Cultural Revolution (China)

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was initiated by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in May 1966, formally beginning with the Central Committee's "May 16 Notification" and amplified by the August 1966 "Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" (the Sixteen Points). Mao's stated aim was to purge "revisionist" and "bourgeois" elements from the Party, government, and society, and to revive revolutionary fervor after the failures of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962).

Key features included:

• Mobilization of youth into Red Guard units, who attacked the "Four Olds" (old customs, culture, habits, ideas), ransacking temples, libraries, and private homes.
• Mass struggle sessions against teachers, intellectuals, officials, and anyone labeled a "capitalist roader," including senior leaders such as Liu Shaoqi (then head of state, who died in detention in 1969) and Deng Xiaoping (purged twice).
• Cult of personality around Mao, propagated through the Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung).
• Rustication: roughly 17 million urban youth were "sent down" to the countryside under the shangshan xiaxiang campaign.
• Institutional breakdown: universities largely closed from 1966 to the early 1970s; the army under Lin Biao was deployed to restore order after factional violence.

The movement's most violent phase ran from 1966 to 1969, though it formally continued until Mao's death on 9 September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen) in October 1976. Estimates of deaths vary widely, from hundreds of thousands to several million.

In 1981, the CCP's Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC officially judged the Cultural Revolution as responsible for "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic," while attributing primary responsibility to Mao.