Table of Contents
Part I: The Unravelling of a Revolution: The Legacy of the Great Leap Forward
To comprehend the convulsive origins of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, one must first grasp the scale and significance of the cataclysm that preceded it: the Great Leap Forward (GLF).
Far from being a discrete and unrelated policy failure, the GLF was the foundational crisis that directly created the political, ideological, and personal conditions for the turmoil of 1966.
It was a national trauma that shattered the Chinese economy, decimated its population, and, crucially, fractured the unity of the Communist Party of China (CCP), leaving its paramount leader, Mao Zedong, politically wounded and ideologically cornered.
The methods Mao employed to explain away this failure and reclaim his authority would become the terrifying blueprint for the Cultural Revolution itself.
The Scale of the Catastrophe (1958-1962)
Launched in 1958, the Great Leap Forward was an economic and social campaign of breathtaking ambition, born of Mao’s revolutionary impatience and his desire to catapult China into the ranks of global industrial powers, overtaking Britain in a matter of years.1
The plan was rooted in the core Maoist principle of mass mobilization.
In a single year, over half a billion peasants were stripped of their private property and organized into vast, militarized People’s Communes.3
These new social organizations, sometimes comprising tens of thousands of households, abolished private plots, collectivized all resources, and sought to liberate labor—particularly female labor—for gigantic projects by establishing communal mess halls, nurseries, and “happiness homes” for the elderly.3
A frenzy of propaganda, driven by slogans and street operas, urged the populace to work around the clock to achieve impossible production quotas.3
In agriculture, peasants were ordered to adopt pseudoscientific techniques like deep plowing, which broke the subsoil and ruined farmland, and close planting, which choked the seedlings.3
Simultaneously, millions of rural laborers were diverted from farming to work on massive infrastructure projects or to feed the backyard furnace campaign—a nationwide effort to produce steel in small, primitive smelters.1
To meet quotas, peasants melted down kitchen utensils, iron beds, and even their own farm tools, producing vast quantities of useless, low-quality pig iron while denuding the landscape of trees for fuel.1
The consequences were catastrophic.
The diversion of labor, combined with disastrous agricultural techniques and adverse weather, led to a sharp decline in grain production.1
This was compounded by a system where local officials, swept up in the competitive hysteria, reported wildly inflated production figures to Beijing.1
The central government, believing these figures, requisitioned grain based on phantom surpluses, leaving the countryside to starve.1
The result was the Great Chinese Famine, a man-made disaster of historic proportions.
Between 1959 and 1962, an estimated 15 to 55 million people perished from starvation, overwork, and disease, making it one of the deadliest famines in recorded human history.1
It was a largely preventable disaster born of ideological fanaticism and a profound disregard for economic reality.4
Mao’s Diminished Authority and Political Sidelining
The sheer scale of the failure dealt a devastating blow to Mao Zedong’s prestige and credibility within the CCP leadership.6
He was the undisputed architect of the Great Leap Forward, and its failure was his failure.
At the landmark 7000 Cadres Conference in January 1962, faced with overwhelming evidence of the disaster, Mao was compelled to make a public self-criticism—a significant humiliation for a leader who had been elevated to near-mythical status.6
In the aftermath, the Party apparatus moved to correct the course and sideline its chairman.
Mao was effectively moved to the “second line” of leadership, a form of semi-retirement where he retained his formal titles as Chairman of the CCP but ceded day-to-day control over the state and the economy.10
The “first line” of administration was taken over by more pragmatic and organizationally-minded leaders: Liu Shaoqi, who had become State Chairman in 1959, and Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s General Secretary.11
They were tasked with the monumental challenge of cleaning up the economic wreckage and restoring social order.
For Mao, this marginalization was not a welcome respite but a profound political wound.
He deeply resented his diminished role and watched with growing suspicion as his revolutionary comrades began to dismantle his signature policies.14
Reframing Failure: The Seeds of a Purge
Despite the public mea culpa, Mao never privately accepted that his core ideological vision was flawed.
