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.