Um actually for a late August day it's actually quite chilly. So um I would definitely say that we can uh I'll say here in Xi’an that the worst of the dog days of summer are over. And let me tell you, I am more than happy about that. And let me tell you, Xi’an is - all of northern China, northwest China, northeast China is just magical in winter. So the fall seasons here, uh no matter where you go, in China are just brilliant. Uh so let me tell you once the borders open up if you can come visit China in the fall cuz it is amazing.

Uh you know I've had a pretty wild summer to be honest. I uh you know there was a reason I didn't give you guys a full episode last month. I moved into the Northwest University faculty apartments. Uh, I went to Xinjiang for a little while, which was great. Uh, went to a few raves and nightclubs parties, and, uh, now we're just a few days away from beginning the new semester at my new university.

Uh, but before I get back to teaching today, I'm going to serve you up a hot and fresh episode filled with rebellion, class struggle against counterrevolutionary traitors, and complete and utter chaos under heaven. So today's episode will situate us with the cultural revolution now kicking into high gear with Red Buckle up, my friends, cuz this is where you might say, well, pardon my French. I, you know, I try to keep academic on this podcast and limit profanity, but there's really no other way of saying it. This is the part of 1966 where the kids go fecking apeshit. That's it. They go fecking apeshit.

The work teams had pissed the radical Maoist students off. And by the time Mao ordered the work teams to pull out, the students who had been snubbed, sidelined, and even tortured or killed by Liu and Deng's cronies were ready to go completely and utterly berserk. You know, it's like uh you guys remember that uh song from the '90s uh by the Offspring - ‘the kids are not all right’. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the offspring would have said the kids are not all right.

But Mao brazenly said it is fine. So with such tension and rancor filling the air as it was in August of '66, Mao decided to let the floodgates open. And oh boy did he end up kicking the hornets's nest. Honestly, a lot of historians would argue that Mao got more than he bargained for. So, as the whirlwind of big character posters or dazibao kept piling on to what seemed to be every flat surface across Beijing, Mao decided that it was time to write his own Dazibao, which he titled Bombard the Headquarters.

He wrote it during the 11th plenary session of the central committee of the communist party on August 5th and he distributed it to all high-ranking members of the party pasting it around Zhongnanhai and the inside of the great hall of the people. In it, Mao said it’s China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster. Uh, I assume he's referring to Nie Yuanzi’s dazibao, uh, the one that we talked about in episodes 1 and two, and the editorial articles on it in People's Daily are indeed superbly written.

Comrades, please read them again. But in the last 50 days or so, some leading comrades from the central committee down to the local levels have acted in a diametrically opposite way. Adopting the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie, they have enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great proletarian cultural revolution. They have stood facts on their heads and juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, stifled opinions differing from their own, imposed a white terror, and felt very pleased with themselves. They have puffed up the arrogance of the bourgeoisie and deflated the morale of the proletarian. How poisonous. Viewed in connection with the right deviation in 1962 and the wrong tendency of 1964 which was left in form but right in essence, shouldn't this make one wide awake?

While Bombard the headquarters was not officially publicly published in People's Daily until August of '67, a year later, the news of Mao's big character poster, which he had posted around the Great Hall of the People and other government offices, did end up leaking out to lower level cadre, into the army, and into the trade unions quickly, and it only fueled the rebellion.

It was quite obvious that the big character poster was a snub at Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping given how the document spoke of the quote right deviations of 1962 and 1964. Either way, it was a sign that Mao was ready to fully endorse the current Red Guard movement as he was beginning to emulate the Red Guard's actions on the campuses within his own halls of power.

3 days later on August 8th, Mao drew up yet another groundbreaking declaration. This time it was called the decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, better known as the 16 point decision or the August 8th Declaration. The 16 points were, and I'm going to go through all of them because I think it's important that you guys know about them because it'll give you a sense of a lot of what's to come over the next few episodes.

Uh number one, the Chinese Revolution has reached a new stage in the development of socialism.

Number two, the cultural revolution will inevitably meet resistance.

Number three, put daring above everything else and boldly arouse the masses.

Number four, let the masses educate themselves in this movement. Cast out fear. Trust the masses. Rely on them and respect their independent initiative. Don't be afraid of disturbances.

Number five, firmly apply the Marxist class line of the party.

Number six, and this is interesting, correctly. Handle the contradictions among the people. Conduct debate through reasoning and not by force as much as possible. And distinguish between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions among comrades. This is kind of, this is an aside, this is kind of funny how Mao stressed 6 so emphatically. And yet, uh, as we'll see, the Red Guard movement fell into factionalism so quickly.

Number seven, guard against those who brand the revolutionary masses as counterrevolutionaries or denouncing the rebels as opponents of the cultural revolution.

Number eight, distinguish between good cadres, decent cadres, cadres with incorrect lines but who are not capitalist roaders and cadres who are now firmly in the camp of the new bourgeoisie and to try to remember that the vast majority of cadres are in the first two categories.

Number nine, embrace the new systems of power such as mass committees, mass organizations, and rebel congresses.

Number 10, carry out educational reform in schools and universities to do away with the old feudal systems of thinking.

Number 11, Criticize counterrevolutionaries by name in the press, but only after proper discussion and line struggle within revolutionary organization and rebel aligned party committees.

Number 12, Apply unity criticism unity when dealing with scientists, technicians, and lower middle class intellectuals so as to transform them into revolutionary intellectuals ready to serve the people and take proletarian leadership.

Number 13, pay attention to building cultural and educational units to eradicate bourgeois and feudal ideology in both city and countryside.

Number 14, grasp revolution, promote production. Understanding Mao Zedong thought and Marxist political economy will allow the economy to continue to innovate and grow even in the midst of violent class struggle.

Number 15, cherish the People's Liberation Army and support the Central Military Commission in raising the militant class consciousness of all soldiers.

And finally, number 16, put Mao Zedong Thought in command of all things.

So, if the May 16th circular was a declaration of war against the bourgeoisie within the party and it was the launch of the cultural revolution officially and ‘Bombard the headquarters’ was Mao's official endorsement of the red guard movement, the 16 points of the cultural revolution was meant to be the guidelines and objectives of the post-work team rebellion in the campuses, workplaces, and communes.

It called for what was previously a student movement, mostly confined to the Beijing city limits, to become a nationwide mass campaign that would unleash all workers, farmers, soldiers, as well as Maoist aligned lower level party functionaries to rise up, challenge authority, hold directions on every level, quote, in the spirit of the Paris Commune, and to reshape the superstructure of society.

Uh by the way, we'll be talking a lot more about the whole economic base versus superstructure in later episodes, where we'll be talking about the deeper aspects of the philosophical underpinnings of the cultural revolution.

We did get into it a little in episode one, but I think that sometime later we should do another episode or two where we dig a little deeper into it. And I'll probably bring in some guests who are a little better trained in uh materialist dialectics than I am for that. Uh but yeah, that was the 16-point decision. And you know, it's funny.

Many mainstream western scholars say that the 16 point decision was the real beginning of the cultural revolution as we think of it in popular culture and feel that it was far more important than the May 16th circular in terms of bringing the cultural revolution out of the halls of power and out of the campus and turning it into a broad movement that mobilized the entire population.

Uh, although just as an aside, it would still take a few months before the Red Guard movement became the major form of rebellion in the factories and farms outside of Beijing. Well, I definitely wouldn't say that the 16-point decision was the true beginning of the cultural revolution, though I've gotten into some very heated discussions at academic conferences and history department mixers over the matter at uh it definitely was a gamechanger and shaped the cultural revolution as it panned out until I guess I'd say the 9th Congress of the Communist Party of in April of 69.

And I would definitely argue that the 16 points broadcast nationally on the radio and its publication in People's Daily the next day helped really spring the Red Guards across the country into action to flood Tiananmen Square on August 18 to take part in Mao's big reception of the Red Guards which uh we'll talk about here in just a few minutes. But before we get to the big Tiananmen Square Red Guard receptions, let's cut back to the university campuses of Beijing.

Across the first two weeks of August, Red Guard organizations blossomed across China, but particularly in Beijing. Here we see the students who had been sidelined or punished by the work teams organized together in fevered militancy. At the same time, we see the majority of students who, while maybe not overtly having supported the work teams, maybe, you know, they at least cooperated with them, they, those students, end up joining what are called cultural revolution preparatory committees.

Now, cultural revolution preparatory committees were essentially bodies of students that were left behind by the work teams to continue guiding the cultural revolution on a more orderly basis. Although, what's interesting is many preparatory committees ended up swinging to the left across the months of August and September and became rebel mass organizations themselves.

Um, uh for example, I've I know that here in Xi’an, the Xi’an Jaotong University Cultural Revolution Preparatory Committee became a part of the left wing of the rebellion on Jaotong campus by uh late autumn of ' 66. Outside of the preparatory committees though, the Red Guards, who initially made up the minority, so to speak, of students, despite being endorsed by Mao and the Central Cultural Revolution Group, were out for blood.

They wanted to take the fight off the campuses, find the work team leaders, drag them back to the schools for interrogation and struggle sessions, and get revenge on the party cadres and faculty members who had supported them. Vengeance against the former work teams was going to be thorough and brutal, and it was going to take the entirety of the city of Beijing by storm.

The students who had come from quote ‘good class backgrounds’ or quote ‘red backgrounds’. So that's like children of Revolutionary or World War II veterans, children of high-ranking party members were actually some of the first targets of the Red Guards because they were seen as having gotten a little too comfortable resting on their mommy and daddy's laurels and were more likely to fall into becoming new red bourgeoisie. And uh another thing is many of the students who came from red backgrounds were strict proponents of the bloodline theory or Xuetong Lun.

Meaning that your ancestry determined whether or not you were a red element, an intermediate element, or a black element. And this became a major point of contention among various red guards across late ' 66 and early ' 67. And uh many of the leftist red guards who were officially approved by the CCRG were deemed black elements or the children of black elements by the preparatory committees or some of the quote unquote I guess you would call official red guards.

And in the next few episodes, I'll get into how the bloodline theory played out and how it often had very tragic consequences in both the left and right wing of the red guard movement up until the end of '66 when it began to become repudiated.

Well, at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of 18th of August, 1966, nearly 1 million youth flooded into Tiananmen Square so that Chairman Mao could receive his new army of young revolutionary generals, waving little red books, red flags, and gigantic portraits of Chairman Mao. The square was packed to the gills with a sea of youth, intoxicated with revolutionary fervor.

They were here to catch a glimpse of the man who not only had led the foundation of their new socialist society, the man who was the father of their country, but the man who had declared himself to be the leader of their rebellion against those who wish to restore capitalism. The cheers and chants of revolutionary slogans were deafening. When the sun rose over the square, Mao walked out of the Tiananmen gates and right into the square as if he himself was the morning sun, wearing a red guard uniform.

He walked among the crowd and shook as many hands of as possible of the attendees before returning to the gate where he ascended to the Tiananmen roster above his portrait with Marshall Lin Biao by his side. Beginning at 7:30 a.m. with a loud rendition of the East is Red playing over the loudspeakers.

For hours, Mao and his closest comrades waved to the crowd, led them in song, with the masses only growing more and more frenzied with their chance and patriotic songs, growing louder and louder. For hundreds of thousands of young Chinese, this was the moment that signaled to them that not only had a new revolution been launched, but that a new world had dawned and that Mao was going to be in the ideological trenches right alongside them in the fight for that new world.