His reaction to early criticism set a chilling precedent.
In 1959, at the Lushan Conference, when the respected Defense Minister Peng Dehuai wrote a private letter to Mao outlining the problems of the GLF, he was not engaged in a policy debate but was ruthlessly purged as a “rightist” and an anti-Party element.5
This act sent a clear and brutal message to the rest of the leadership: direct criticism of Mao or his revolutionary line was politically suicidal.
This refusal to acknowledge ideological error forced Mao into a crucial intellectual maneuver that would pave the way for the Cultural Revolution.
If his ideology was correct, then the GLF’s failure must have been the result of sabotage.
This line of thinking allowed him to shift the blame from his policies to his political opponents.
Beginning in 1962, he launched the “Socialist Education Movement,” a campaign ostensibly aimed at rectifying the Party.
His stated rationale was not that the GLF was inherently flawed, but that its implementation had been subverted by “class enemies” and hidden bourgeois elements who had seized control of the party at the local level.6
This reframing was a political masterstroke.
It transformed a catastrophic policy failure into a problem of ideological impurity and internal enemies.
The Great Leap Forward, in its collapse, thus served as a dress rehearsal for the logic of the Cultural Revolution.
Faced with an undeniable disaster of his own making, Mao could not admit his core belief in mass mobilization was wrong, as doing so would undermine his entire revolutionary identity and historical legitimacy.
The failure, therefore, could not be ideological; it had to be the result of a conspiracy.
The question then became: who were the conspirators? The purge of Peng Dehuai demonstrated the danger of challenging Mao directly.
So, Mao first tested his new theory on lower-level cadres through the Socialist Education Movement.
As he watched Liu and Deng’s pragmatic reforms effectively repudiate his vision, he escalated the theory: the “class enemies” were not just at the bottom; they were “persons in authority taking the capitalist road” at the very top of the Party.16
The GLF’s failure created the need for a scapegoat, and the “capitalist roader” became that scapegoat.
The Cultural Revolution was the ultimate, psychotic extension of this blame-shifting mechanism.
This reveals a fundamental paradox in Mao’s thinking.
The problems of the GLF were rooted in a top-down, ideologically-driven mass campaign that ignored expertise, rational planning, and objective conditions.
Yet Mao’s proposed solution, which would become the Cultural Revolution, was to double down on the very methods that had caused the disaster.
He sought to launch another top-down, ideologically-driven mass mobilization—this time of the Red Guards—specifically to attack the very concepts of expertise (“bourgeois intellectuals”) and rational bureaucracy (“capitalist roaders”) that were cleaning up his mess.16
This demonstrated an unshakeable, messianic faith in the revolutionary purity of the mobilized masses—whom he saw as a “clean sheet of paper”—and a profound distrust of the institutions of his own state.19
The failure of one mass campaign did not discredit the method; it only proved that the revolutionary spirit had been contaminated and required a more violent, more thorough purification.
Part II: The Two Roads: A Party Divided Against Itself
The years between the end of the Great Leap Forward and the start of the Cultural Revolution (1962-1965) were defined by a deep and widening schism within the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
It was a period characterized by two fundamentally opposed visions for China’s future.
On one side stood the “first line” administrators, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who pursued a course of pragmatic economic restoration.
On the other was Mao Zedong, operating from the “second line,” who viewed their every move as a betrayal of the revolution and a slide into the “revisionist” abyss.
This clash of policies was not a minor disagreement; it was an irreconcilable conflict over the soul of the nation, making a final, violent confrontation all but inevitable.
The Pragmatic Restoration (The “First Line”)
With Mao effectively sidelined, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping took charge of the day-to-day governance of the state.11
Their immediate and overriding priority was to pull China back from the brink of total collapse.
