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.