After a couple of hours of sloganeering and singing, Mao invited 1,500 Red Guard leaders to join him and the rest of the party leadership on the top of the gates roster to watch the big parade. Chen Boda gave the keynote speech as Mao continued to wave to the crowd. Chen proclaimed Mao to be quote ‘the great leader’, the great teacher, and the great helmsman. Lin Biao piggybacked on the speech and called Mao the commander and chief of the cultural revolution and called upon the red guards to smash the four olds. Old ideas, culture, customs and habits in complete earnest and by any means necessary.

More speeches were given by various other leaders including Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing except for one glaring and well obvious exception. Liu Shaoqi. Liu was present in the roster. Yes, but he was positioned at the far end of the lineup and was made to be as inconspicuous as possible across the morning's rally. By noon time, the rally had ended and the crowd within the square dispersed to continue marching and celebrating around the city of Beijing. But actually, Mao allowed for a few more red guard leaders to come to the top of the gate to meet him. There he approached a young lady named Song Bing Bin.

Upon meeting Mao, Song Bin Bin took her own red guard armband and pinned it to Mao's arm, signaling that Mao himself was now officially a red guard. Now, Bin Bin's name is interesting. She's got an interesting story because in Chinese, uh, Bin Bin means refined or ladylike. When Mao asked her name and she said," he shook his head and said, "No, no, no." And he said something along the lines of, "A revolution is not something to be refined. You should be named Song Yao Wu, which means to be a marshall." So from that point onward, Song became the poster girl for the most militant of red guards.

And this is actually uh Song Bin Bin. She is still alive today. And it's actually something that she feels very embarrassed about now because it elicited a mixture of both fanatical adoration and paralyzing fear of her among her classmates. But either way, the famous photograph of Sun Bin Bin or Sun Yao Wu pinning her armband onto Mao's arm is still to this day considered one of the most iconic photographs of the cultural revolution, despite Song's modern dislike for being known as the band girl. Actually, as an aside, uh this is interesting.

A comrade of mine and I were talking about the Red Guard reception rallies of August through November of ' 66 just recently and uh he pointed something out to me. Um the French postmodern philosopher Alain Badiou uh made an interesting point about these rallies. Um, as I demonstrated, while many Communist Party officials gave speeches that day, Mao himself virtually said nothing. He simply stood and waved.

And I must say, I have my own personal problems with Badiou's interpretation of the cultural revolution overall, particularly his view of the later half of the cultural revolution. Badiou posits that Mao's silence was really a way of revealing the mass's own power to themselves through the creation of uh quote the space of these rallies. Badu says that this was very different from, say, a tyrant's theater for fanatics that you might see in footage of fascist rallies in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy or Ba’athist Iraq. It makes it seem that Mao deliberately made the rallies about the masses and about his comrades around him on the roster rather than about himself.

So, just a thought to chew on. Regardless, the August 18th reception of the Red Guards in Tiananmen caused a stir nationwide. According to Peking Review issue 34, smaller parades celebrating the reception were held in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shaoshan, Urumqi, Xi’an, and Lhasa. In Shanghai, revolutionary music blared from every loudspeaker across the city and every factory stopped so that workers could parade through the streets in celebration of the events in Beijing.

Here in Xi’an, every university held a celebratory rally in which little red books and copies of the selected works of Mao Zedong were distributed in mass to every single student, faculty member, and campus worker. In Urumqi, way out in Xinjiang, university campuses became festival grounds of celebration with students dancing traditional Uyghur dances as they held up massive portraits of Mao and placards of his quotations. In Lhasa, Tibet, both Han Chinese and Tibetans alike flooded the streets, repeatedly chanting, "Oh, majestic Himalayas, how can you compare to the lofty spirit of Chairman Mao?"

So, uh, speaking of Shanghai, I really haven't talked about Shanghai yet, have I? Shanghai, China's second largest city and one of the major battlegrounds of the cultural revolution. Well, across the week after the Tiananmen reception, the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and all the newly reformed Red Guard factions in the city held their own reenactments of the Tiananmen reception and called to destroy the old world, which was heavily emphasized by speakers at the Shanghai reception.

And four days later, the Shanghai Red Guards and rebel worker unions took to the streets to do exactly that. But actually, you know, let me get back to Shanghai in a couple of minutes. Sorry, I know I'm jumping all over the place in my script, but bear with me. I'm doing this for a reason because Red August is yeah, it's wild. So with the first of the Red Guard reception rallies out of the way, there would end up being seven more major rallies in Tiananmen between August 18th and November 26, not counting the countless rallies during that time across the rest of the nation.

The now sufficiently hyped up Red Guards were filled with revolutionary fervor and were ready to destroy anything and anyone they saw as getting in the way of building a more democratic, egalitarian, and communistic society. And so, Red August gained its other name, often used in history books, the Red Terror. The day after the August 18th rally, high school red guards flooded the streets and began to attack everything that had even a whiff of the old society. Department stores filled with western clothing like jeans and t-shirts or Hong Kong style fashion were ransacked.

The famous Quanjude Beijing Roast Duck Restaurant, which I've eaten at before, and it's good stuff, really, was attacked by a coalition of the 2nd, 25th, and 63rd Middle School red guards. They smashed all the old antique decor within the restaurant, demanded all the restaurant staff join them as rebel workers, and posted portraits of Mao and various big character posters all over the walls of the restaurant. While the duck was still uh supposedly quite delicious, Quanjude was now a revolutionary red restaurant, accessible to all citizens of the city and no longer an exclusive five-star dining establishment.

As the days went through, more and more teachers became targets of their students' wrath. Even as early as August 5th, before the 16points were even published, Vice Principal Bian Zhongyun of Beijing University's affiliated high school was beaten to death, making her the first civilian casualty of Red August. On August 20th, the superintendent of Beijing schools was dragged out of his office by Red Guard High School students and beaten within an inch of his life.

School district office buildings in Beijing and other cities were ransacked, their staff chased out of their offices and beaten. The school district and university administrative buildings were burned to the ground. Records that listed education officials who were either members of or had been supportive of the work teams were confiscated and distributed to the Red Guards who the high schoolers were allied with. And well, I'm sure you can deduce what happened to those who were listed in those rosters.

In Changsha, Hunan Province, Red Guards, who had just arrived back from the first Red Guard reception rally, got straight to work occupying their universities and putting all work team faculty and campus cadres through brutal struggle sessions and savage beatings. And uh in Guangzhou, one pro-work team teacher was forced to chug ink straight out of an ink well, after which red guards kicked him in the stomach until he vomited the ink backup.

On August 21st in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, provincial party chief General Y addressed a 20,000 strong rally while wearing a red guard uniform and called for the students, youth, workers of the city to emulate the destroying of the four olds as was happening in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou,and Changsha.

Fuzhou, he proclaimed, was yet to be another battleground against any attempt at capitalist restoration inChina. And soon, Fuzhou was thrown into chaos as well. Across China, street names were changed at an alarming rate. Many street and square names were renamed things like anti-revisionist road, which was the street that the Soviet embassy was located on. So that was kind of the their little fuck you to the Soviet Union. Anti-revisionist road in Shanghai. New street names included Eternal Struggle Street and Eternally Red Boulevard. Tianjin's Golden Tripod Factory Square became Worker and Peasant Factory Square.

And here in Xi'an, uh, just near the drum tower, we have a,uh, street called Bamboo Market Street, but at that time, it became Revolutionary Street. And that really is just a tiny fraction of the amount of name changes given to various streets, workplaces, cities, and schools during that time. For the youth of China, even the most innocuous of things had to be wiped away to remove, erase any reminder of the old feudal and capitalist world, even if it meant the street you grew up on or the name of your favorite noodle shop.

On August 22nd,1966, Mao sent a document to the Ministry of Public Security ordering, quote, "do not police force, no exception, to intervene or suppress the movement of revolutionary students." He also sent a similar proclamation to the central military commission of the people's liberation army saying that the armed forces were to stand down from any engagement with the red guards whatsoever no matter how excessive or fatal the students actions might be. The next day, Mao gave a talk at a workconference of the central committee, publicly backing the students movement and opposing any intervention to the cultural revolution of the students.

In other words, all law enforcement bodies were to let the Red guards do as they please. And actually, frankly, Mao didn't have to ask twice because you see, uh, Xie Fuzhi, the minister of public security at the time, he was already an adamant-supporter of Mao's line. And he was more than happy to give the Red Guards carte blanche to destroy the old world and wreak vengeance on all their enemies like right-wing intellectuals, non-red guard youth league members, and any party cadres who had supported the work teams.

Heck, in uh many instances, the police gave over the keys to the local jails and police stations to the Red Guards and just let them go hog wild on whoever they saw fit. I mean uh you know for us Americans living in the era of widespread police misconduct and systemic violence against marginalized peoples you know it seems completely foreign the idea of the entire police system of a country siding with a revolutionary communist rebellion

but uh hey it happened like okay I guess imagine if you lived in America and the people decided to go all out and beat the crap uh or even kill every Republican politician or right-wing professor or right-wing high school teacher and every police department and military unit just stood by watching. That's basically what Red August was like.

That same same day, red guards in Zhengding, Hubei province went crazy or hog wild and proceeded to ransack and burn down as many Buddhist and Daoist temples and Muslim mosques as they could. 100 red guards stormed the Zhengding Mosque, dynamited the centuries old dome, and then put the mosque's imam through a brutal struggle session in which he was forced to wear a necklace made of pig’s tails.

While I personally find this tobe very insensitive towards the cultures of the national minorities of China, and as a historian, the idea of centuries old buildings being wantingly destroyed hurts me greatly. I can't help but admit I sympathize with why the so many kids enthusiastically took part in such things because I mean while for me as an academic I view these religious sites as places of historical significance to Chinese youth of that particular time period they represented ancient oppressive belief systems that had caused their ancestors untold amounts of suffering for millennia. So, you know, perspective, perspectives, perspective.That's the name of the game.

Meanwhile, here in Xi’an on August 22nd, a small group of red guards called the Red Terror Brigade dragged one of their teachers into a busy intersection, tied him up, poured gasoline on the poor man, and burned him alive. The Red Terror Brigade, however, later got exposed as a group of rightists tied to the provincial military authorities and were suppressed by the other Red Guards in Xi’an shortly before the January 1967 power seizures. But I'll retell and expand upon the Red Terror Brigade story in a little more detail in my future episode about the cultural revolution in Xi’an.

Okay, anyways, let's head back to Shanghai. On August 23rd, Red August in Shanghai truly went into full rampage mode. While the rebel workers, revolutionary intellectuals, and the left wing of the Shanghai Party apparatus quickly became the main force of the cultural revolution in Shanghai and stayed in that position once the January storm of ' 67 happened. And indeed historians often point out just how brief the Red Guard movement lasted in Shanghai compared to the rest of China. But for the time being in August, the Shanghai Red Guards were the ones to fire the first salvos of the Red Rebellion.