To do this, they systematically implemented a series of moderate, rational policies that represented a near-total reversal of the radicalism of the Great Leap Forward.11
Their guiding principle was Deng’s famous aphorism, “seeking truth from facts,” a stark contrast to Mao’s “politics in command”.20
In the devastated agricultural sector, the vast communes were reduced in size by about two-thirds to make them more manageable and to better link peasant efforts with remuneration.
Crucially, individual farming and private plots were revived in many areas, restoring a degree of personal incentive that had been annihilated during the GLF.9
In industry, the chaos of the backyard furnaces was replaced with a renewed emphasis on central planning and quality control.
The authority of professional factory managers and trained engineers—who had been denigrated as “bourgeois experts”—was restored, and material incentives for workers were reintroduced to boost productivity.11
This pragmatism extended to cultural and educational spheres.
A “thaw” in cultural policy allowed for a broader range of artistic subjects and the revival of older art forms, moving away from purely propagandistic works.11
In education, the focus shifted back toward academic standards and respect for intellectual expertise.
These policies, often developed with the help of experts who had been purged during the anti-rightist campaigns, were remarkably successful.
By 1965, China’s economy had achieved a significant recovery, with output in most sectors returning to the levels of 1957, before the Great Leap began.11
For most of the top CCP leadership, the lesson of the GLF was clear: the era of convulsive mass campaigns was over, and China’s development now required stability, order, and bureaucratic competence.11
Mao’s Growing Alarm and Counter-Mobilization (The “Second Line”)
From his position on the “second line,” Mao Zedong observed these developments with profound alarm and contempt.
He did not see a necessary economic recovery; he saw the restoration of capitalism.
The pragmatists’ reliance on private plots, material incentives, and technical experts was, in his eyes, a direct repudiation of socialist principles and an embrace of the “capitalist road”.14
He became convinced that Liu and Deng were fostering a new bureaucratic elite, entrenching social stratification, and extinguishing the revolutionary flame, just as he believed Khrushchev had done in the Soviet Union.11
In response, Mao began to orchestrate an ideological counter-offensive and build a new coalition of loyal radicals.
This group included his wife, Jiang Qing, a cultural hardliner who shared his views on art and literature; the party ideologue Chen Boda; the internal security chief Kang Sheng; and his most crucial ally, Defense Minister Lin Biao.11
While the “first line” managed the state, Mao’s “second line” focused on capturing the ideological high ground.
He repeatedly insisted at high-level meetings that “class struggle” must remain China’s central task.11
His most significant move was to transform the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) under Lin Biao into a model of Maoist purity.
Following a brief but successful border war with India in 1962, Mao and Lin seized on the army’s victory to launch a nationwide “Learn from the PLA” campaign.11
This campaign promoted PLA heroes as ideal role models for the entire population and, by 1964, insisted on establishing PLA-style political departments within all major government bureaucracies.
This effectively created a parallel power structure, staffed by military men loyal to Mao, that penetrated the civilian government controlled by his rivals.11
The fundamental clash between these two approaches is best understood through a direct comparison of their policies, which reveals not just a difference in tactics, but a deep, structural conflict over the very definition and direction of the Chinese revolution.
Table 2.1: Divergent Policy Approaches in the Aftermath of the Great Leap Forward (1961-1965)
| Policy Area | Liu Shaoqi & Deng Xiaoping’s Pragmatic Line (“First Line”) | Mao Zedong’s Radical Line (“Second Line”) |
| Guiding Principle | “Seeking truth from facts”; economic recovery is the priority. 20 | “Never forget class struggle”; preventing revisionism is the priority. 11 |
| Agriculture | Smaller communes, revival of private plots, material incentives to boost production. 9 | Continued emphasis on collectivization, ideological purity over output, mass mobilization. 6 |
| Industry | Strengthened role of factory managers and trained engineers; focus on rational planning and quality. 11 | Mass participation in management (“revolutionary committees”), downgrading of “bourgeois” experts, politics in command. 17 |
| Education | Restoration of academic standards, respect for intellectuals and expertise. 11 | “Part-work, part-study” schools, less elitism, more vocational training, political indoctrination. 11 |
| Party & Governance | A stable, orderly, bureaucratic administration to govern the country efficiently. 24 | The Party itself is a site of class struggle; must be constantly rectified and purged of “capitalist roaders.” 11 |
| View of the USSR | A model to be cautiously learned from, especially in terms of planning. | A “revisionist” state that has betrayed the revolution; a cautionary tale of what China must avoid. 14 |
This stark divergence reveals a critical dynamic: the very success of the pragmatic restoration was the greatest possible threat to Mao Zedong.
