The Chinese Cultural Revolution

The May Sixteenth Circular, issued under Mao Zedong's own direction, named the enemy plainly: representatives of the bourgeoisie who had sneaked into the party, the government, the army, the arts. Not abstractions. Liu Shaoqi. Deng Xiaoping. The cadres who had quietly reintroduced profit and private plots after the famine.

Mao's theory of continuous revolution held that class struggle does not end when a party seizes the state. The Soviet Union was the proof: after Stalin's death, Khrushchev denounced him and let a new bureaucratic class inherit the country. By the nineteen sixties, Mao saw China headed the same way.

The instrument was the masses. Red Guards were not directed by a central command. They were unleashed on the Four Olds, the buried feudal past inside the classroom and the temple.

That line, from Mao Zedong's own writing decades earlier, is what Red Guards carried into every school they entered.

Liu Shaoqi's fall gets remembered because he held office. Most victims did not. In Beijing alone, one thousand seven hundred seventy two people were killed in August and September of nineteen sixty six, later called Red August.

Bian Zhongyun, vice principal of a girls' middle school in Beijing, was beaten to death by her own students on August the fifth, nineteen sixty six, the same day Mao posted Bombard the Headquarters. She was the first confirmed educator killed.

Intellectuals were sorted into the lowest of nine categories of class enemy, nicknamed the Stinking Ninth. The translator Fu Lei hanged himself with his wife after Red Guards ransacked their Shanghai home.

The novelist Ba Jin survived, and spent his life asking for one thing: a museum, so it could not be repeated.

No museum was ever built. Ba Jin died in two thousand five, and the proposal was never revived.

They were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, raised entirely inside the People's Republic, taught from birth that Mao Zedong was always right. When he told them their teachers and their parents' colleagues were secretly working to restore the old society, most did not doubt him.

A former Red Guard, unnamed in the record, was quoted years later trying to explain the belief itself.

By nineteen sixty eight the party that had used them had no more use for them. The Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside campaign sent seventeen million of them to the villages instead. The schools they had destroyed were the schools they no longer had.

The party's own account starts with an admission. The nineteen eighty one Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of the Party, drafted over two years by the Central Committee under Deng Xiaoping's supervision, called the decade the most severe setback the party and the state had suffered since the founding.

The same document then preserved the man responsible for it.

Privately, the formula got a shorthand: Mao was seventy percent correct and thirty percent wrong. It let the party condemn the decade without condemning the man who had founded it. Under Xi Jinping, whose father spent sixteen years in detention during these years, the space to discuss it has narrowed further.

Tibet had already been through seven years of what China called democratic reform when this decade began: monastic land seized. What followed did not soften that. It finished it.

Of Tibet's estimated six thousand two hundred fifty nine monasteries, about six thousand were damaged or destroyed. Monks were forced to denounce the Dalai Lama in public.

An unnamed Tibetan monk, quoted years later in exile, described what the campaign asked of them.

In Inner Mongolia, an estimated three hundred forty six thousand people were detained, and sixteen thousand two hundred twenty two killed, accused of belonging to a separatist organization that likely never existed.

For Han Chinese, the Four Olds were customs revolutionary culture could replace. For Tibetans and Mongolians, the Four Olds were the civilization itself.