The morning of the 23rd, inspired by the news out of Beijing, the newly formed Red Guard factions in Shanghai paraded through the streets of the city, chanting, "We are the creators of the new world," and posted up big character posters and propaganda posters everywhere they went. According to one source, some high school red guards ransacked every flower shop they could find and proclaimed ornamental plants to be bourgeois decadence. Um, I myself have only read that in a single source. So, while I can't discount that as being untrue, I do encourage my listeners to take that little factoid with a grain of salt, but I still found it kind of funny.

Much like their counterparts in other cities, the Shanghai Red Guards marched into the famous waterfront Shanghai Bund and renamed it Revolutionary Boulevard while proceeding to vandalize shops and buildings built in the European colonial style. On August 26th, a delegation of 170 red guards from 14 Beijing universities arrived by train and declared their intention to help their comrades make Shanghai into a battleground against the old world. Chen Pixian, the Shanghai party chief, and several other communist officials came to greet them at the train station.

The next day, another 900 Beijing red guards arrived at the train station. And by the end of the month, thousands of young rebels from cities around China had converged on Shanghai to aid their comrades in making the city into an epicenter of Red August. However, Chen Pixian and the Shanghai Parties Committee's welcoming of the out of town red guards was actually not accepted kindly. The newly arrived red guards claimed they had come to ‘dianhuo’ (light a fire) and immediately denounced the local party apparatus as having handled the revolution in the city as too restrained.

It makes sense though I guess uh you know in the eyes of the Beijing red guards there was the question of how could China's second largest city not launch its own cultural revolution until 3 months after the May 16th circular, one Shanghai Red Guard said of the out of town reinforcements and I'm quoting her here when the Beijing red guards came south wearing military uniforms with complete with leather belts They looked really awesome. They said to us, "Why are you folks here so civil without even a bit of revolutionary spirit?" At that time, I didn't understand what they meant by revolutionary spirit. A girl red guard from Beijing then took off her leather belt and started to demonstrate to me how to whip someone. This was my first look at the Beijing Red Guards.

Needless to say, the Beijing Red Guards were disappointed in their Shanghai comrades when it came to the current lack of bloodshed. And quickly, the Shanghai Red Guards began to emulate their Beijing counterparts in transforming line struggle into armed struggle. And the Red August of Beijing became the Red August of Shanghai. Indeed, one of the first joint actions of the Beijing and Shanghai Red Guards was to end the month of August by destroying Shanghai's oldest Buddhist temple, the Longhua Temple, resulting in the burning of 3,000 ancient scriptures. With Shanghai now an epicenter of rebellion, let's backtrack a couple of weeks back to the campuses of Beijing.

Now, you'd think with the 16 points and the August 18th rally being such a resounding success, the campus red guard movement in Beijing would be united in ironclad fashion, marching forward in unison under the banner of Mao Zedong thought in their common goal to defeat the rightists within the party and destroy the old world. Right. Right. No. In fact, the Beijing Red Guard movement fractured almost immediately at birth with Red August being a time of campus rebel groups splitting in ways that would make any group of British Trotskyists or Portland anarchists jealous.

On many campuses, splits between the original Red Guard groups would often be over things like, "Did so-and-so oppose the work teams militantly enough?" or should we work to rehabilitate pro work team students who have self-criticized and whose new preparatory committees are swinging to the left and other questions left unanswered in the aftermath of the work team pullouts. Red Guard groups split into majority factions and minority factions with the minority factions often being the most ferocious and militant. And frankly, they were usually the most likely to achieve endorsement from the central cultural revolution group.

It wasn't until Zhou Enlai gathered a large congress of red guard factions together at Qinghua University and urged the students to unite against the former white terror that things began to settle down uh for a few weeks that is. But no, seriously, it wasn't unusual for a university to have two, three, or even four competing Red Guard factions at any given time.There was one exception to the rule of Beijing campuses factionalizing so quickly, that of Beijing University or BeiDa.

A good part of this was because the work team dispatched to BeiDa in May of 66 did not take part in a mass attack against the rebel students thanks to Nie Yuanzi using her influence to effectively and quickly neutralize them and pull many work team members into the Mauist orbit by late July. Because of this, there was no serious split among the students when it came to pro and anti-team work team groups. And thus the BeiDa red guards were formed in a situation where there was no initial lingering of bad blood among anyone on campus during the month of August.

BeiDa campus actually became known as a quote model unit and a quote revolutionary tourist site where red guards from other campuses would try to learn how to unite amongst each other, build rebel coalitions, and handle contradictions in non-antagonistic ways.

However, BeiDa would also eventually begin to experience its own factional disputes across September and October, something we'll get into next episode. Well, things might have seemed hunky dory at Bay, but across the rest of Beijing, Red August was becoming a true red terror, filled with excesses and errors that made even Mao's closest allies a bit queasy.

While university and red guard rebel workers in the factories were primarily struggling against rightists with line struggle and fierce debate, the high school red guards were letting their teen angst get the best of them. Countless junior high and high school teachers were grabbed up by their students and tortured or killed. Schools were vandalized or burned to the ground and book burnings of textbooks and western literature became a daily occurrence in many cities from Xiamen to Karamay.

High school red guards turned their classrooms into makeshift jail sales and torture chambers, trapping teachers and school administrators inside until they self-criticized as counterrevolutionaries or confessed to having supported the work teams. Even teachers who were not tortured or beaten were so humiliated and frightened by their students that many hanged themselves or threw themselves off the top of school buildings as the red guards cheered them on. No matter where you went in Beijing, Guangzhou, or Shanghai, every junior high school and high school was a complete and utter bloodbath.

The university age red guards, while not nearly as cruel as their teenage comrades, were in no mood to make the revolution into a dinner party either. Red guards stormed opera houses and museums and looted them of their ancient costumes and old imperial uniforms, then proceeded to burn them in the courtyard in the Confucian temple in Beijing.

In fact, uh it was only because Zhou Enlai and Mao agreed to send the PLA into the Forbidden City that the Forbidden City was not ransacked during Red August. In Lhasa, the Jokhang temple was ransacked and its statues, ancient manuscripts, and relics were dragged out into the streets by Tibetan red guards and local workers and burned as revenge for the past crimes of the pre-revolutionary llamaist regime. So, what were the authorities to think of all this mayhem?

Well, to quote Mao during his revolutionary days, it is fine. The party, army, police, and state media all gave their seals of approval to the red terror. People's daily ran an editorial called workers, peasants, and soldiers must be supported and that they must support the students. And they said that the students' actions were quite very good indeed. Liberation Army Daily said to the Red Guards, "What you did was right and you did it well." and ran an editorial, calling on PLA troops to quote learn from the Red Guards and respect the Red Guards.

Many local PLA commanders and local municipal police chiefs in the provinces began to encourage their troops to join the Red Guards in the rioting and looting. The Ministry of Public Security and other law enforcement agencies began passing on to Red Guard detachments the home addresses of people's houses in order to search for politically suspect items or documents proving people's connections to either Liu Shaoqi's faction of the party or even to the Guomindang in Taiwan.

As riots, labor strikes, campus occupations, and rural uprisings continued to spread nationwide, Mao called a work conference to discuss how to move forward from the current situation. Much of the left wing of the party, including much of the CCRG, was beginning to express concern that the Red Terror was losing focus on attacking the capitalist roaders and was attacking too many innocent people.

Was Mao concerned though? Not at all. In fact, he said bluntly, quote, "I do not think that Beijing is that chaotic. Beijing is too civilized. Now is not the time to interfere. It is right to rebel." Mao knew the people of China had a fever and the only prescription was more unbridled rebellion. But Red August kind of Yeah, Red August finally went off the rails to a screeching crescendo on August 26th in the Daxing Commune district of Beijing.

Uh just a warning folks, this is the part of the episode that's about to get really ugly.

So Daxing Commune is a district of Beijing that's just south of Chaoyong district. It's in southeast Beijing. Today, it's a lot more built up, but uh back in the 60s, it was essentially a rural suburb of the city.

The Daxing Commune was unique at that stage of the cultural revolution because it was a rural area that was already increasingly militant and already had a grassroots red guard movement that wasn't really connected to uh university campuses. So when Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi broadcast his speech about there being nothing wrong with red guards taking the law into their own hands and killing class enemies, it seemed to, uh, really strike a nerve with the young comrades in the district.

That morning, the district's police turned over to the Daxing Commune Red Guards a large list of people who were former Comprador Bourgeoisie, former Guomindang members, former nobles and landlords, and most importantly, people who were tied to the wing of the Communist Party supported by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The cops basically told the kids, "Knock yourselves out. Search their houses for signs of counterrevolutionary activity. Show these people who's boss now."

The red guards began pulling people out of their homes and into the district squares. For hours, they subjected the quote black elements of society to brutal struggle sessions with a large crowd of angry peasants and local high schoolers whipped into a frenzy as they denounced their targets. Several people who were being struggled against died in the process of being beaten. And many of the older people being struggled against died from sheer exhaustion due to being put through hours of harassment and physical assault in the middle of a humid August day.

After the first wave of struggle sessions was over, the Daxing Commune Red Guards, the Daxing District People's Militia, and a section of rebel cadres of the district's communist party branch marched through the commune, going from house to house to rob and beat the families of those who had been struggled to death in that morning's struggled session.

Some red guards had become so intoxicated with rage that they began pulling children and infants out in the streets and bludgeoning them to death, citing the bloodline theory that I had mentioned earlier. For 5 days, the riots and looting in Daxing continued. And by the end of the riots, the county government counted 326 civilians dead, tens of thousands injured, and countless homes and workplaces destroyed.

A local Daxing rebel cadre leader realizing things had gone too far phoned the party center who had decided then that the pilgrims had been totally unnecessary and targeted too many innocent civilians unconnected with the capitalist roaders of the party or with the old regime. With that order was restored in the Daxing commune and the red guards of the district were officially reprimanded by the CCRG. When the party center received the full report of the Daxing massacre, it was a clear sign that the red terror had gone too far and had begun to target the masses rather than the capitalist roaders.

On September 2nd, People's Daily published a decree saying urgent notice, struggle with words, not with violence. Jointly written by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and co-signed by Nie Yuanzi, Wang Renzhong, Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, and various prominent Red Guard faction leaders. The decree demanded an end to the terror and commanded that the Red Guard movement redirect itself back to the line of quote, "Bombard the headquarters," rather than taking up the ultra-leftist and anarchistic line of quote, "overthrow literally everything." A slogan that some red guards, particularly high school red guards, had begun to raise.

While Mao himself did not sign off on the declaration, it was obvious that his position earlier that Beijing was quote not chaotic enough had indeed changed. At the next million strong red guard rally in Tiananmen Square that same week, he sternly and tersely told the red guard representatives standing with him at the tan men roster to quote, "Refrain from physical violence and to remember to distinguish contradiction among the masses and contradictions among the enemy."

By September 1st, 1966, thousands were dead. According to an official Chinese government report in 1980, 1,772 people had been killed by the Red Guards that month. While a 1985 followup government report upped that number to 10,275 people killed by the Red Guards. Both the 1980 and 1985 Chinese reports cited that over 85,000 people had been displaced from the city and 92,000 homes, buildings, and workplaces had been ransacked or demolished. Personally, I have a feeling that the 1,772 estimate was referring to the death toll in Beijing and the 10,000 estimate was referring to the nationwide death toll. Uh, but if anyone could clarify for me, I'll gladly add it to next episode's corrections corner.