The economic recovery achieved under Liu and Deng was not a source of relief for Mao; it was an existential challenge to his authority and his entire revolutionary legacy.
The GLF, his signature policy, had been an unmitigated disaster.
The Liu-Deng policies, which were the philosophical and practical antithesis of his approach, were a demonstrable success.
This created a powerful, irrefutable, and practical argument for their continued leadership and for Mao’s permanent marginalization.
Their success was a living monument to his failure.
Therefore, Mao could not allow their model to stand.
He had to destroy it not because it was failing, but precisely because it was succeeding.
The only way to do this was to reframe the entire debate—to discredit their pragmatic success by recasting it as a profound moral and ideological failure.
Their “road” had to be condemned not for its results, but for its “capitalist” soul.
Part III: The Specter of Revisionism: Mao’s Ideological Imperative
To reduce the origins of the Cultural Revolution to a mere power struggle, however intense, is to miss its driving force.
Mao Zedong’s actions were propelled by a deeply held, paranoid, and potent ideological conviction.
He genuinely believed that his revolution was on the verge of being betrayed from within and that he alone could save China from the fate he saw befalling the Soviet Union: the slow, bureaucratic death of the revolutionary spirit.
This ideological imperative, centered on the concepts of “revisionism” and “continuous revolution,” provided both the justification for his assault on the party establishment and the intellectual framework for the chaos that followed.
The Fear of “Khrushchev’s Phony Communism”: The Soviet Precedent
Mao’s worldview in the 1960s was profoundly shaped by his analysis of the Soviet Union.
He was horrified by Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes and the subsequent policy of de-Stalinization.4
In Mao’s eyes, this was not a necessary correction but a monstrous betrayal.
He saw the USSR, the world’s first socialist state, becoming “revisionist”—a term of ultimate political condemnation.14
To Mao, Soviet revisionism meant abandoning the essential doctrine of class struggle, pursuing “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialist West, and, most damningly, allowing a new, privileged bureaucratic class to emerge and usurp power, transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat into a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.14
The widening Sino-Soviet split was the geopolitical expression of this ideological crusade.26
Mao positioned himself and China as the true inheritors of the revolutionary tradition of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and the global leader in the fight against modern revisionism.28
This international struggle had a direct domestic corollary.
He became obsessed with the fear that the Chinese Communist Party, under the pragmatic leadership of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, was treading the same path as Khrushchev.14
Their emphasis on stability, expertise, and material incentives was, to Mao, a textbook case of the revisionist disease.
He believed he was witnessing the birth of a new Chinese bourgeoisie within his own Central Committee, and he was determined to stop it at any cost.11
The Theory of “Continuous Revolution Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
To combat this perceived threat, Mao developed his most unique and radical contribution to Marxist theory: the concept of “continuous revolution” (or “uninterrupted revolution”).29
Orthodox Marxism-Leninism generally held that revolution was a finite event—the violent seizure of state power.
After this seizure, the main task was socialist construction.
Mao fundamentally rejected this.
