The Cultural Revolution: the Decade That Nearly Destroyed China

Introduction

Few events in the twentieth century were as deliberately destructive of a civilization's own heritage, or as systematically targeted against a society's most educated and talented members, as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that convulsed the People's Republic of China between 1966 and 1976. In a decade defined by revolutionary violence across much of the world, the Cultural Revolution stands apart not because it caused more deaths than other catastrophes of the era — though it killed between 500,000 and 2,000,000 people by most scholarly estimates — but because it was among the most organized acts of cultural self-destruction in modern history: a movement in which one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated civilizations deliberately set out to erase the foundations of its own cultural identity at the command of a single aging individual who had lost political ground and was determined to reclaim it at any cost.

That individual was Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and the undisputed founder of the People's Republic of China, who launched the Cultural Revolution in the spring and summer of 1966 when he was seventy-two years old, politically diminished within his own party after the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, and consumed by a sense of historical mission so absolute that it left no room for ordinary considerations of human welfare, institutional stability, or basic decency. The movement he set in motion would cost tens of millions of people their livelihoods, their families, their educations, their health, and in many cases their lives. It would destroy temples, libraries, monasteries, and museums that had endured for centuries. It would drive China's greatest scholars, artists, composers, and writers to suicide, prison, and internal exile. And it would create a generation of young people who grew up knowing nothing but revolution, who lost what should have been the formative years of their education and intellectual development, and who would spend the rest of their lives grappling with the trauma of what they had done and what had been done to them in the name of a utopia that existed only in one man's imagination.

The Cultural Revolution formally ended with Mao's death in September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four one month later, but its consequences have never fully resolved themselves. The People's Republic of China has never conducted the kind of honest, sustained reckoning with the Cultural Revolution that Germany conducted with Nazism or that South Africa attempted with apartheid through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The archives relating to the Cultural Revolution remain largely closed. Survivor testimonies have been largely suppressed, particularly in recent decades. The full accounting of the dead remains incomplete. For Chinese society, the Cultural Revolution is simultaneously a wound that has never healed and a subject that cannot be publicly examined with the honesty it deserves. Understanding it — its causes, its mechanisms, its victims, and its legacy — is essential to understanding the country that China has become, and the fears, ambitions, and compulsions that shape its political life in the twenty-first century.

Scholars estimate that the Cultural Revolution set China's economic, scientific, and educational development back by ten to twenty years. An entire cohort of scientists, engineers, doctors, and educators was lost to persecution, imprisonment, or internal exile during those ten years. The destruction of cultural artifacts, religious sites, and historical repositories left permanent gaps in the record of one of humanity's longest-standing civilizations. The human suffering was immense, intimate, and often unspeakable. This is the story of how it happened, who bore responsibility, and what it cost.

The Roots of Catastrophe: Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward

To understand why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, one must understand the catastrophe that preceded it: the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962, which remains the deadliest peacetime famine in human history and which left Mao politically marginalized within the very party he had built.