Well, while I am far from a pacifist, and I am a firm believer that any cultural revolution within a socialist society is going to require at least some bloodshed against reactionaries trying to restore capitalism. I can't help but feel, you know, just how many of those that died, be it a 1,000 or 10,000, were genuinely counterrevolutionaries wanting to overthrow the socialist system, and how many of them were just innocent folks caught in the crossfire of a mass campaign of young people who had lost themselves in the sound and fury of the new revolution.

But alas, excesses and atrocities are bound to happen in any violent historical event. Be it the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Russian Revolution, cultural revolution. So while we should never ever ever excuse the killing of innocent people, we have to always put such mass killings into historical context. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And we should sum up revolutionary upsurges in ways so that we can learn to avoid such things in future cultural revolutions in future socialist societies.

I must say, you know, I can't bring myself to fully denounce Red August as some terrible and unforgivable atrocity, but oh well, it certainly was a learning experience when it comes to how to and how not to mobilize the youth in waging class war against right-wing intellectuals and party members. Uh well, on that dour note, I think it's time for us to wrap this episode up.

Next month is the first month of the new semester at my new job, like I said earlier. So, I can't promise you guys that I'll be able to deliver a full episode for September. In fact, what I'm thinking about doing is using the month of September to create a special National Day episode for the month of October where I can not only talk about the events of September and October of 66, but maybe bring on some special guests as well as tell you guys about some other Maoism related projects that I have up my sleeve. How does that sound today?

So, uh, but if you guys are too impatient for that, maybe I'll throw a little minisode up on Spotify and Anchor sometime in the third week of September. So, uh, do we have any corrections corner this month? No, no, no, no. Seems we don't. That's good. Of course, that means that episode two and the many so number one weren't filled with filthy dirty bourgeois lies and rattish deviations from which I must be dunce-capped and airplane’d by my listeners.

[Laughs] Oh, I've got a dark sense of humor. Seriously though, love you guys. Always appreciate when you guys correct my slip ups or my line problems. So, yes, please. If I screw up, corrections corner. It's here for a reason. Thanks so much for listening in once again. As always, until next time from the ancient city of Xi’an, zai jian. If you guys have any comments, corrections, or criticisms, send them my way at cultural revolutionodcast@gmail.com or my Twitter account at GPCR podcast. And as always, keep marching forward, be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory.

Special thanks once again to

Fractured Rebellion, the Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew G. Walder, particularly chapter 3,

Proletarian Power, Shanghai and the Cultural Revolution by Elizabeth Perry.

The Banned Thought website for their extensive archive of Peking Review issues, particularly Peking Review for August 19th, 1966, as well as these academic journals that are readily available on Jstor. (editors' note: or Sci-hub, if you ask me)

The brief tumultuous history of big democracy in China's factories by Joel Andreas and Yige Dong.

China's great cultural revolution by GP Deshpande.

Language and violence during the Chinese cultural revolution by Ji Fengyuan.

Local autonomy in China during the cultural revolution. The theoretical uses of an atypical case by Lynn T. White III and

Student attacks against teachers during the revolution of 1966 by Wang Youqin.

All right, that's it for the bibliography and the sources. Have a great day, comrades.

So, um, as you guys know, I will be in Xinjiang, uh, for the first half of August, so I'll just give you guys a little bit of a mini-episode today. So today I'd like to review the 2003 documentary "Morning Sun," a film about the Cultural Revolution.

Now, while "Morning Sun" came out almost 20 years ago, I want to talk about it because it's probably, in terms of English-language documentaries about the Cultural Revolution, probably one of the most interesting, and it's one of the few that I know of that is a feature-length film.

Um, so a little bit of background about the film. Um, so probably a lot of my listeners are fans of William Hinton, as in, yes, that William Hinton, the Marxist author that did "Fanshen" and "The Hundred Day War" and many other books about the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution.

Well, William Hinton had a daughter, her name is Carma Hinton, she was born in Beijing in 1949, and she, uh, and she moved back to the States with her father back in the '50s, I believe. Um, she is a documentary filmmaker who teaches at George Mason University, and she's done a number of excellent documentaries about China.

Um, she did the "Longbow Trilogy," which is "Small Happiness," "To Taste 100 Herbs," and "All Under Heaven." Yes, that's it, "All Under Heaven." Uh, and they all take place in, uh, Longbow Village, as in the Longbow Village in Shaanxi Province that her father, uh, talked about in "Fanshen." Um, she also did a very nice one called "One Village in China," uh, "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," which is an epic, epic three-hour documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

It was actually one of the first documentaries I ever saw as a kid, and, uh, it really helped launch my interest in Chinese history and culture. So hats off to Carma, thank you. I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her. Um, and then finally, her last major film. She's done a few other short films, but she— her last major film was in 2003 with "Morning Sun." "Morning Sun" is, uh, phew, it's an interesting one.

It garnered a lot of positive reviews. It won the American Historical Association John E. O'Connor Film Award, uh, in 2004, and was nominated, or a finalist, at many other awards and film festivals. So with that background, let me tell you guys what I thought of the film.

So one thing that I really liked from the start about "Morning Sun" is that it opens with the 1964 film, "The East Is Red." Sets a fantastic tone. And, you know, she gets into— Hinton really gets into how that movie set the tone that the generation, the Red Guard generation, you know, they wanted to lead a revolution themselves. They wanted to be like their parents and grandparents.

Um, I gotta say, one thing about the movie is the visuals and archival footage are second to none. Absolutely amazing work on her part, finding and compiling all that footage. Um, another thing that you— I give a lot of credit to her is she was able to find people like Li Rui or, uh, Liu Ting, Liu Shaoqi's daughter. Um, he found, um, actually, multiple members of Liu Shaoqi's family are interviewed. A lot of notable figures. Uh, Song Binbin, as in the young Red Guard who pinned her Red Guard armband on Mao's arm on August 18th, 1966, at the first major Red Guard rally. Yes, she's interviewed in it too.

It's really interesting to see just how many people she was able to get for the in— for the interview parts of the film. Um, it's definitely not an entirely sympathetic— it's not a sympathetic film towards the Cultural Revolution, but it is relatively nuanced. So I'm just gonna kinda go through some of the things I liked and some of the things I didn't like.

Um, one problem I had, especially at the beginning, is Hinton really glosses over, you know, the motives of Mao's rivals. Uh, it risks giving the audience the sense that figures like Liu Shaoqi to be innocent bystanders, uh, and she really only slightly hints at Liu's attempt at market reforms.

But at the same time, she admits that Mao had a valid concern about the Soviet Union's economy and social degeneration. So, yeah. Um, another problem I have is she often conflates many party policies from the Socialist Education Movement with that of the Cultural Revolution, particularly in the early part of the documentary. Um, though, like I said, it's a nuanced take. She does emphasize the idealism, the hopes, and the good intentions of the Red Guards.

She admits students were understandably unhappy with the education system, especially when it came to the concept of, uh, Confucian pedagogy, still based on bland, rote memorization. Uh, she admits that the work teams exacerbated the situation in the opening months of the Cultural Revolution, and that the pushback by the Red Guards was understandable, albeit excessive.

Uh, she also, uh, when discussing the destruction of precious ancient relics during the Destroy the Four Olds campaign and Red August, she does show that many Red Guards were children or grandchildren of people who had been oppressed by landlords, old Guomindang officials, um, religious clergy. So their attacks on already toppled reactionaries and members of the Old Society was, even if Hinton thinks it was unjustified, she admits that it was understandable.

So, you know, kudos to her there. Um, I liked especially the scene where they discuss ne— revolutionary networking. It's a fan— I think that's my favorite part of the whole thing, uh, because it truly captures the idealism and excitement of the period of August through November of '66. Um, my main gripe is, unfortunately, Hinton spent so much time on the 1966 through '67 period that she glosses over the period of '68. She really glosses over the year 1968.

Then she kind of cuts to 1969 with the Ninth Congress and all that, and then she just kind of, in the last 15 minutes of the documentary, wraps everything up that happened between 1970 and 1976 in a very rushed and hurried fashion.

So, um, I think that she should have made the documentary a little less top-heavy, you could say. But, you know, even though Carma Hinton makes it clear that she views the Cultural Revolution as a net negative. You know, I gotta admit, I actually liked this film.

It did have, uh, you know, it had points where she gave credit where credit was due. She perfectly captured the idealism and the, the agony and the ecstasy, you could say, of the Red Guard movement. So I definitely commend her for that. And, um, no matter how you, uh, feel about her political leanings and how she did not take up her father's Maoist politics, I still think that Carma Hinton is a fantastic director and producer.

Uh, I'm a big documentary junkie myself, so when it comes to those kinds of things, I really appreciate a good documentary, even if I disagree with the conclusion it arrives at. So definitely check it out if you can find it.

Um, "Morning Sun," a film about Cultural Revolution by Carma Hinton. And, uh, I gotta also say, definitely check out her magnum opus, "Gate of Heavenly Peace," which was released in 1995. It's also still available on DVD and Blu-ray and maybe a few streaming sites. So check those out and, uh, engage with the material and see if you like it. All right, my friends.

Well, I will try to catch you on the last week of August when we will be talking about the Red August. See you guys later.

I know I had promised you to deliver this episode on June 25th, but alas, administering final exams and doing a few speaking engagements around town got in the way. Heck, today I found myself running around town doing all sorts of professor errands in sweltering 37° C heat with only some bubble tea and matcha ice cream to cool me down. But I'm back in the studio and I'm ready to continue with our awesome exploration of the cultural revolution. So, where were we?

Oh, yeah. May 16th. May 16th. On May 16th, Mao sent the May 16th circular, officially the circular of the central committee of the Communist Party of China on the great proletarian cultural revolution to the Politburo who then circulated it among the entire central committee and down to the level of provincial and county party committees. party committees in all mass organizations and party committees at regimental levels in the army. Within hours, the leadership of the party was paralyzed with shock. After all, Mao made some extremely bold claims within the circular. Mao said that in academia and broader culture that there had been a division of political struggle and class struggle, when one of the core tenets of Marxism is that all political struggle is class struggle.

He also said quote all erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters must be subjected to criticism. In no circumstance should they be allowed to be spread unchecked. Mao went further on to say Communist Party members among the intelligentsia had become quote ‘scholar tyrants’. I don't know about you guys, but I've known a few scholar tyrants in my time in school. But yeah, scholar tyrants who were mistreating students of worker and peasant origin and stifling their initiative to become revolutionary communists. And the time of such petty bourgeois pedagogy had come to an end.

Mao ended his incendiary declaration with these words.

Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army, and various cultural circles are a bunch of counterrevolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

With these words, Mao declared it was time for the Communist Party and the people of China to organize to prevent this secret capitalist coup via the great proletarian cultural revolution. That's right. The day had come to China to once again rebel. The first 48 hours of the cultural revolution hit Beijing hard. The elite were shocked.

The night the circular was sent out, Deng Tuo, former People's Daily editor and chief and one of the major figures within the Beijing Municipal Party committee, knew that this new cultural revolution would spell the end of his political career and decided to overdose on sleeping pills. Other right-wing members of the party who were in favor of market reforms or pro-Soviet style governance began to resign en masse or quietly flee the city of Beijing.

