# Cultural Revolution The **Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution** (1966–1976) was the decade-long upheaval [[Mao Zedong]] launched to reassert control over the [[Chinese Communist Party]] and purge what he called "bourgeois" and "revisionist" elements from Chinese society. It killed and ruined millions, shattered the Party's institutions, and traumatized a generation. It is also, for reasons that have nothing to do with China, the single most rhetorically productive event in the entire [[Chinese History Hub]] — the historical source of the American right's "struggle session" and "cultural revolution" vocabulary, tracked separately on [[Cultural Revolution Rhetoric]]. ## Origins By the mid-1960s Mao had been politically weakened by the catastrophe of the [[Great Leap Forward]], whose famine killed tens of millions and forced him to cede day-to-day control to pragmatists like [[Deng Xiaoping]] and Liu Shaoqi. The Cultural Revolution was his counterattack: a mass movement that went over the heads of the Party apparatus to mobilize Chinese youth directly behind him and against his rivals. Its ideological charter was the cult of Mao himself, distilled into the "Little Red Book" of his quotations, and a doctrine of "continuous revolution" holding that class enemies persisted even under socialism and had to be rooted out by permanent struggle. ## The Red Guards and the Terror Beginning in 1966, students organized into "Red Guard" units, closed the schools, and turned on teachers, intellectuals, officials, and their own families. The movement's signature ritual was the **struggle session**: a public denunciation in which a victim, often wearing a dunce cap or a placard listing their "crimes," was made to confess, was screamed at, beaten, and humiliated before a crowd. Millions were persecuted; victims were imprisoned, tortured, sent to labor in the countryside, or killed, and many took their own lives. The "Four Olds" — old ideas, culture, customs, and habits — were targeted for destruction, and an immense amount of China's cultural heritage was smashed or burned. As Red Guard factions turned on each other and the violence threatened the state itself, Mao ordered the army to restore order and dispatched the urban youth "down to the countryside." ## End and Verdict The Cultural Revolution wound down into a decade-long power struggle dominated by the radical "Gang of Four," led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing. It ended only with Mao's death in September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four weeks later. In 1981 the Party itself rendered a formal verdict, calling the Cultural Revolution a "catastrophe" responsible for "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people" since 1949 — while still protecting Mao's overall legacy. [[Deng Xiaoping]], twice purged during the period, emerged to launch [[Reform and Opening Up]]. ## Why the American Right Invokes It The event's afterlife in U.S. politics is out of all proportion to American knowledge of the history. "Cultural revolution," "struggle session," "re-education," and "Red Guards" have become the right's master metaphors for cancel culture, DEI training, compelled apologies, and campus speech norms — a frame [[Christopher Rufo]] and others have built into a political program, often fused with the Gramscian [[Long March Through the Institutions]]. Whether the analogy illuminates or trivializes is contested; the [[Cultural Revolution Rhetoric]] page tracks the pattern and both sides of the argument. > [!info] Related > [[Mao Zedong]] · [[Maoism]] · [[Great Leap Forward]] · [[Chinese Communist Party]] · [[Cultural Revolution Rhetoric]] · [[Chinese History Hub]]