By Lynne Ann Hartnett, Villanova University
Ostensibly, the Mao Zedong initiated the Cultural Revolution to eradicate the final remnants of the bourgeois past, obliterating the roots of counterrevolution, in order to allow the revolution to thrive. In reality, it was about protecting the power of Chairman Mao Zedong in the name of revolution. He explicitly aligned himself with the people rather than the party.
The ‘Little Red Book’
Mao’s words became considered gospel truth, and everyone was committed to study them. His quotes and pronouncements filled the People’s Daily newspaper each day. The only news worth knowing was Mao’s news.
His sayings were also gathered in a book, Quotations from Chairman Mao, known as the Little Red Book. It became the most important text in China. Schoolchildren started their days with recitations from the Little Red Book. Chinese children considered it their most prized possession, and everyone had a copy.
Formation of the Red Guards
Mao called on the people, especially the youth of China, to destroy the remnants of the despotic corruption of the past. The youth answered Mao’s call by forming units of Red Guards.
Invoking the motto that ‘rebellion is justified’, the Red Guards burned books, destroyed ancient buildings and temples, and pillaged museums and palaces. The Red Guards also adjudged many prominent writers, artists, scholars and intellectuals to be reactionaries, and went after them ferociously. Teachers and professional figures were humiliated, often beaten, and sometimes murdered.
For two millennia, China had invested its emperor with state and spiritual authority. Mao co-opted this element of ancient culture and invested it with revolutionary legitimacy.
‘Long Live Chairman Mao’
This was clear when Mao welcomed Red Guards from across the country to Beijing and Tiananmen Square in August 1966. Standing at the entrance of the Forbidden City before about one million fervent young revolutionaries, Mao basked in their adulation, as chants of ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ filled the air.
Propaganda posters from the late 1960s show the full extent of his deification. An estimated 2.2 billion portraits of Mao were produced during the Cultural Revolution. In many of them, Mao hovers above the people as a sort of radiant sun. Golden rays beam out from a circle framing his face.
The rules for these portraits were incredibly specific. Mao’s face needed to be depicted in ‘reddish warm tones with burnt sienna for shading and yellow ochre for highlights’. The Chinese people responded by referring to Mao as the ‘red sun within our bosom’.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Great Revolutions of Modern History. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Mao’s Death and the ‘Gang of Four’
Despite the claims that the Cultural Revolution’s purpose was to divest the party of reactionary impulses, historian Frank Dikotter contends that the “Cultural Revolution was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward”.
During the Cultural Revolution, the concept of the people receded into the background. The people’s democratic dictatorship existed in name only. Mao and his cult of personality personified the revolution. And Mao retained this exalted position until his death in September 1976.
As the country grieved for Chairman Mao, his widow Jiang Qing and three colleagues took power as the ‘Gang of Four’. But this arrangement lasted for less than a month before a more-moderate faction gained ascendancy.
Rise of Deng Xiaoping
Hua Guofeng, a longtime loyalist to Mao, became the new party chairman. He was a transitional figure who held power for four years, before being pushed out by the much more capable Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s long-time comrade and occasional nemesis.
For the next decade, Deng Xiaoping worked to modernize and strengthen the Chinese economy, in part by allowing a limited measure of private enterprise and foreign investment. In 1986, the American journalist Mike Wallace asked Deng if he were overseeing “a new revolution”. The Chinese leader answered, “You are right… We too say that what we are doing now is in essence a revolution.”
Deng had learned a valuable lesson from Mao Zedong: the aura of revolution was an effective tool to validate policy and legitimize reform. But when large-scale protests in 1989 called for liberal political reforms, Deng made it clear that freedom of speech, freedom of the press and liberal democracy weren’t part of his agenda.
Protest at Tiananmen Square
In early June 1989, peaceful protesters occupied Tiananmen Square, despite the government’s institution of martial law. Communism’s hold was already slipping away in Eastern Europe. Global attention turned now to see what would happen in Beijing.
Deng provided the answer when government troops fired into the crowds and armored military vehicles mowed down the protesters. To this day, the death toll is unknown. The British ambassador estimated that security forces killed as many as 10,000 protesters. But because China strictly regulates the media and Internet through a mechanism known as the ‘Golden Shield’, most young Chinese today know little to nothing of this event.
In the square where Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China, and where he received up to a million of his adoring Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, Deng once again invoked the idea of revolution to maintain the party’s monopoly on power, and what was legitimately revolutionary as opposed to what could be deemed counterrevolutionary and thereby treacherous. Such was—and is—the power of the Chinese communist revolution.
Common Questions about the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong’s Cult of Personality
Mao’s sayings were gathered in a book, Quotations from Chairman Mao, known as the Little Red Book. It became the most important text in China. Schoolchildren started their days with recitations from the book.
Invoking the motto that ‘rebellion is justified’, the Red Guards burned books, destroyed ancient buildings and temples, and pillaged museums and palaces. The Red Guards also adjudged many prominent writers, artists, scholars and intellectuals to be reactionaries, and went after them ferociously. Teachers and professional figures were humiliated, often beaten, and sometimes murdered.
Propaganda posters from the late 1960s show the full extent of Mao’s deification. In many of them, Mao hovers above the people as a sort of radiant sun; golden rays beam out from a circle framing his face. The rules for these portraits were incredibly specific. Mao’s face needed to be depicted in ‘reddish warm tones with burnt sienna for shading and yellow ochre for highlights’. The Chinese people responded by referring to Mao as ‘the red sun within our bosom’.