On the 18th of May, two days later, Marshall Lin Biao and Kang Sheng, the chairman of the party's theoretical committee, called the Politburo and a group of people's liberation army commanders together for a speech that was filled with anger and vitriol towards the rightists within the party and their enablers. Everyone in the Politburo immediately clamored with self-criticism and added to the attacks on those who had been part of the five-man group and swore their allegiance to help carry out the cultural revolution to the end.

But the struggle against the capitalist roaders in the party didn't stay in the halls of power long. A week later, the cultural revolution spilled out of the great hall of the people and out of the boardrooms of Zhongnanhai and into the campuses and neighborhoods of Beijing, where the people began to take it as a movement of their own. So here's a good part for us to cut to the campus of Beijing University or as we call it here in China, BeiDa.

BeiDa is one of the preeminent, if not the preeminent universities in all of China along with Qinghua University and Renmin University. It's pretty much like the Ivy League university, if that gives you an idea. At Beida, something that at first seemed innocuous happened that later became a major catalyst within the cultural revolution. The first dazibao or big character poster was posted. What's a big character poster?

Well, you're going to hear a lot about these dazibao posters on this show because they became a staple of campus and workplace life in China during the cultural revolution. And um just a heads up, I tend to interchangeably use the English term big character poster and the Chinese term dazibao.

It's just a matter of habit. forgive me ahead of time, but just uh as you're listening, keep in mind they're synonyms for the same thing. Big character posters or dazibao were essentially large blank pieces of paper upon which people wrote in large Chinese calligraphy whatever was on their mind when it came to the struggles around them. Whether it was to praise someone, denounce someone, or even just to give feedback to their superiors, big character posters were an integral part of communication and people expressing themselves in new and novel ways during the cultural revolution.

Anyways, one of the most important characters in the history of the cultural revolution is Nie Yuanzi, a 45-year-old professor of philosophy at Beida, who was the university's party leader at the time. Nie Yuanzi had been at Yan’an during the Chinese Civil War and during the war against Japan. When her old chum from Yanan, Cao Yi’ou, wife of Kang Sheng, showed her the May 16th circular, she and a handful of other colleagues felt the urge to speak out in support of Mao's new directive.

Nie was unhappy with the right-ward turn of her subordinates in the Beida party apparatus and there were rumors that she was going to be ousted from her position as the school's party leader and sent to the countryside by those unhappy with her hardline left-wing positions. Zhao Zhengyi, another leftist professor who sympathized with Nie, volunteered to help her and started writing the first draft of the big character poster that night along with her.

On the morning of the 25th of May, Nie and seven other comrades posted up the big character poster that they titled Ignite the Cultural Revolution in the University Center. I know this might take a little extra time, but if you may permit me, I'd love to read it in full because it's just such a rousing work and really gives you a feel of what the first few weeks of the cultural revolution felt like and just how quickly talk of revolution took hold on the Beijing campuses within the course of less than two weeks. Here's how the Dazibao went.

At present, the people of the whole nation in a soaring revolutionary spirit that manifests boundless love for the party and chairman Mao and their inveterate hatred for the sinister anti-party and antisocialist gang are making a vigorous and great cultural revolution. They are struggling thoroughly to smash the attacks of the reactionary sinister gang in defense of the party's central committee and chairman Mao. But here at Beida, the masses are being kept immobilized. The atmosphere is one of indifference and deadness. Whereas the strong revolutionary desire of the vast number of the faculty members and students has been suppressed. What is the matter? What is the reason? Something fishy is going on. The revolutionary people must be fully aroused to vigorously and angrily denounce the enemies of the party, to hold big meetings, and to hold up big character posters is one of the best ways for the masses to do battle. by quote ‘guiding the masses to not hold big meetings, to not put up big character posters, and by creating all kinds of taboos’. Aren't you suppressing the masses' resolve to revolution, not allowing them to make revolution and opposing their revolution? We will never permit you to do this. All revolutionary intellectuals, now is the time to go into battle. Let us unite, holding high the great red banner of Mao Zedong thought. Unite around the party's central committee and chairman Mao and break down all the various controls and plots of the revisionists resolutely, thoroughly, totally and completely wipe out all ghosts and monsters and all Khrushchevite counterrevolutionary revisionists and carry the socialist revolution on to the end. Defend the party central committee. Defend Mao Zedong Thought. Defend the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Really gets you going, doesn't it?

Well, needless to say, in the following days after the Ignite the Cultural Revolution poster was posted up, hundreds of other big character posters began appearing around Beida, other universities, and even in a handful of nearby factories and neighborhoods. Every day, throngs and throngs of young people took to the streets of Beijing, holding up gigantic portraits of Mao, banging drums and symbols, waving little red books, waving red flags, and chanting denunciations of the now disgraced Beijing municipal party committee and rightist officials within their own respective universities and high schools.

Copies of Nie's big character poster were paraded around and read aloud to large crowds all around the capital which only added to the fervor among the people to speak their own peace via their own big character posters and join in the rebellion. Upon reading a facsimile of the dazibao by Nie himself, Mao declared Nie Yuanzi 's poster to be quote ‘China's first Marxist big character poster’ and thus allowed her to set the standard for what a revolutionary dazibao would look and sound like.

Well, cutting back to the halls of power, on May 28th, the Politburo of the party gathered together to elect a 'steering committee’ or board of directors, so to speak, to help guide the cultural revolution, and act as a revolutionary headquarters for the left wing of the Communist Party. The committee declared its name to be the Central Cultural Revolution Group, or as I'll refer to it from now on, the CCRG.

Made up mostly of people who helped Mao write the May 16th circular. This 15 person group would end up being the de facto replacement of the central committee secretariat and would end up being the final say when it came to most cultural revolution related things over the first three years of the movement or well at least they tried. Mao placed politburo chief ideologue Chen Boda as official chair but he also gave significant power to Premier Zhou Enli, first lady Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Li, and Xie Fuzhi.

The existence of the CCRG really shows in my opinion how contradictory, or uh should I say, dialectical the nature of the cultural revolution being that it was uh if you're wondering what I mean by this let me expand on that.

On the one hand, the cultural revolution was much of the time a large organic mass movement that even Mao himself lost control of and many major campaigns during the time were launched without authorization from the party. But at the same time, there was still a top-down element to the movement from the very beginning.

But I guess to use Marxist lingo, Mao and his comrades knew that this contradiction between leadership and lead wasn't quite ready to be completely dismantled yet. And this is something we'll dig deeper into once I get to some of the episodes about the summer of 1968 and the consolidation of the revolutionary committees, the philosophical summations of the cultural revolution by Maoists afterwards etc etc. because it's to me I think it's an uncomfortable question that we Maoist historians should really explore and face in a sober manner regardless with the formation of the central cultural revolution group within 12 days of the release of the May 16th circular left had cobbled together a group that could act as the de-facto leadership of the communist party's revolutionary tendency and they would be the spearhead of the movement within the party itself while the masses pushed forward the movement outside the halls of power as the cultural revolution poured into the campuses and streets.

The party center initially, and note I say initially, with Mao's blessing, then began sending down work teams to figure out all that was going on in the campuses and neighborhoods. Now, now, my fellow Maoist listeners are probably thinking, "Wait, Drew, the work teams were sent by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to crush the cultural revolution." Mao was against the work teams. Well, yes, you're right. But hold your horses because the work teams were a little more complex and their role as a force that impeded the cultural revolution was something that only gradually became apparent over the course of June and July. So stick with me.

Let me get to the end of the episode. Actually, you know, it's important to note that in many cases, the work teams were not sent to the campus to preserve the powers that be. Now, many did as per Liu and Deng's orders, but you'd be surprised at how many work teams were sent to campuses and workplaces to overthrow the existing party apparatuses. Now, I'm not saying they didn't have their own ulterior motives, and oftentimes they were simply reshuffling the deck, so to speak, so as to quote play along with the orders to carry out the revolution.

But anyways, what I'm saying is things were a little more complicated with the work teams than with what both mainstream academics and what Maoist historiography tend to simplify them as. Still, at the end of the day, the work team's initial orders to quote ‘investigate the current status of’ and quote ‘promote the cultural revolution’ didn't last.

Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were still pulling the strings in the background, and other than a few aforementioned cases, the work teams mainly wanted to put a muzzle on the potent rebellious groups starting to form among the students. They started to mobilize loyalist students to attack and struggle against rebel students, declaring the rebel students to ironically be the real capitalist roaders trying to defeat Chairman Mao's revolutionary line and to crush the cultural revolution.

They tore down revolutionary big character posters and put up their own right-wing big character posters, denouncing the Maoist rebels as revisionists themselves. And indeed, some of the first and most brutal struggle sessions on Chinese campuses during the Cultural Revolution were not held by red guards, but by the work teams who would subject rebel students to violent, degrading public humiliations that often drove young comrades to suicide. That's right, folks.

The first deaths of the Cultural Revolution were not at the hands of the Red Guards, not at the hands of the People's Liberation Army, but at the hands of the so-called moderates and loyalist work teams who were trying to crush the Maoist Rebellion on Beijing's campuses. Funny how history works, huh? But the leftist movement had just begun to fight. And here's where things get even more interesting.

On May 29th, the same week that Nanza and her colleagues put up the first dazibao about the CCRG was formed. And just as the first brawls between left-wing and right-wing students on Beijing campuses began to draw blood, as Maoist group of 12 high school students did something historic. At first, it was just a blip on the radar. But the name they decided to give their organization ended up being one that would become one of the most iconic terms in all of Chinese history.

At Qinghua University High School, a young Hui Muslim boy named Zheng Chengzhi and a dozen classmates wrote a big character poster declaring that the youth of China would quote ‘change China’s color back to red’. The name that gaggle of kids decided to give themselves, the red guards. Now, like I said, at first the Qinghua High School Red Guards were a tiny little left sect, and outside of their school campus, they were almost completely unknown.

But as the weeks went by and as more and more youth heard about Zheng Chengzhi's rousing big character poster, slowly but surely more and more rebel students began to form collectives which they would too call red guards. Um, if I may digress again, I think this would be a good point in the episode to make a point about the red guards. And I'll explain more about this in episode three when I talk about Red August and about how the red guards came about.

One of the biggest misconceptions that pop history or as I like to call it Barnes & Noble history or History Channel history seems to disseminate is that red guards were launched by the Communist Party of China. That the Red Guard movement was a monolithic movement and that they answered directly to Mao.

So many history YouTube videos, History Channel documentaries, and K through 12 textbooks describe the Red Guards as some kind of like Hitler youth style paramilitary personally raised by Mao to crush his enemies like a quote teenage gestapo. Yes, I have seen that epithet thrown around at the red guards in this one YouTube video. Yeesh. With no purpose other than to destroy everything and murder everyone that Mao ordered them to.

But as we see here with our young friends at Qinghua High School and as we'll see further down the line in the podcast, the Red Guard movement was never ever officially established by the Communist Party. And Mao didn't even give his official approval to the Red Guards until early August. It was, no matter how you feel about the Red Guards, a somewhat organic movement that the masses of youth created themselves, not a Communist Party launched an initiative, maybe a Communist Party endorsed initiative, a Mao endorsed initiative eventually, but not a Communist Party launched initiative. But I digress.