He argued that class struggle does not end after the revolution; it continues, and can even intensify, under socialism.29
The core of this theory was the startling assertion that a new bourgeoisie could be generated from within the Communist Party itself.25
These were not old landlords or capitalists in disguise, but high-ranking party officials who, through their bureaucratic power and ideological decay, had become “persons in authority taking the capitalist road”.17
Because this new class enemy was embedded within the very structures of power, the revolution had to be a permanent, ongoing process of cultural and political purification, involving periodic, violent upheavals to purge these elements and prevent a capitalist restoration.27
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was to be the first and most dramatic application of this terrifying theory.32
This ideology was more than just a philosophical abstraction; it was the ultimate political weapon.
It provided Mao with an unassailable justification for attacking his own party and anyone who opposed him.
Policy disagreements were no longer debates over the best way to build socialism; they were transformed into life-and-death class struggles.
If a colleague like Liu Shaoqi advocated for reviving private plots to combat famine, he was not simply proposing a pragmatic solution; he was “taking the capitalist road” and revealing his hidden bourgeois nature.17
The theory created a universe of permanent suspicion, where anyone, regardless of their revolutionary record, could be unmasked as a “counter-revolutionary revisionist”.27
In this universe, there could be only one arbiter of truth, one person capable of identifying the hidden enemies: the great theorist himself.
Mao Zedong Thought became the sole benchmark of revolutionary purity, and the theory of continuous revolution created a closed logical loop that granted him absolute power to define, identify, and destroy his enemies.35
The Utopian Vision
Mao’s goal was not merely destructive.
Behind the purges lay a radical utopian vision.
He sought to forge a new type of society and a new “socialist man,” completely free from the inequalities of the past.24
His aim was to eliminate the “three great differences”: the gap between the city and the countryside, between industrial workers and peasants, and, most importantly, between mental and manual labor.24
This required upending the entire social hierarchy, especially the privileged position of intellectuals and bureaucrats.
This vision was underpinned by a philosophical concept known as “voluntarism”—the belief that human will, revolutionary consciousness, and ideological purity could triumph over objective economic laws and material constraints.36
The Cultural Revolution was a monumental attempt to put this belief into practice: to shatter the old social order and create a new, perfectly egalitarian, and permanently mobilized society through sheer force of will.13
This ideological crusade was, in effect, an attack on reality itself.
The objective reality of the early 1960s was that the pragmatic, expert-led policies of Liu and Deng were successfully rebuilding China’s economy.21
Mao’s ideology, however, insisted that these same policies were leading to capitalist restoration, a claim completely divorced from their empirical results.
To resolve this contradiction, reality had to be forcibly redefined.
The campaign against the “Four Olds”—old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits—was a war on the historical and cultural fabric of China, because that fabric produced non-Maoist ways of thinking and being.18
Intellectuals, teachers, and experts were brutally attacked not just because they were a privileged class, but because their knowledge was based on objective standards, scientific principles, and historical traditions that existed independently of, and could therefore challenge, the “truth” of Mao Zedong Thought.16
Ultimately, the war on “revisionism” was a war on any form of knowledge, history, or pragmatism that contradicted Mao’s violent, utopian dream.
Part IV: Forging the Instruments of Chaos
By 1965, Mao Zedong faced a critical dilemma.
He was ideologically convinced of the need for a massive purge to save his revolution, but he had been politically sidelined.
The formal apparatus of the Party and the state—the very instruments a leader would normally use to implement policy—were in the hands of the men he now considered his primary enemies: Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.23
To launch his assault, Mao needed to bypass the established power structures entirely.
He achieved this by forging two unconventional and devastatingly effective weapons: a quasi-religious cult of personality that elevated him above the Party, and a private army of radicalized youth who owed their allegiance to him alone.
The Cult of Mao: Deification as a Political Strategy
While Mao had long been the subject of reverence as the founding father of the People’s Republic, the cult of personality that emerged in the early 1960s was of a different order of magnitude.
It was systematically and deliberately inflated to a point of deification, precisely at the moment when his concrete political power was at its nadir.6
This was not merely an exercise in vanity; it was a calculated political strategy to create a source of authority superior to the Party itself.
