Chinese Cultural Revolution
Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966 and it ran, in its violent phase, until 1969 and formally until his death in 1976. Its stated purpose was to prevent the restoration of capitalism by purging the party of those taking the capitalist road. Its actual purpose was Mao's recovery of power. The Great Leap Forward had killed tens of millions in the famine of 1959–61, and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping had been running the economy on pragmatic lines since, with Mao pushed to the side. He went outside the party to attack it. The Red Guards — students mobilised from the schools and universities, closed for the purpose — were told to destroy the four olds: old customs, culture, habits and ideas. Teachers were beaten by their pupils, sometimes to death. Temples, libraries, monasteries and family shrines were destroyed on a scale that has no modern parallel. Intellectuals, former landlords, party officials and anyone with a foreign connection were paraded, denounced at struggle sessions, sent to the countryside or driven to suicide. Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, died in a cellar in 1969 denied medical treatment. Deng was purged twice and survived. Red Guard factions then fought each other with weapons taken from arsenals, and the army was sent in from 1968 to restore order and to send some seventeen million young people to the villages. Estimates of the dead run from several hundred thousand to two million. The party's 1981 resolution called it responsible for the gravest setback since 1949.
- Year: 1966 CE
- Category: Political Violence
