocked and dismayed by conditions.
• Lin Biao's death, 13th September 1971


  
  

  • Rumours of him and his son attacking Mao’s private train with artillery spread
  • Paranoid he was going to be purged next, fled from Mao’s security in such a panic, that it meant the plane wasn’t fully fuelled, it crashed in Mongolia, killing his whole family
  • People started questioning communist rule after Lin was denounced, as he was previously described as Mao’s ‘close comrade in arms’
• Deng Xiaoping's return to power

  
  

  • Mao in bad health, couldn't read or exercise and spent all day watching Hong Kong kung-fu movies
  • His other allies who could replace him were also sick, with Zhou diagnosed with lung cancer in 1972, and Kang with bladder cancer
  • In 1975 Deng was picked to join the Politburo's standing committee and was appointed PLA chief of staff
• Mao wanting to return from the side lines

  
  

  • Had been distant since Great Leap Forward failure.
  • In 1966 he swam in the dangerous Yangtze River.
  • Propaganda claimed he swam 9 miles in 65 minutes - a new world record.
  • Called for 'a new stage in the socialist revolution'.
• Escalating anarchy with the 'January Storm'

  • ‘January storm’ was when radical red guards destroyed the party establishment in Shanghai and created their own form of controlled modelled on the Paris Commune of 1871
  • 30th December 1966, 100k radical reds attacked and defeated 20k other red guards, knows as the Scarlet Guards, who were mobilised by the Party
  • The radical reds declared for the party itself to be abolished, believing that they were doing Mao’s bidding
• Death of Mao - Hua Guofeng


  • Picked to succeed him because his obscure background as a bureaucrat ensured he had no enemies with either pragmatists or ideologues
  • Handed him a note saying ‘with you in charge, I am at ease’
  • He announced what would become known as the ‘two whatever policies’: dedication to uphold whatever policy decisions and to follow whatever instructions were given by Mao
• Death of Mao - Jiang Qing

  • she was ignored
  • She tried to organise a coup against coup and criticised Hua at the July 1976 State Council meeting
  • Hua order the arrest of Jiang and the gang of four one month after Mao’s death, on the 6 October 1976
  • Zhang sentenced to death, Yao served 20 years and Wang died of cancer while serving their life sentence
  • Jiang defended herself by saying ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite’
  • She was sentenced to death, later changed to life imprisonment
  • She hung herself in 1991, due to cancer and depression
• Death of Mao - Deng Xiaoping

  • Returned to Beijing and undermined Hua as China’s Paramount Leader
  • This was not an official title, bit meant that Deng was the most powerful man in China, allowing him to introduce economic reforms that granted freedom
  • ‘To be rich is glorious’, announced Deng, the people celebrated his liberties
• Deng's 4 modernisations

  • Deng’s four modernisations of agriculture, technology, industry, and defence reversed Mao’s efforts of mass mobilisation
  • Encouraged further by Deng telling senior party cadres that ‘the worst that could happen is you could be overthrown a second time. Don’t be afraid. If you’ve done a good job, it’s worth being overthrown for!’
• Collapse of the party - the gang of four

  • Launched the ‘criticise Lin, criticise Confucius’ campaign, where intellectuals were forced to find linkages between the two, to prove that Lin was always against the revolution
  • Jiang hoped this campaign would grow into a mobilised revolution against Zhou and Deng, the last two rivals
  • Campaign failed as the people clearly saw the personal political motive, reducing supporters for the party
• Collapse of the party - Zhou Enlai's death

  • Died in a Beijing hospital on 8th January 1976
  • 1 million people lined in the streets to pay respects when his body was taken to be cremated
  • Mao was too sick to attend the funeral, so Deng delivered the eulogy
  • Jiang then attacked Deng as ‘China’s new Khrushchev’, but had misread the feelings of the masses
  • The people of Beijing lay wreaths in Tiananmen square, this angered the gang of four as within the tributes, were attacks on them
  • Government sent trucks to remove the wreaths, leading to 10,000+ protesting, some being violently removed
• Collapse of the party - Deng's second removal

  • Gang of four blamed Deng for the ‘Tiananmen Square incident’
  • He was banished to a pig farm in the south and was removed of all political posts
  • Gang of four hoped to create an anti-rightest unrest with this, but the people were not interested in yet another political campaign