Let's get back to where we were and what was going on with the college students on the other side of town. Right now, I'd like to introduce you listeners to a guy named Kuai Dafu, a young and handsome chemistry student at Qinghua University known for his dedication to Marxist Leninist politics. After reading Nie Yuanzi's dazibao, Kuai began to gather some of the more radical communist Youth League students on campus to discuss the dazibao on campus and also the recent circulars and editorials coming out of the party press.

Charismatic, passionate about communist activism, and enthusiastic to take up chairman Mao's call to wage rebellion against the capitalist roaders within the party. Kuai took it upon himself to work hard to stoke the fires on Qinghua campus. He authored a major dazibao attacking the Qinghua's university's party leadership. And it was such a compelling argument that many students who had originally authored pro-work team posters ended up tearing down their old posters and writing new posters self-criticizing and declaring allegiance to Kuai Dafu's line. Love it.

Kuai then proceeded to gather a group of classmates into a quote combat team to put up posters and organize protests against the party's secretary Jiang Nangxiang. Soon, Kuai and his combat team found themselves coming to blows with the campus work team. And by the end of the month, Qinghua University campus had become a battleground between pro work team students, the university leadership, and hardline Maoist students. Keep an ear out for that name, Kuai Dafu. He's going to become quite one of the main characters of this podcast, particularly in regards to the Red Guard movement in Beijing.

One of the editorials that inspired Kuai Dafu and other anti-work team rebels was Chen Boda's incendiary quote, "Sweep away all monsters and demons” published in the 1st of June 1966 edition of People's Daily. The editorial turned out to be extremely popular among the people and spread not just through the campuses of Beijing but into cities around the country from Shanghai to Xi’an to Changsha to Chongqing. Copies of the editorial were posted up everywhere and people would often march through the streets reciting passages from it. Obviously, it really struck a chord with the Chinese people to say the least. In the editorial, Chen fired off exactly what he and the rest of the CCRG thought should be the orientation for the next phase of the cultural revolution. If I may quote,

"The great proletarian cultural revolution is aimed not only at demolishing all the old ideology, old culture, and all the old customs and all the old habits which fostered by the exploiting classes have poisoned the minds of the people for thousands of years. but also at creating and fostering among the masses an entirely new ideology and culture, an entirely new customs and habits, those of the proletariat. This great task of transforming customs and habits is without any precedent in human history. As for all the heritage, customs and habits of the feudal and bourgeois classes, the proletarian world outlook must be used to subject them to thoroughgoing criticism. It takes time to clear away the evil habits of the old society from among the people.”

The editorial was clear. The four old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits were major causes of the regeneration of a new bourgeoisie within the party and defeating the capitalist roaders in the communist party meant taking on old cultural norms and thinkings in all realms of Chinese society, many of which that had been around for over 5,000 years. Chen made no bones about what he and the leftists in the party thought needed to be done. It was time to destroy the old world to build the new world. Beijing wasn't the only place the cultural revolution was taking hold.

Nanjing University, one of China's preeminent institutions of learning outside of Beijing, had a particularly dramatic introduction to the cultural revolution itself. The trouble began when Nanjing University decided to build a new campus on the rural outskirts of the city, which they called NJU Liyang campus. Now, ostensibly, key word, ostensibly, the campus was created in response to Mao's 1964 and 1965 discussions about how students in the humanities were disconnected from the workers and peasants.

In mid January of ' 66, a few months before the cultural revolution was launched, the university party leadership decided to move the philosophy, literature, and history departments to the Liyang campus and require humanities students to work alongside the peasants and in nearby factories as part of their curriculum. Now, on the surface, this may sound pretty good, at least to me as a Marxist. They were following Chairman Mao's suggestions about breaking down the division between the intelligentsia and the lower classes, and they were giving humanity students a proletarianized education.

But things weren't exactly what they seemed, dear listeners. The reality was that Kuang Yaming, the party chief of the university, was distrusting of the humanity students at NJU, who tended to lean quite radically left even before the cultural revolution had launched. If he could keep them off the central campus, the less likely they were to cause trouble. Kuang also kept delaying Liyang campus's graduation dates, hoping to keep them indefinitely in their work study program to milk them for their labor power as much as possible with his little one-man management scheme.

Once it became apparent that Kuang was keeping them as essentially perpetual work study interns with no hope of graduation and isolating them from the class struggle that had been launched a couple of weeks earlier in other cities. A group of humanities students decided to speak out. On the morning of June 2nd the first dazibao denouncing Kuang was put up. By early evening, 270 wall posters denouncing the university party leadership were spread around both NJU campuses, and the university's atmosphere became almost identical to that of BeiDa or Qinghua within a matter of mere hours.

In typical rightist fashion, Kuang hysterically proclaimed that the rebel posters were signs of an anti-cultural revolution counter movement arising on campus and called for a work team to bring the rebel students to heel. Kuang mobilized the campus's communist Youth League leadership, who was fiercely loyal to him, to capture and subject the rebel students and the rebel aligned professors to cruel and bizarre public struggle sessions.

However, Kuang's counterattack completely backfired. If anything, it caused even more students and faculty to align with the rebel faction due to his draconian measures and haughty attitude. Word got through to the leadership in Beijing via an anonymous university party functionary, and the report on Kuang's work team's thuggery ended up on the desk of Kang Sheng himself.

Kang declared the big character poster movement at NanjingU to be a revolutionary action and that Kuang and his allies were guilty of quote anti-party, antisocialist and anti-Mao Zedong Thought tendencies. On the 6th of June, only four days later, Kuang was expelled from the party entirely and fired from his position as dean of the university by the campus party committee. On 8th of June, loudspeakers all across the campus began to blare the east is red. An announcement was made. “You students will not see Kuang Yaming again. He was removed because of his mistake. You students are right to write wall posters against Kuang. Your action is a revolutionary action.”

A massive rally ensued in celebration of the victory of the rebels against Kuang and his work team cronies. And 10 days later, People's Daily ran headlines congratulating the students and faculty of Nanjing University for their victorious rebellion and called them model revolutionaries of the cultural revolution.

Well, living here in Xi’an, I can't help but tell you guys about how the revolution started here. Being out here in northwest China, Xi’an doesn't seem like it would be exactly a hot bed of the cultural revolution during its opening weeks. But to say nothing happened would be simply untrue. The cultural revolution began in Xi’an on May 25th when a special rally was called at Xi’an Jiaotong University to inform the citizens of Xi’an that Chairman Mao was calling for the masses of all of China to rise up against the capitalist roaders within the party. For the first five days after the announcement, nothing really seemed to come of it, and life in Xi’an seemed to go about as usual. But then things changed when Chen Boda's sweep away all monsters and demons editorial was reprinted on the front page of Sha’anxi Daily alongside Nie Yuanzi's Ignite the Cultural Revolution dazibao.

Chen's editorial and Nie's poster reappearance didn't just cause a buzz among Xi’an newspaper readers, they caused a storm. The next day, June 2nd, students from the six major universities in our city and many more high schools took to the streets to march, shutting down the city with large portraits of Mao, as well as banner-ized facsimiles of Chen's editorial dazibao posters and dazi bao of their own. Nearly every college and high school in the city were shut down due to demonstrations and occupations. And many government and military offices found themselves closing down early for the day because they were unsure of what to do with the new upsurge pouring from the campuses.

On June 3rd, the Sha’anxi Provincial Party Committee decided to nip the upsurge in the bud. While officially the provincial committee supported the launch of the cultural revolution, they were dead set on keeping it up proper and in an orderly fashion. In other words, they wanted to keep the cultural revolution a dinner party.

That afternoon, vice governor of Sha’anxi province, Yan Kelun, held the meeting of all the deans and party secretaries of all the universities, high schools, and state-owned enterprises in Xi’an and issued three orders.

Number one, do not post big character posters outside or inside schools.

Two, do not take to the streets to parade.

And three, beware of bad people trying to sabotage the cultural revolution. Establish a good revolutionary order.

Well, my dear listeners, just how well do you think that went over with the students and workers of our beautiful ancient city? After all, Sha’anxi folks are tough cookies, hearty and headstrong folks, and the rebellious spirit of Yan’an flows through their veins. Needless to say, this order was only obeyed for a couple of days, if even. And in less than a week, the new rebel movement among the students and young workers once again flowed through the streets. Yan Kelun was still adamant about bringing the cultural revolution in Xi’an to heel though.

On June 6, People's Daily issued the editorial ‘Carry the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ to the end, which then inspired a tremendous flurry of new big character posters around the city against Yan's orders. Two students at Xi’an Jaotong University, Li Shiyang and Liu Weina, put up a poster denouncing the work teams that Yan had sent onto Jaotong's campus.

Unfortunately, Liu and Li were captured by the work team, subject to a grueling struggle session, and then paraded around the streets with their boots around their necks. Humiliated in front of their peers and feeling powerless against the work team's draconian measures against the rebels, Li and Liu attempted suicide that evening. This incident was later referred to by Jaotong students as the June 6 counterrevolutionary incident.

And when the first Red Guard units were mustered on Xi’an campuses two months later, let's just say that the tides turned pretty hard for Yan's cronies who drove the young rebels to their deaths. Meanwhile, even farther northwest in China, the first tremors of the cultural revolution were beginning to be felt.

On June 19, Radio Urumqi, or as we say in Chinese, Mandarin, Wulumuqi, declared that the Cultural Revolution had come to Xinjiang and the capitalist quote monsters and freaks that had been running the autonomous regions party apparatus would be swept away by a mass upsurge of people of all the nationalities of Xinjiang. Chen Boda's call to destroy the four olds was echoed and the dismissal of Bengong the party chief of Xinjiang University was announced with great pride.

Now I must admit when I first read this document I thought it was a little odd that the June incidents in Xi’an that I just mentioned would be such big news in Xinjiang. But I guess the leftists in Urumqi saw the happenings in Xi’an as a sign of things to come for the rest of Northwest China. However, that's just my personal speculation. If any listeners have any further information or ideas, please send them my way.

A lot more happened in the following weeks in Xinjiang after the major June 19th radio announcement, but I kind of want to save the rest of that for our future episode on the cultural revolution in Xinjiang. So, let's turn our ears back to Beijing where the class struggle on the campuses were still going buck wild.

With things so wild on the campuses in Beijing and even in other cities on June 13th, Mao and the CCRG decided right on the eve of final exams week, by the way, that it would be best to suspend all classes in schools and universities in China so that the students would concentrate solely on class struggle and helping push the cultural revolution forward. To modern western ears and honestly to modern Chinese ears, this sounds absolutely horrible.

Depriving students of an education to concentrate entirely on political activism. Well, if I may play Mao's advocate for a second, I think that the decision to suspend classes was necessary at the time. The work teams were quickly becoming a major hindrance to the development of the cultural revolution. The traditional confusion pedagogical model of rope memorization for exams was getting in the way of students' ability to grasp revolutionary Marxist theory. And it was time for kids to get a different kind of education. Education in making revolution and developing the next step of socialism.

So with that, Mao said shake which in Chinese roughly means ‘class dismissed’ to the entire country and the campuses of China became ideological battlegrounds for the future of China's economic and social system rather than institutions of reciting from the classics or cramming for standardized exams. As the struggle on the campuses began to ramp up, on July 16th, Mao himself decided to wage a curious little propaganda battle himself.

