ON THIS DAY ·
Red Guard rallies in Tiananmen Square
18 Aug 1966 — Mao wore army uniform to review about a million Red Guards at Tiananmen. A schoolgirl pinned a Red Guard armband on his sleeve. This was the first of eight rallies that brought some 12 million young people to Beijing by late November, a sign to them that the Chairman himself stood behind their rebellion.
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The moment in context
Mao wanted to remake China and purge officials he called “revisionists”, but the Party he chaired was itself the obstacle. The opening came in November 1965, when a Shanghai critic attacked a play by Beijing’s deputy mayor. Mao read the play as a veiled defense of his critics. By May 1966 Beijing’s leaders had been purged, and a small Central Cultural Revolution Group, including his wife Jiang Qing, directed the campaign. It answered to Mao and bypassed the Party’s normal leadership.
From Cultural Revolution, chapter 9 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1967).
The place: Red Guard rallies in Tiananmen Square — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — 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…
- The turn — Wuhan, 20 July 1967. On 20 July 1967 Mao was in Wuhan when troops and the mass organization “Million Heroes” seized two envoys from Beijing. He had to be flown to…
- 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…
Then ask the room: Was the Cultural Revolution a revolution from below or a purge directed from above? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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