How a political struggle became a project to remake the self — and why remembering it matters.

Why the Cultural Revolution still speaks to us

Between 1966 and 1976, China experienced a convulsion that reached into schools, homes, factories, and villages. Labeled the Cultural Revolution, it was framed as a campaign to purify the revolution by smashing “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.” In practice, it yoked high-level political struggles to mass mobilization and intimate coercion. People were not merely governed; they were enlisted to transform themselves and to police one another. That double move — political power working through social relations and inner life — is what makes the period so chilling and so instructive.

Origins: campaigns that taught people to look inward (and at each other)

The Cultural Revolution did not come from nowhere. In the late 1950s, Mao Zedong encouraged frank criticism in the “Hundred Flowers” moment and then reversed course with the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which critics were punished. Just prior, the Great Leap ForwardThe Great Leap Forward A catastrophic economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong prior to the Cultural Revolution. Its massive failure and the resulting famine weakened Mao’s position within the party, providing the primary motivation for him to launch the Cultural Revolution to regain absolute control. The Great Leap Forward was an attempt to rapidly transform China from an agrarian economy into a socialist industrial society through collectivization and the construction of “backyard furnaces” for steel production. It resulted in one of the deadliest man-made famines in human history.
Read more’s catastrophic famine (1958–62) left tens of millions dead, a trauma later campaigns could not fully acknowledge. By the mid-1960s, Mao feared that “revisionismRevisionism Full Description:Revisionism was framed as the greatest threat to the revolution—the idea that the Communist Party could rot from within and restore capitalism, similar to what the Chinese leadership believed had happened in the Soviet Union. Accusations of revisionism were often vague and applied to any policy that prioritized economic stability, material incentives, or expertise over ideological fervor. Critical Perspective:The concept served as a convenient tool for political purging. It allowed the leadership to frame a factional power struggle as an existential battle for the soul of socialism. By labeling pragmatic leaders as “capitalist roaders,” the state could legitimize the dismantling of the government apparatus and the persecution of veteran revolutionaries. ” (backsliding into bureaucratic inertia and self-interest) threatened the revolutionary project. The remedy, in his view, was to mobilize the masses against both external enemies and inner “incorrect thinking.”

How the Cultural Revolution worked on the ground

Historians emphasize that what unfolded was not an uncontrolled riot but a structured social process with shifting centers of power. In 1966–67, student Red GuardsRed Guards Full Description:The Red Guards were the instrument through which the leadership bypassed the established bureaucracy to unleash chaos on society. Encouraged to “rebel is justified,” these groups engaged in humiliated public “struggle sessions,” violent raids on homes, and the physical abuse of teachers, intellectuals, and local officials. Critical Perspective:The mobilization of the Red Guards represented the weaponization of the youth against the older generation. It exploited the idealism and energy of students, channeling it into mob violence and destruction. This resulted in a “lost generation” who were denied formal education and sent to the countryside, their futures sacrificed for a political power struggle.   targeted teachers and officials; in 1967–68, factional battles broadened and the People’s Liberation Army stepped in; from 1968, millions of youths were “sent down” to the countryside; and from 1970 onward, struggles moved inside work units, party branches, and households. The state’s rhetoric demanded vigilance; its mechanisms rewarded zeal. Those incentives — promotions, political safety, public acclaim — could be earned by exposing others’ “problems” and performing one’s own ideological remolding. Timeline (very brief)
1956–58: Hundred Flowers → Anti-Rightist Campaign
1958–62: Great Leap Forward famine
1966–68: Red Guard high tide; factional violence; PLA intervention
1968–72: “Rustication” of urban youth; cadre schools; reorganization
1976: Death of Mao; official end of the Cultural Revolution

“Struggle sessionsStruggle Sessions Short Description (Excerpt):A form of public humiliation and torture used by the Red Guards against “class enemies.” Victims were forced to admit to various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse them. Full Description:Struggle Sessions (or thamzing) were a primary weapon of terror. Intellectuals, landlords, and party officials were dragged onto stages, forced to wear dunce caps or heavy placards detailing their “crimes,” and beaten by their former students, colleagues, or neighbors until they confessed to counter-revolutionary thoughts. Critical Perspective:This practice weaponized the community against the individual. It was designed to break the psychological will of the victim and to implicate the crowd in the violence. By forcing colleagues and neighbors to participate in the abuse to prove their own revolutionary fervor, the state successfully destroyed social trust and interpersonal bonds.
Read more”: a technology of humiliation and self-fashioning

One of the period’s signature practices was the struggle session: a choreographed gathering in which a targeted person stood before colleagues, neighbors, or classmates to confess political errors and be denounced. These sessions were not random explosions of anger; they were scripted performances meant to produce two outcomes at once: public truth (lists of mistakes, revelations of alleged cliques) and a new, purified self. Targets wrote self-criticisms, recited them aloud, and were pressed to name associates. Applause lines and chants gave the crowd cues; party activists steered the proceedings and recorded outcomes.