He went swimming. Yeah, you heard that right. He went swimming. Word on the street among a lot of Mao's rivals was that Mao was secretly in poor health and that the cultural revolution was a last ditch effort for him to hold on to absolute power in his final dying days. But being the absolute Chad that he was, Mao decided to stick it to his haters in the best way he knew. He stripped down to his speedo and he took a nice long dip in the Yangtze River. Now, to get an idea of how hardcore Mao went, the place where Mao went to swim was on the banks of the Yangtze, just outside of Wuhan. That area has an extremely strong and dangerous current. It is not a place for beginning swimmers and not a place for senior citizens of weak constitution.

But at 72 years old, Mao powered through 10 miles of those currents or 16 kilometers in just a little over an hour. Let me tell you, as someone who's only 35 and who has stood at the banks of the Yangtze River, that's a big no thank you for me. Well, while going swimming might seem a bit silly in and of itself, the Great Swim, as it came to be called, was actually an enormous propaganda victory in the big picture of the cultural revolution. It showed the global press and Ma's rivals that rumors of Mao's declining health were a bunch of hooey and that he still had the vitality, virility, and stamina to lead the country and to lead a second revolution.

The Chinese people were so enamored by their chairman's action that swimming actually became a major athletic activity across China through the cultural revolution. And each year on July 16th, for many years later, there would be massive swimming competitions across the Yangtse to commemorate the great swim. So this summer, if you have the chance and the heat's just too much for you, commemorate the chairman by taking a dip in your local watering hole. As the sweltering heat of summer continued to ramp up across July, so did the battles on campus. The work teams were now completely mask-off, so to speak, in their goal to stifle the cultural revolution. Thus, the rebel students who had worked so hard to fight against them started taking a cue from the kids at Qinghua High School and began to form paramilitary-like collectives to fight against the work teams, calling themselves red guards, or in Chinese, hongweibing.

The Red Guards decided to emulate the revolutionaries of old by wearing olive green uniforms, olive green caps with red stars, and wearing red armbands that said red guard in traditional Chinese characters. They proclaimed themselves to be the new soldiers of the revolution, the new defenders of the communist party and the shock troops of the cultural revolution that the work teams had falsely claimed to be.

On July 24th, after assessing the situation, Mao had had enough of the work team shenanigans. They had not only failed in their mission to spread the cultural revolution, they were actively working to destroy it and they weren't even hiding it. He told the Politburo and the CCRG that covering up big character posters and breaking up student protests should not be permitted. He said, quote, "All restrictions on the cultural revolution must be smashed to pieces."

He said the work teams had to be quote ‘eradicated’ and that the students, teachers, workers, peasants, and soldiers must take the lead in the new revolution rather than established party cadres. Liu Shaoqi graveled and blubbered for forgiveness, swearing that only a handful of work teams were counterrevolutionary and that he truly was dedicated to helping Mao carry out the cultural revolution. And actually, I think this is a good time for me to uh point something out that I've noticed a lot of historians uh both Marxist and mainstream get wrong in that for the most part the amount of people who opposed the cultural revolution publicly was very very few and mostly only done through a tiny handful of anonymous dazibao.

One of the main strategies of the revisionists within the party honestly was to act more Maoist than the Maoists.

In fact, they were often at, at least in the initial stages of the cultural revolution, as you guys have seen in this episode, much more eager to do things like vandalize places, beat up university faculty, and other trademarks of the cultural revolution. When you think of the cultural revolution in mainstream history. But Liu's grandstanding about undying loyalty and his grumbling for a second chance fell on deaf ears.

Two days later, Mao and the Politburo issued an internal order to all party committees to dissolve every work team across the country and in doing so opened the floodgates for the Red Guards and other rebel mass organizations to become the main force of the movement. Furthermore, that day, Mao told the Hunan province's party leaders, "I've gone on the long march once, and now I'm going to do it again." It was uh Mao's not so subtly threatening way of saying he's willing to launch a second people's war. Typical Mao fashion, if you knew the guy.

Then on August 1st, Mao wrote a letter that was sent out to all Red Guard groups in Beijing and other cities where rebel students were beginning to form Red Guard organizing committees. In the letter, he publicly declared an official end to the work team movement and bluntly stated his position on where his loyalties now lay with these words. quote, "You say it is right to rebel against reactionaries. I enthusiastically support you." And with that, Mao had officially given his blessing to the Red Guards and triggered the proliferation of the Red Guard movement to every corner of China.

And that's where we'll end the episode this month, folks, as we prepare for Red August. As you guys might know, the Red August episode will probably not be released until late August, as I will be traveling through Gansu Province and Xinjiang through much of July. And then I'll be moving into a new apartment during the first half of August as I prepare to take up my new position as faculty at Northwest University of China. But rest assured, my account of Red August will have you on the edge of your seat as you hear what happens when the red guards take to the streets to smash the old world and wreak vengeance upon the revisionists.

Special thanks to

Andrew G. Wilder for his excellent work, Fractured Rebellion, the Beijing Red Guard Movement,

Dong Guoqiang's The First Uprising of the Cultural Revolution at Nanjing University,

Donald H. McMillan's Communist China’s Power and Policy in Xinjiang 1949 through 1977.

The Shaanxi Provincial Archives County Chronicles database.

The Marxist Internet Archives.

Marx to Mao archives and the Banned Thought websites.

Oh. Uh, before we wrap things up, I'd like to do our first corrections corner where I take your criticisms and corrections and make a proper self-criticism like a good Mao should do. In my last episode, I said that the quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong did not get its trademark Little Red Vinyl cover until the release of the April 1966 public edition. In fact, I was wrong about this. My friend and fellow Mao badge and cultural revolution memorabilia collector Clint Twist, shout out to my homie Clint, says that there were in fact 1964 and 1965 military editions of the quotations with red vinyl covers. Now, the 1964 military edition of the quotation that I myself own is a little white paperback. And Alexander Cook's Mao's Little Red Book, A Global History, had an introduction that gave me the impression that the vinyl red cover didn't come about until the public release in April of 66.

But, Mea culpa, Mea culpa, mea culpa maxima, now I know. And if you have any other corrections or criticisms of this episode or future episodes, please email me at culturalrevolutionodcast@gmail.com or DM me at my Twitter or handle at gpcrpodcast. That's it for now everyone. Until next time from the smoking hot ancient city of Xi’an, zaijian tongzhimen.

A revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

– Mao Zedong, a report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan, 1927.

The great proletarian cultural revolution that took place in the People's Republic of China between 1966 and 1976 is one of the most controversial and unusual mass movements in the history of the 20th century. A turbulent and whirlwind social political movement that upended Chinese society in nearly every way. The cultural revolution is an event that is usually described in modern discourse as either a genocidal purge fueled by mass hysteria or as a liberating movement that was humanity's furthest advance towards communism.

The purpose of this podcast is to present a nuanced take of the cultural revolution and what it was all about. This podcast will give you neither fairy tales nor horror stories, but a detailed examination of a period of history that can only be described as what Charles Dickens would call the best of times, the worst of times.

Uh, oh yes, I'm your host, Drew Smith. I'm a historian who specializes in Sino Soviet relations, the cultural revolution, and the history of global Maoism. I currently live in Xi’an in China's northwest Shaanxi province. I spent my youth as a member of the youth league of a Maoist political party, published a monograph about Maoist groups in 1960s Eastern Bloc Europe, and now live permanently among the Chinese people.

On days that I'm not teaching, I spend my days scouring through antique markets, collecting red relics, or homes when wool as we call them here, treasures of China's cultural revolution past and making conversation with the elderly marketeers in these shops, many of whom were part of the cultural revolution. I'm hoping that this podcast will be a rousing discussion with everyone about one of the most misunderstood periods in history. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's start at the beginning.

So why did the cultural revolution happen? Well, Maoists will tell you that it was chairman Mao Zedong's attempt to stop phony communists or in Marxist terminology, revisionists, from hijacking the Communist Party of China and turning China into a capitalist country. Anti-communists will tell you it was a Machiavellian move by Mao to crush all dissent in society through the systematic slaughter of all intellectuals by means of a fanatical cult of personality. Personally, I lean more towards the former.

But exactly how the cultural revolution played out and why it did cannot simply be explained by one man's motives at the top. We have to look at the fact that hundreds of millions of people took up Mao's call of its right to rebel and took it deeply seriously with all the consequences positive and negative that that had.

So let's start in fact a few years prior to the cultural revolution. The year is 1962 and the great leap forward has ended in disaster for the Communist Party of China. Unrealistic production goals for steel from so-called backyard furnaces led to diversion of too much agricultural labor into making essentially useless steel.

Massive droughts and floods hit 60% of China's arable land, causing a massive famine. To make matters worse, government officials in many areas whipped up what began to be called a quote wind of exaggeration, claiming fantastical successes in industrial production and in agricultural output in their reports to the central committee of the party. This of course led to relief efforts and direly needed resources not being sent to provinces facing starvation and breakdown of production.

In the face of all these problems, Mao had to shut down the Great Leap Forward, citing it being quote ‘a partial failure’. On the international front, things weren't much better. China found itself completely cut off from the other ostensibly socialist nations with the exception of tiny little Albania. Sure, North Vietnam and North Korea were still on relatively pleasant terms, and the Chinese were aiding North Vietnam in their war against the Americans, but overall, the Koreans and Vietnamese were still hesitant to fully throw their hats into the Beijing ring.

In the Soviet Union and its satellite states, new economic reforms were undertaken by Khrushchev and Brezhnev who had introduced a great deal of new incentives based around profit and competition within state-owned industries. Something the Chinese found utterly anathema to the principles of socialist economics.

Across the previous 10 years, the Sino-Soviet split had caused China to declare the USSR to be a quote ‘social imperialist’ state. Socialist in name, but capitalist and imperialist in deeds. As early as 1965, the Soviet armed forces were beginning to strengthen a great number of deployments on the Sino-Soviet border.

With the ever-increasing pressure from the Warsaw pact states as well as NATO and other Western bloc countries, many Communist Party officials in China were beginning to crack under the pressure and wonder if it was time to start their own similar reforms, opening China to a market economy and capitalist style management of workplaces.

During this time, Chinese society became more and more stratified with Soviet style bureaucracy becoming the norm rather than the exception. Mao was still chairman of the Communist Party, yes, but his political enemies like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were swiping up key posts in both the executive branch of the government and the state economic planning commission.

Some people were even beginning to refer to Mao as a quote dead ancestor, revered by the people, but overall distant and powerless to stop what was happening around him. Mao, of course, wasn't going to let this stand at all. A stalwart and hardline Marxist Leninist to the end. The eternal guerilla and a revolutionary. The hopeless romantic and utopian love that he had in his heart. He decided he wasn't going to go down without a fight. The capitalist road wasn't an option for him and he didn't want Chinese socialism to become the cold, gray, ossified, bloated bureaucratic state that the Soviets had let take form.

So Mao got to work hitting the books pouring over the Marxist classics and asking the same question Lenin had asked in 1904, ‘What is to be done?’ For a while, Mao had tried his hand at a few different ways of cleansing Chinese society of capitalist influence.

He had tried the 100 flowers campaign in 1956, the same year as the great leap forward, where he had called for the people to quote, "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." He wanted to win over the intellectual class to the Chinese socialist cause at a time when only a minority of the middle class intelligentsia supported the new socialist order. Mao said in a speech in 1957 that communists shouldn't be afraid of criticism and that correct ideas cannot be developed and sharpened without discussion and struggle against incorrect ideas.

