Lin Biao repeated Mao’s position on people’s war, further arguing that popular insurrections against noncommunist governments could succeed only if they took place without substantial foreign assistance. To the extent that indigenous rebels came to depend on outside support, inevitably their bonds with the local populace would be weakened. When this happened, the rebellion would wither for lack of support. On the other hand, the hardships imposed by relying on indigenous resources would stimulate the comradeship and ingenuity of the insurgents. Equally important, Lin’s statement also indicated a high-level decision for China to remain on the defensive.
Lin’s speech coincided with yet another secret working conference of the Central Committee, in which the Maoist group reissued its call for cultural revolutionization, this time convinced that the effort of 1964 had been deliberately sabotaged by senior party and military officials. Initiated by Mao Zedong and Lin Biao, the purge first struck dissident army leaders, especially the chief of staff; as the power struggle began, China turned its back on the war in Vietnam and other external affairs. The September meeting may be taken as a clear harbinger of what came to be known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution, 1966–76
As the clash over issues in the autumn of 1965 became polarized, the army initially provided the battleground. The issues concerned differences over policy directions and their implications for the organization of power and the qualifications of senior officials to lead. Much of the struggle went on behind the scenes; in public it took the form of personal vilification and ritualized exposés of divergent worldviews or, inevitably, “two lines” of policy. Lin Biao, in calling for the creative study and application of Mao’s thought in November and at a meeting of military commissars the following January, consistently placed the army’s mission in the context of the national ideological and power struggle. In these critical months, the base of operations for Mao and Lin was the large eastern Chinese city of Shanghai, and newspapers published in that city, especially the Liberation Army Daily, carried the public attacks on the targets selected.
Attacks on cultural figures
The first target was the historian Wu Han, who doubled as the deputy mayor of Beijing. In a play Wu wrote, he supposedly had used allegorical devices to lampoon Mao and laud the deposed former minister of defense, Peng Dehuai. The denunciation of Wu and his play in November 1965 constituted the opening volley in an assault on cultural figures and their thoughts.
As the Cultural Revolution gained momentum, Mao turned for support to the youth as well as the army. In seeking to create a new system of education that would eliminate differences between town and country, workers and peasants, and mental and manual labour, Mao struck a responsive chord with the youth; it was their response that later provided him with his best shock troops. As a principal purpose, the Cultural Revolution was launched to revitalize revolutionary values for the successor generation of Chinese young people.
The attack against authors, scholars, and propagandists during the spring of 1966 emphasized the cultural dimension of the Cultural Revolution. Increasingly it was hinted that behind the visible targets lay a sinister “black gang” in the fields of education and propaganda and high up in party circles. Removal of Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi and subsequently of Zhou Yang, then tsar of the arts and literature, indicated that this was to be a thoroughgoing purge. Clearly, a second purpose of the Cultural Revolution would be the elimination of leading cadres whom Mao held responsible for past ideological sins and alleged errors in judgment.
Attacks on party members
Gradual transference of the revolution to top echelons of the party was managed by a group centred on Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Chen Boda. In May 1966 Mao secretly assigned major responsibilities to the army in cultural and educational affairs. Another purpose of the Cultural Revolution, as then conceived, would be a “revolution in the superstructure”: a transformation from a bureaucratically run machine to a more popularly based system led personally by Mao and a simplified administration under his control.
Following the May instructions, the educational system received priority. “Big-character posters,” or large wall newspapers (dazibao), spread from the principal campuses in Beijing throughout the land. University officials and professors were singled out for criticism, while their students, encouraged by the central authorities, held mass meetings and began to organize. In June the government dropped examinations for university admissions and called for a reform of entrance procedures and a delay in reopening the campuses. Party officials and their wives circulated among the campuses to gain favour and to obstruct their opponents. Intrigue and political maneuvering dominated, although political lines were not at first sharply drawn or even well understood. The centres of this activity were Beijing’s schools and the inner councils of the Central Committee; the students were the activists in a game they did not fully comprehend.
This phase of the Cultural Revolution ended in August 1966 with the convening of a plenary session of the Central Committee. Mao issued his own big-character poster as a call to “Bombard the headquarters” (“Paoda silingbu”), a call to denounce and remove senior officials, and a 16-point Central Committee decision was issued in which the broad outlines for the Cultural Revolution were laid down and supporters were rallied to the revolutionary banner. The immediate aim was to seize power from “bourgeois” authorities. The locus of the struggle would be their urban strongholds. Now more than ever, Mao’s thought became the “compass for action.”
Evidently fearing that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet revolution and concerned about his own place in history, Mao threw China’s cities into turmoil in a gigantic effort to reverse the historic processes then under way. He ultimately failed in his quest, but his efforts generated problems with which his successors would have to struggle for decades. Mao adopted four goals for his Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking, to rectify the CCP, to provide China’s youth with a revolutionary experience, and to achieve specific policy changes to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. He initially pursued those goals through a massive mobilization of the country’s urban youths—organized in groups called the Red Guards—while ordering the CCP and the PLA not to suppress the movement.
When Mao formally launched the Cultural Revolution in August 1966, he had already shut down the schools. During the following months, he encouraged the Red Guards to attack all traditional values and “bourgeois” things and to put CCP officials to the test by publicly criticizing them. These attacks were known at the time as struggles against the Four Olds (i.e., old ideas, customs, culture, and habits of mind), and the movement quickly escalated to committing outrages. Many elderly people and intellectuals were physically abused, and many died. Nonetheless, Mao believed that this mobilization of urban youths would be beneficial for them and that the CCP cadres they attacked would be better for the experience. John Wilson Lewis Kenneth G. Lieberthal