![]() ![]() The decade-long revolution resulted in the deaths of some 1.72 million people, official figures show – twice the number of Britain and the United States’ casualties in the second world war combined. (Photo by Li Zhensheng/ChinaFotoPress) ‘All-out civil war’ Ren became Guangdong’s party boss in the late 1970s and was considered a key player in kicking off market reforms in the province. Red Guards cheer as Heilongjiang party boss Ren Zhongyi is humiliated. ![]() In the capital alone, almost 5,000 – or more than 70 per cent – of the city’s some 6,800 cultural artefacts were destroyed in August and September 1966. In Beijing, Red Guards declared war against the “Four Olds” – old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas – destroying cultural artefacts and persecuting intellectuals in a massive campaign that quickly spread across the nation. With the outbreak of the revolution, a new order emerged but chaos also ensued.įor the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, grassroots – instead of party cadres – seemed to play a central role, with the people pushing the campaign within boundaries set by Mao, instead of the top-down approach previously taken. In a letter from Mao Zedong to his wife Jiang Qing in 1966, he wrote: “Great chaos achieves great order.” Mao is quoted as saying, “You must be concerned about the country’s affairs and must carry the Cultural Revolution to the very end”. People’s Daily publishes Mao’s big-character poster titled “bombard the headquarters”. has always been the watershed between proletarian revolutionists and traitors among the proletariat.” ── Proletarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s Revisionism, published in People’s Daily, March 31, 1964 “Whether or not to acknowledge violent revolution as a universal law of proletarian revolution. Beijing lashed out against Moscow in a series of nine commentaries in its mouthpiece People’s Daily as the row gradually developed into a three-decade-long feud that came to be known as the Sino-Soviet split. The move affronted Mao, a staunch believer of the Marxist class struggle. In 1963, Russia’s Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Nikita Khrushchev, declared its Marxist class struggle completed, allowing the regime to relax its previously repressive policies and further soften its stance towards the West. Former Red Guards and rebels share their personal accounts of the difficult decade that the country and its people are still struggling to come to terms with half a century on.īirth pangs of the emerging revolution began in the early 1960s, when China’s supreme leader Mao Zedong – increasingly insecure from being sidelined as chairman of the Communist Party – started trying to reassert his authority.Īggressively attacking the state of society in which he saw a growing chasm between those in power and the people they served, Mao argued that a revolution of culture would better serve the interests of the masses. We detail the birth of the movement – Mao Zedong’s brainchild – and how the hardline political campaign shook the nation even as its effects rippled across the globe. The official death toll numbered more than 1.7 million. ![]() On this day 50 years ago, China issued a top directive calling on its people to rid society of “members of the bourgeoisie threatening to seize political power from the proletariat” – marking the start of a decade-long violent class struggle.įor 10 tumultuous years from 1966, the country underwent massive sociopolitical upheaval that saw countless politicians and intellectuals driven to their deaths, civilians killed in armed conflicts, and cultural relics and artefacts destroyed. May 16, 2016, marks the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
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