However, Mao had to shut down the hundred flowers campaign after some intellectuals and students began to attempt to organize the people to overthrow the socialist state. The subsequent anti-rightist campaign of 1957 didn't seem to fare much better. And in the midst of the problems of the Great Leap Forward, the left wing of the Communist Party, led by Mao, didn't have the time or resources to fully concentrate on weeding out the rightwing in broader Chinese society.

Mao tried again to once again counter his right-wing political enemies in 1962 by launching the socialist education movement which could be argued as sort of a demo tape or beta test of the great proletarian cultural revolution.

During this time, the Sino-Soviet split fully solidified with the Communist Party of China launching a series of polemics against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that definitively synthesized the Chinese argument for the Soviets having abandoned socialism in favor of capitalism draped in a red flag.

By the way, you can read all these documents in Beijing Foreign Language Press's compilation of these documents, the PMIC, on the general line of the International Communist Movement, which I will link on the official GPCR podcast blog and Twitter account.

The polemics weren't just an attack on the Soviets, however. They were also an indirect attack on the pro-Soviet and conservative elements in the Communist Party of China. The socialist education movement was a plan to mix political education with productive labor, purging corrupt and tyrannical party members and a revival of a new socialist spirit in all parts of Chinese society. In the rural areas, the peasants were mobilized to reassert the primacy of the collective farms over the private plots which had begun to spring back up in many parts of the countryside.

The Dazhai Commune, a vast collective farm in eastern Shanxi, known for its militant communist leadership and its excellent agricultural output as well as marvelous innovation in agricultural engineering was upheld as a national model.

The Daqing oil fields in Heilongjiang province way up in the cold northeast of China near the Soviet border had become the industrial equivalent of Dazhai in terms of workers around China being called to emulate the militant and ingenious workers at Daqing. By far however the most important focus of the socialist education movement was the people's liberation army.

While military training continued at a high level, communist political consciousness and ideological development were given top priority over anything else. In order to help build this consciousness, PLA top dog Marshall Lin Biao, who had recently replaced Marshall Peng Dehuai, commissioned the quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong in early 1964, a new political manual for soldiers, which would later become known as the Little Red Book.

The trends towards a Soviet style professional officer corps were curbed by Lin with officer ranks and privileges being gradually eliminated. PLA units and their officers were once again made to serve the people and worked alongside the peasants on the commune and trained a newly revitalized greatly enlarged people's militia that had laid relatively dormant for quite a few years.

With all these changes, Mao and his allies hoped that transforming the PLA versus via the socialist education movement would act as an armed buffer against any revisionist influence seeping into the halls of power. After all, Mao was the one who said, quote, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." However, it seemed that no matter how hard Mao worked to make the socialist education movement a surefire way to defeat the revisionist wing of the party, all his efforts were undermined at every turn by the usual suspects.

Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and their network of revisionist officials in the party and government were resolutely opposed to putting Marxist politics forward, rather focusing on building up the economic base or productive forces and making China an industrial powerhouse even at the cost of the revolution. Local work unit managers and administrators everywhere consistently blocked efforts to stem the growing inequalities in workplaces and in schools. The realm of agriculture is where Liu Shaoqi issued the quote '23 directives' using his position as state chairman to trump Mao's policies.

The 23 directives, without getting bogged down into too much detail, went against Mao's idea of mobilizing the peasants to reinvigorate collective farming and criticize conservative rural party officials and instead dispatched work teams, outsider party officials organized by higher party organs to protect local corrupt officials within their faction and block independent initiatives among the peasants. And let me tell you, that term work team that's going to come back up again next episode. So watch out for those work teams.

It was clear now though. Battle lines were being drawn. It was about to get real. Mao then realized that simply rooting out writers among the intelligentsia and educating the PLA and Marxism wasn't going to stop the right wing of the party from constantly undermining his revolutionary vision. If the rightists in the party were going to play dirty to work to restore capitalist production relations, well by golly Mau and the leftists were going to play dirty to keep China on the road to communism. It was time to fully mobilize the population and upend every nook and cranny of society. And if that meant a full-blown revolution just like China had had in 1949, then so be it.

But why launch a revolution if socialism had already been established in China? Hadn't China already overthrown the old capitalist and semifeudal order and was marching on the road to communism? Sure, Mao is hitting some roadblocks, but don't we all hit roadblocks on the path to developing a new society? Well, I think this is a good point where we should digress a bit from the narrative and explain the philosophical underpinnings of the great proletarian cultural revolution.

Mao was a firm believer in what Lenin had said years before that the bourgeois attempts to crush the new revolutionary society would increase tenfold after their overthrow but also Mao himself had figured out a few new things in the realm of Marxist philosophy. Mao's grasp of Marx and Engel's theories about dialectical materialism allowed him to see that contradictions of socialist society give rise to a new regeneration of bourgeois thinking and thus a new bourgeoisie within the communist party itself. This according to Mao is why Soviet style socialism had degraded into social imperialism. And that is why a revolution within a revolution would be needed to stop the machinations of the new bourgeoisie within the party. In May of 1965, Mao re-ascended Jinggangshan Mountain, the site of the first Chinese Red Army base area in southern China's Jiangxi Province in 1927. While there, Mao wrote a new poem, his first in several years, where he invoked the glories of his time as a revolutionary guerrilla and hinted at his new plans for the course of the People's Republic of China in which he would once again galvanize the working class into insurrection against the ruling class once more. in it. He said,

I have long aspired to reach for the clouds, and I again ascend Jinggangshan. Coming from afar to view our old haunt, I find new scenes replacing the old. Everywhere or sing, swallows dart, streams babble, and the road mounts skyward. Once Huangyangchieh is passed, no other perilous place calls for a glance. Wind and thunder are stirring. Flags and banners are flying. Wherever men may live, 38 years are fled with a mere snap of the fingers. We can clasp the moon in the ninth heaven. One of five strategic passes in the area and seas turtles deep down in the five seas. We'll return amid triumphant song and laughter. Nothing is hard in this world if you dare to scale the heights.

Then, on 1965 November, things began to escalate. Mao wanted to make his new revolution be based on culture. So he commissioned his comrade Yao Wenyuan who would later become part of the gang of four to write an article in Wenyi Yuebao magazine called on the new historical Beijing opera ‘Hai Rui dismissed from office’.

Hai Rui dismissed from office was a play published in 1961 that was written by Beijing's vice mayor Wu Han and told the story of Hai Rui, a Ming dynasty minister who was imprisoned for criticizing the emperor.

To all who saw the play, it was obvious Wu Han had written the story as a way to criticize Mao's purge of Marshall Peng DeHuai after the 1959 Lushan conference. Although, oddly enough, Mao had initially enjoyed the play.

Yao's article was a striking condemnation of the play and of the Beijing municipal government in general due to it being a stronghold for the right-wing of the Communist Party. Then in 1966 in February, Beijing party chief Peng Zhen and those around him, the so-called five man group, originally appointed by the Politburo of the party a year earlier to secretly study the potential for a cultural revolution in China, published the February outline, which was essentially a position paper attacking Yao's article and declaring the controversy around Wu Han's play to be nothing more than an academic debate, not a political one. No need for a mass uprising in the realm of culture.

The February outline concluded, "All China needed was just more vigorous debate in the intellectual realm." Upon hearing this, Mao was furious and said it was a sign that the Beijing city government had become a bastion of the new bourgeoisie.

In March, Mao, Premier Zhou Enlai, and Mao's wife Jiang Qing were in agreement that art, culture, and science within China had all become filled with so-called poisonous weeds at every level. The party had been commandeered by anti-socialists. And at that time, it had come for a socialist cultural revolution.

Finally, the term cultural revolution had come into the public eye, and there was no turning back. Later into April, more signs of a new revolution being launched were being seen.

The People's Liberation Army's official newspaper, Liberation Army Daily, ran a front page editorial called, Uphold the Banner of Mao Zedong Thought and Participate in the Great Cultural Revolution. The editorial was very clear. A new revolution against rightist thought within art and culture would require old culture to be thoroughly overthrown so that the new socialist culture could truly be established.

Indeed, this rhetoric coming out of Liberation Army Daily sounds much like the prelude to the Red Guard slogan, crush the old world to build the new world. Meanwhile, the Little Red Book, the quotations of Chairman Mao, originally compiled strictly as an internal PLA document during the Socialist Education Movement, was authorized for sale in civilian bookstores on April 20th, 1966 by the People's Publishing House and the Central Propaganda Department.

It was with this new printing that The Little Red Book received its iconic vinyl red cover and that would eventually become the symbol of the cultural revolution and of youthful anti-capitalist rebellion the world over. But well, more on that in a later episode.

Three days after the release of the civilian publication of the Little Red Book, Mao wrote an editorial calling for all students and teachers in both high schools and universities to quote ‘take part in a new cultural revolution’. The five-man group, now strongly out of favor with Mao, was dissolved and replaced by a cultural revolution document drafting group led by Chen Boda, which would prepare for the upcoming launch of the Cultural Revolution, which by now was not just talk, but something that was mere weeks away from being launched.

And in the first two weeks of May 1966, it happened. The great proletarian cultural revolution of China began and all that came with it, just after the May 1st International Workers Day holiday. But even before the May 16th circular that officially declared the GPCR beginning, the People's Liberation Army released a series of position papers with names such as never forget class struggle, annihilate bourgeois ideology, and open fire on the anti-party and antisocialist line.

These editorials and papers were taken up by the party leadership and published in other periodicals like red flag and people's daily for the workers, peasants and students to study and launch into action against the new bourgeoisie Mao had identified within the communist party. It was no longer a matter of if, but a matter of hours until Chinese society would be completely thrown into a new revolutionary insurgency by the people, led by the nation's top political leader himself against his own government and his own political party. Huh.

Well, that's enough for now, considering this episode is just meant to be a prelude.

Next week, uh, we'll be launching a discussion of the May 16th circular, the first big character poster in Beijing, the inaugural launching of the cultural revolution in other urban areas outside of Beijing, and the advent of the first Red Guard groups in May and June of '66. So now I'm saying from the ancient city of Chang’an, that's Xi’an to our modern years. I'm Drew Smith and I'm hoping you'll tune in to next month's episode. I know this episode wasn't that long, only about 25 minutes or so, but that's what preludes and teasers are for, I guess. So I hope to hear from you guys soon. Your feedback, comments, criticisms, and corrections are always welcome.

Uh, special thanks for this episode goes out to the

former Marxist Leninist Maoist Revolutionary Study Group for their wonderful document, Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its legacy for the future.

Dr. Gao Mobo for his work, The Battle for China's Past, Mao and the Cultural Revolution,

the Cambridge history of China volume 15

and

the Banned Thought website for their wonderful archive of Peking review back issues.

More information on these sources will be available on our blog at greatproletarianculturalrevolutionpodcast.wordpress.com .

Special thanks also goes out to my many comrades and friends who have encouraged me across the past year in my work to get this whole shebang off the ground. I wish I could give you an individual shout out, but then this episode would be oh, probably about 3 hours long. But with that, I'm going to brew up a nice hot pot of - green tea. And with a strong revolutionary spirit, I say zaijian. And a very red shining good day. I'll catch you next time.