The chief architect of this intensified cult was Defense Minister Lin Biao.15
Beginning in the early 1960s, Lin positioned the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as the great school of Mao Zedong Thought, a model of revolutionary purity and unwavering loyalty for the entire nation to emulate.11
The most potent tool in this effort was the book Lin commissioned for internal army indoctrination in 1964:
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong.38
Soon to be known globally as the “Little Red Book,” this pocket-sized volume was a work of political genius.
It distilled Mao’s complex and often contradictory writings into a collection of short, simple, and highly memorable aphorisms that could be treated as infallible dogma.37
It became the sacred text of the coming revolution.
During the Cultural Revolution, the population was urged to study it, memorize it, and apply it to every aspect of life.
Waving the book became a universal sign of loyalty, and its verses were invoked to justify any action.
With some one billion copies ultimately printed, it made Mao’s word ubiquitous and absolute.38
Simultaneously, Mao’s image was propagated on an unprecedented scale.
He was no longer just the Chairman; he was the “Great Helmsman,” the “Great Teacher,” and, most poetically, “the red, red sun in our hearts”.22
This carefully constructed personality cult, assuming “religious proportions,” elevated Mao to the status of a living god whose wisdom was beyond question and whose authority emanated directly from his person, not from his position within the Party.14
The “Revolutionary Successors”: Unleashing the Red Guards
With his personal authority established as supreme, Mao needed a force to wield it.
Knowing the Party bureaucracy would resist him, he turned to an untapped and volatile source of energy: China’s youth.23
The generation of students in middle schools and universities in 1966 had been born under the red flag.
They had been raised entirely on a diet of communist ideology, had no memory of the civil war or the pre-revolutionary era, and had been taught to revere Chairman Mao as a savior.6
Mao saw them as the ideal “revolutionary successors,” describing them as being “poor and blank”—like a clean sheet of paper on which the “newest and most beautiful words can be written”.6
In May 1966, Mao personally endorsed a “big-character poster” written by students at Peking University that attacked the university’s administration.16
This act was a signal of immense significance: it was a direct license from the supreme leader for the youth to rebel against all figures of authority—their teachers, school administrators, and local Party officials.
He then shut down the nation’s schools, calling for a massive youth mobilization to take current party leaders to task for their “embrace of bourgeois values”.18
These students began to organize themselves into paramilitary groups that they called the “Red Guards.” Their stated mission was to defend Chairman Mao and his revolutionary line by attacking the “Four Olds” (old ideas, customs, culture, and habits) and purging society of “impure” elements.18
In August 1966, Mao cemented his alliance with this new force by presiding over a series of massive rallies in Tiananmen Square, where he reviewed over a million Red Guards at a time.
His appearance, clad in a military uniform and accepting a Red Guard armband, conferred his ultimate sanction upon them.
He had unleashed a frenzied, loyalist mass movement that was accountable to no one but him, and he directed them to “bombard the headquarters”—to turn their fire on the very Party that governed China.15
These two instruments—the cult and the Red Guards—were symbiotically linked.
The cult of personality was the ideological “software” that programmed the Red Guards, who in turn acted as the destructive “hardware” of Mao’s purge.
It was the deification of Mao that gave millions of young people the moral license to carry out acts of extreme violence.
Because Mao’s word was presented as absolute truth, it superseded all other forms of authority and all other loyalties—to one’s family, to one’s teachers, to the law, and even to the Communist Party itself.
The Little Red Book provided a simple set of divine commandments.
If a Party official’s actions seemed to deviate from a line in the book, that official was a “capitalist roader” and a legitimate target for a “struggle session.” The cult was therefore not just about glorifying Mao; it was the necessary psychological precondition for mobilizing the Red Guards, giving them the ideological certainty to attack, humiliate, and destroy in the name of a higher cause embodied by the Chairman.
This strategy reveals the central paradox of Mao’s rule during this period.
He acted as an “Anarchist Emperor.” A typical dictator uses the apparatus of the state—the police, the army, the bureaucracy—to enforce order and crush dissent.
