Was the Cultural Revolution from below or from above?

The short answer

• Mao’s fear of a Chinese Khrushchev. Mao believed after the famine that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were governing without him and leading China toward capitalism, as he believed Khrushchev had done in the Soviet Union. The Socialist Education Movement had failed to remove them; the men it threatened controlled the Party machine conducting it. Mao therefore looked outside that machine. Young people, mobilized with army backing, could purge “those in authority taking the capitalist road”.
• A generation raised on the cult. The students Mao addressed in 1966 had been taught to place loyalty to him above family and teachers. Lei Feng, the Little Red Book and the cult of Mao had shaped their education. Their prospects were also narrowing: university places and city jobs were becoming harder to obtain, and entrance examinations were suspended in June 1966. When Mao said rebellion was justified, faith in him met frustrations of their own. Teachers represented the examinations and the order that judged students, and became early targets.
• Grievances waiting for a target. Campaigns over seventeen years had left many people with reasons to resent those above them: families carried stigmatizing class labels, temporary workers held insecure jobs, purge victims remembered their treatment, and students resented privileged classmates. The Cultural Revolution briefly permitted attacks on authority. These grievances helped rebel factions spread, but they also gave a national campaign thousands of local and personal quarrels that proved hard to control.
• An army ordered to take sides. The instruction to the army in January 1967 was to “support the left” during the power seizures. Which faction was the left? Commanders backed groups that suited them, while rivals took weapons from military depots. Posters and meetings gave way to armed conflict; some cities saw machine guns and even artillery used. With soldiers themselves taking sides, ending the fighting required Mao to decide which side the army should back.

What it changed

The army becomes the government. Restoring order gave the army a commanding place in civilian government. Officers dominated the revolutionary committees; by 1969 nearly half the Central Committee wore uniform. The army ran factories, schools and ministries, and its leader Lin Biao became Mao’s designated successor. Soldiers and workers formed political work teams that took over universities, while army methods became a model for the militarized state.

The young sent away. From December 1968 Mao sent millions of urban school leavers “up to the mountains and down to the villages” to learn from peasants. Dispersing the young removed the Red Guards, the movement’s shock troops, from the cities and eased urban unemployment. By 1980 about seventeen million young people had been sent down. For most, rebellion ended in a village.

Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping destroyed. The campaign ruined both men who had led the recovery. Liu Shaoqi was expelled from the Party in October 1968 as a “renegade, traitor and scab”; denied proper medical care, he died in custody in Kaifeng in November 1969. Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor plant in Jiangxi. His son was crippled after a fall while held by Red Guards. Deng survived and would shape China after Mao.

Schools closed, heritage destroyed. The attack on the Four Olds destroyed temples, libraries, graves and private collections. Education suffered a long interruption too: secondary schools and universities stopped normal teaching in 1966, and university entrance examinations returned only in 1977. China lost a decade of trained graduates and much of its material past. Reformers in the 1980s had to rebuild universities, research institutes and professions almost from the beginning.