May 16 Notification

The May 16 Notification (五一六通知, Wǔ-yāo-liù Tōngzhī) was a circular adopted by the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on 16 May 1966 and is conventionally treated by historians as the document that launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Drafted under Mao Zedong's direction and revised personally by him across multiple sittings, the Notification repudiated the so-called "February Outline" (二月提纲) prepared by Peng Zhen's "Group of Five in Charge of the Cultural Revolution," which had sought to confine the unfolding campaign against the historian Wu Han's play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office to the realm of academic debate. The Notification dissolved Peng Zhen's group and established in its place the Central Cultural Revolution Group (中央文革小组), the body through which radicals such as Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, and Jiang Qing would direct the movement.

The document's enduring significance lies in a single passage warning that "representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army and various cultural circles are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists" and that "some of them we have already seen through, others we have not"—a line widely read as Mao's coded targeting of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. By framing the struggle as one against "capitalist-roaders" (走资派) embedded within the Party apparatus itself, the Notification recast an arts controversy as a life-and-death class struggle reaching the highest levels of the state. It thereby supplied the ideological licence for the mass mobilisation of Red Guards, the assault on the "Four Olds," and the purge of the established Party hierarchy that followed in the second half of 1966.

The Notification was initially kept secret and circulated only within the Party; its full text was not published openly until 17 May 1967, on the first anniversary. It was followed by the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in August 1966, which adopted the "Sixteen Points" (十六条) codifying the Cultural Revolution's aims, and by Mao's wall poster "Bombard the Headquarters" of 5 August 1966. The radical faction that coalesced around it later took its name—the "May 16 Elements" (五一六分子)—from the document, becoming targets of a purge in 1967–1970. The CCP's own 1981 "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party" repudiated the Cultural Revolution as a "catastrophe" and an error initiated by Mao.

For the exam, the May 16 Notification appears chiefly in modern Chinese history and the politics of the People's Republic. China's Guokao and graduate-history candidates should be able to date it precisely (16 May 1966), link it to the dissolution of Peng Zhen's Group of Five and the founding of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, and explain its function as the formal opening of the Cultural Revolution. UPSC and FSOT world-history questions typically test the broader sequence—Wu Han's play, the May 16 Notification, the Red Guard movement, and the 1981 Resolution—rather than the text in isolation, so candidates should master the causal chain and the named actors (Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Jiang Qing, Peng Zhen).