Mao, finding that apparatus in the hands of his rivals, did the precise opposite.
He used his supreme, emperor-like personal authority, built by the cult, to call for the destruction of state authority from below.
Slogans like “to rebel is justified” were aimed squarely at the existing power structure.
He encouraged the Red Guards to overthrow local Party committees, ransack the homes of intellectuals, and plunge the nation into a state of virtual civil war.14
This demonstrates that for Mao, personal power had become more important than institutional stability.
He was willing to paralyze the economy and unleash terror upon his own country to eliminate his rivals and reassert his personal, ideological dominance.
He acted not as a steward of the state he had founded, but as a revolutionary agent bent on its purification through chaos.
Part V: The Point of No Return: The Launch of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
By the winter of 1965, the pieces were in place.
Mao had his ideology of permanent struggle, his god-like status, and his nascent army of student followers.
All that was needed was a spark to ignite the conflict and a formal declaration of war to move his campaign from the shadows of intra-party maneuvering into a full-blown public convulsion.
These came in the form of a manufactured controversy over a historical play and a seminal Party document that would serve as the foundational charter for a decade of turmoil.
The Spark: The Controversy over Hai Rui Dismissed from Office
The opening shot of the Cultural Revolution was fired not in a government ministry, but in the pages of a literary journal.
In November 1965, at the instigation of Mao and Jiang Qing, the Shanghai-based ideologue Yao Wenyuan published a scathing critique of a popular historical play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.16
The play, written by the respected historian and deputy mayor of Beijing, Wu Han, told the story of an honest 16th-century official in the Ming Dynasty who was dismissed from his post by the emperor after daring to criticize imperial policies, particularly the seizure of land from the peasantry.16
On the surface, it was a historical drama.
But in the paranoid political climate of the 1960s, it was read as a powerful contemporary allegory.
Mao’s radical faction publicly charged that the play was a “poisonous weed” and a veiled political attack on the Chairman himself.16
In their interpretation, the righteous official Hai Rui was a stand-in for Peng Dehuai, the defense minister purged in 1959 for criticizing the Great Leap Forward.
The corrupt and misguided emperor, therefore, was Mao.16
The attack on the play was thus a proxy attack on its author, Wu Han, and by extension, on Wu Han’s powerful boss and protector, Peng Zhen.
Peng Zhen was the mayor of Beijing, a senior Politburo member, and a key ally of Liu Shaoqi and the Party establishment.16
He and his allies in the “first line” recognized the political danger and attempted to defuse the situation by framing the debate as a “pure academic discussion,” to be handled with scholarly decorum.16
This was a fatal miscalculation.
For Mao, this was never about academic debate; it was a matter of life-and-death class struggle.
Peng Zhen’s attempt at moderation was seen as a deliberate effort to protect the “bourgeoisie” and sabotage Mao’s ideological offensive.16
The battle lines were drawn.
The Declaration of War: The “May 16 Notification”
Frustrated by the Party establishment’s resistance, Mao took decisive action.
He convened an expanded meeting of the Politburo in May 1966, from which Peng Zhen and other allies of Liu Shaoqi were excluded.
This meeting produced a document that would formally launch the Cultural Revolution: the “Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,” known to history as the “May 16 Notification”.18
This document was a declaration of war against the leadership of the Communist Party.
It was a masterpiece of political framing, legitimizing an internal purge by casting it as a grand ideological crusade.
Its key directives were revolutionary:
- It Purged the Opposition: The Notification officially revoked the “February Outline,” the document in which Peng Zhen had advocated for academic debate, branding it a revisionist plot. It formally abolished Peng’s “Five-Person Group on the Cultural Revolution” and announced his removal from power.39
- It Redefined Truth: It explicitly rejected the notion of “equality before the truth,” a concept Peng Zhen had promoted. The document declared this to be a “bourgeois slogan” designed to protect the enemy. In the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it asserted, “there is absolutely no such thing as equality.” The relationship was one of class dictatorship—”a relationship in which the proletariat implements despotism or dictatorship over the bourgeoisie”.40 This move delegitimized any attempt at moderation, compromise, or reasoned discourse.
