Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a political campaign launched in the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong in 1966 and brought to an end after his death in 1976. Presented as a struggle against "bourgeois" and "revisionist" influences, it turned students and workers against party officials, teachers and intellectuals, and plunged much of the country into violence and disorder for a decade.

After the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, whose famine killed tens of millions between 1959 and 1961, Mao had stepped back from day-to-day government while more pragmatic leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping worked to restore the economy. Mao feared that the party was drifting towards a Soviet-style bureaucracy and that the revolution might be reversed. Many historians also see the campaign as a way for him to reassert his personal authority over rivals at the top of the party.

A Politburo circular of 16 May 1966 is usually taken as the formal start. Within weeks, students at Peking University and other schools were putting up "big-character posters" attacking their teachers and administrators. In August Mao issued his own poster, "Bombard the Headquarters", aimed at senior leaders, and began receiving huge rallies of young Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. Encouraged to destroy the "Four Olds", old customs, culture, habits and ideas, Red Guard groups ransacked temples, libraries and private homes, and subjected people labelled as class enemies to public "struggle sessions", beatings and humiliation. Many were killed or driven to suicide.

By 1967 rival Red Guard and worker factions, each claiming loyalty to Mao, were fighting one another in many cities, sometimes with weapons taken from army depots. Liu Shaoqi was purged and died in detention in 1969; Deng was disgraced and sent to work in a provincial factory. To restore order, the People's Liberation Army was given a growing role in running the country, and from late 1968 millions of urban young people were "sent down" to the countryside, a programme that eventually moved more than ten million of them.

Defence minister Lin Biao, the army's leading figure, was named Mao's successor in 1969. Two years later, in September 1971, he died when the aircraft carrying him crashed in Mongolia, after what the party later described as a failed plot against Mao; the full circumstances remain unclear. In the following years Premier Zhou Enlai and, for a time, a rehabilitated Deng tried to steady the economy, while a radical group around Mao's wife Jiang Qing, later called the Gang of Four, pushed the campaign forward.

Zhou died in January 1976 and Mao on 9 September. Within a month the new leader, Hua Guofeng, had the Gang of Four arrested, and the Cultural Revolution was soon declared over. Deng returned to power and by the end of 1978 had become China's paramount leader, launching economic reforms. In 1981 the Communist Party formally judged the Cultural Revolution a grave error for which Mao bore chief responsibility, while upholding his overall standing.

The number of deaths is uncertain and politically sensitive in China. Estimates generally run from several hundred thousand to around two million, and many more people were persecuted, imprisoned or sent to labour camps. Education was disrupted for years, and much cultural heritage was destroyed.

Our 1960 and 1985 maps show the borders of China before and after the Cultural Revolution, which brought no territorial change.