I regret to inform you all that history will not save America from itself

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (The Great Leap Forward)


The opening shot of the Cultural Revolution was small and tentative. In November 1965, a literary critic trashed a popular play that contained an obvious satire of Mao in the guise of a Ming emperor. Within six months wall posters in the big cities had denounced all of the major moderates in China. With the party apparatus in the hands of the moderates, Mao stirred up ideological cadres of students to do his dirty work. He himself stayed aloof from the struggles. The first recorded death by torture was on August 5, 1966. A swarm of students denounced and set upon the headmistress of a prestigious girls school for important government daughters. They kicked and trampled her, forced her to carry bricks until she collapsed, and finally beat her with belts and sticks as she lay dying. Two weeks later, Mao dressed in his army uniform for the first time since the civil war and stood atop Tiananmen gate to review a parade of the new organization of enthusiastic students, the Red Guards. Later that week, the Red Guards hauled thirty of the nation’s best-known writers, musicians, and artists into a library to scold and beat them while books, art, and other cultural artifacts were burned in a bonfire. In Beijing alone, during August and September, thirty-four thousand homes were raided. Old manuscripts were burned, paintings slashed, musical instruments smashed. Some 1,800 people were beaten or tortured to death, and before it was all over, five thousand of the city’s seven thousand registered historical monuments were destroyed. The Red Guards were encouraged to run amok during the Cultural Revolution, destroying all vestiges of the forbidden past, waving the little red book of Mao’s quotations that everyone in China was required to buy. Wrong thinkers were dragged out and paraded through the streets in dunce caps. Any trace of Western influence or Confucian tradition was to be eradicated. Men were beaten for merely owning neckties. In January 1967, the minister of coal became the first senior official in China to be tortured to death. He was sliced, beaten, and smashed against a concrete floor. China’s head of state, Liu Shaoqi, and his wife were publicly beaten and tortured in an auditorium full of screaming Red Guards, and later the husband was killed in prison. Two of their children were also killed. Deng Xiaoping was sent to a labor camp. Zhou Enlai survived the purges only because he had remained friends with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, when she was out of favor in the 1950s. In the south Chinese province of Guangxi, fanatic mobs tore apart and ate at least a hundred enemies of the state. Cafeterias displayed bodies on meat hooks and fed them to workers. Students killed, cooked, and ate their principals. One study has suggested that the most fanatic Red Guards were the children of previously purged middle-class parents. Whether they were trying to prove their loyalty or to get some payback is anyone’s guess—probably a little of both. As a rule, however, entire families were dragged out and punished for any crimes pinned on the head of the household. Mao began to rein in the forces of destruction after 1968. As with so many of his schemes, it became obvious after a couple of years that the Cultural Revolution was undermining China’s viability. Because most of China’s schools were shut down during the Cultural Revolution, an entire generation would enter adulthood distinctly under-educated. Now that the Red Guards had successfully broken the moderates, it was time to break the Red Guards. They were dispersed into the countryside, to work on the farms and reinvigorate their working-class identities. It was a successful cover story that served to dilute the concentrated power of the guards. Red Guards who tried to stay behind in the cities were then hunted down and killed by Lin Biao’s soldiers.