- It Identified the Enemy Within: The document’s most chilling passage warned that the Party, government, and army had been infiltrated by “representatives of the bourgeoisie” and “counter-revolutionary revisionists.” Crucially, it stated that these enemies were not on the fringes, but were figures “like Khrushchev who still enjoy our trust” and were being “trained as our successors”.34 Though Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were not named, the target was unmistakable. This created an atmosphere of profound paranoia and urgency, justifying immediate and radical action against the highest levels of the state.
- It Authorized Rebellion: The Notification was a formal mandate from the Party Center for the masses to rise up and attack the power structure. It called on them to criticize and overthrow the “scholar-tyrants” and “Party people in authority taking the capitalist road”.34 It was a formal authorization for nationwide insubordination, giving lower-level cadres and the soon-to-be-formed Red Guards the ideological justification and political cover to attack their superiors.
The “May 16 Notification” was the point of no return.
It weaponized ideology to give Mao a license to destroy his own party’s leadership structure from the outside in.
By depersonalizing the targets into abstract categories of “class enemies” while simultaneously providing a clear mandate for rebellion, it unleashed the very forces of chaos that would define the next decade of Chinese history.
Conclusion: A Synthesis of Motives
The question of why Mao Zedong initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution often invites a false dichotomy: was it a ruthless power struggle to reclaim his authority, or was it a fanatical ideological crusade to preserve his revolutionary vision? A comprehensive analysis reveals that this is not an either/or question.
The Cultural Revolution was born at the precise and catastrophic intersection where Mao’s personal ambition and his political ideology became indistinguishable and mutually reinforcing.
There can be no doubt that a raw struggle for power was a primary motive.
Sidelined and humiliated after the calamitous Great Leap Forward, Mao deeply resented his marginalization.13
He watched with fury as his designated successors, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, steered China on a pragmatic course that was a living refutation of his own radical methods.15
The Cultural Revolution was, at its core, a brilliantly orchestrated and brutally executed campaign to crush these political rivals and reassert his own absolute, unquestionable dominance over the Party and the state.18
Yet, to dismiss the ideological dimension as a mere cynical pretext is to misunderstand Mao and the very nature of his power.
His fear of “revisionism” and his belief that a new bourgeoisie was emerging from within the Communist Party were not simply convenient justifications; they were the products of a genuine, deeply held, and paranoid worldview.14
He truly saw the Soviet Union as a cautionary tale and believed that Liu and Deng were leading China down the same path of “capitalist restoration”.16
His unique and radical theory of “continuous revolution” was the intellectual framework through which he interpreted this threat and formulated his response.
He was not just a politician seeking power; he was a political prophet convinced he was saving the soul of his revolution.
The Cultural Revolution erupted when these two powerful currents—the personal quest for power and the ideological demand for purity—converged into a single, destructive torrent.
Mao’s personal power struggle was fought on an ideological battlefield of his own design.
His ideology, in turn, demanded a political purge to eliminate the “revisionist” elements that threatened its integrity.
To save his revolution (the ideological goal), he had to destroy the pragmatic Party leadership.
To restore his own position as the revolution’s supreme and indispensable leader (the power goal), he had to destroy the very same people.
The two objectives had become one.
Ultimately, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution because, in his mind, his personal authority and the fate of the Chinese Revolution were one and the same.
The result was a national cataclysm, a decade of turmoil, violence, and cultural destruction that tore Chinese society apart.18
It was unleashed by a leader who, in a final, tragic paradox, embodied the role of the “Anarchist Emperor”: using his absolute, almost divine, personal authority to incite a wave of anarchic rebellion against the very state and Party that he himself had built.
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