Why did this “work”? Because the session weaponized ordinary moral psychology. Confession leaves a person emotionally undefended — the moment in life when we hope for forgiveness — and then extends that moment for hours under social pressure. The result could be capitulation, breakdown, or suicide. Crucially, the practice also recruited the bystanders. Participation taught people how to speak the new moral language and gave them a stake in its continuance.

The cultural front: when art becomes a weapon

Long before 1966, Mao’s Yan’an talks on literature and art declared culture a “weapon” for organizing the people and crushing the enemy. During the Cultural Revolution, that view hardened into an aesthetic regime: “model operas” and ballets that replaced complexity with exemplars of revolutionary virtue and villainy. Bourgeois tastes were not merely “wrong” but dangerous — habits to be uprooted. Politics entered rehearsal rooms and amateur troupes; the stage became a classroom for new sensibilities.

Institutions, incentives, and escalation

The best scholarship shows that escalation flowed through organizations. Work units (danwei), party branches, revolutionary committees, and factory militias all had reasons — reputational and material — to prove vigilance. When “correctness” became a scarce good, denunciation could purchase it. Leaders tried at times to rein in excess, but the system’s reward structure favored displays of purity over procedural justice. That is why many historians avoid psychologizing the era as mass madness; it was largely institutional.

Afterlives: official verdicts, private memories

After Mao’s death, the Chinese Communist Party issued its 1981 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party,” condemning the Cultural Revolution as a “catastrophe” while preserving Mao’s place in the revolutionary pantheon. Public commemoration remained constrained, but personal memory did not disappear: diaries, samizdat memoirs, taped testimonies, and later oral histories preserved granular detail. This is what recent writers call “red memory” — the persistence of experience beneath, alongside, and sometimes against official narrative.

What emerges from those memories is not a single story of perpetrators versus victims. Many people moved across roles: today’s denouncer could be tomorrow’s target; a sincere believer could later be ruined by the very language he had helped enforce. That fluidity is part of the trauma: the line between conviction and coercion blurred, and trust inside families and work units eroded.

The Cultural Revolution and its warnings

The Cultural Revolution is not a template for every political crisis. But it offers durable cautions. First, when rulers reward zeal over law, ordinary organizations radicalize. Second, when politics asks people to “produce truth” about their inner lives — to surveil themselves and one another — fear enters the everyday. Third, selective remembering is always political. Societies can suppress memory; they cannot erase it. Those who lived through struggle sessions did not forget. Their children and students did not either.

Further reading (peer-reviewed & widely cited)

• Roderick MacFarquhar & Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2006) — The definitive political and social anatomy of the Cultural Revolution.
• Andrew G. Walder, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard University Press, 2015) — Institutional incentives, campaigns, and outcomes from 1949 to 1976.
• Yiching Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins (Princeton University Press, 2014) — Local actors, unofficial cultures, and grassroots dynamics.
• Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, trans.) — On the famine’s political causes and its shadow over later campaigns.
• Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Harvard Asia Center, 2012) — How “revolutionary culture” worked in practice.
• Jeremy Brown & Matthew D. Johnson (eds.), MaoismMaoism Full Description:Maoism (or Mao Zedong Thought) emerged as a response to the specific material conditions of semi-feudal, semi-colonial societies. Unlike orthodox Soviet Marxism, which viewed the urban working class as the vanguard of history, Maoism argued that in colonized nations, the vast peasantry constituted the true revolutionary force. Key Theoretical Shifts: The Peasant Revolution: The rejection of the Eurocentric Marxist view that peasants were reactionary; instead, they are mobilized as the engine of socialist transformation. People’s War: A military-political strategy aimed at mobilizing the rural population to encircle and eventually capture the urban centers of power. Anti-Imperialism: The framing of the class struggle as inextricably linked to the struggle for national liberation against foreign colonial powers. Critical Perspective:Critically, Maoism represented a “sinification” of Marxism that de-centered the West. By asserting that the path to socialism did not require waiting for Western-style industrial capitalism to develop first, it provided a blueprint for insurgencies across the Global South (the “Third World”). However, this focus often justified the militarization of social life, where society was permanently organized on a war footing against real or imagined imperialist threats. at the Grassroots (Harvard Asia Center, 2015) — Case studies that move beyond elite politics.
• Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More (Princeton University Press, 2006) — A Soviet comparison on self-criticism and the “making” of socialist subjectivity.
• Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (Faber, 2023) — Oral histories and reportage on memory and its politics.

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