Full Description
A decade of social and political upheaval launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to reassert his authority and re-radicalise the Chinese revolution. Mao mobilised student Red Guards to attack “capitalist roaders” and “bourgeois elements” within the party, leading to the persecution, public humiliation, imprisonment, and murder of millions of officials, intellectuals, teachers, and ordinary citizens. Educational institutions were closed, cultural heritage was destroyed, and the party itself was gutted. Estimates of deaths range from 500,000 to two million.
Critical Perspective
The Cultural Revolution was simultaneously a political power struggle, an ideological campaign, and a generalised war on knowledge and expertise. Its effects on a generation of Chinese — the “lost generation” who received no education during their formative years — were incalculable. That Mao launched it at seventy-two, having already caused the deaths of tens of millions in the Great Leap Forward, and was celebrated as a genius throughout, reflects the totality of the personality cult he had constructed around himself since the 1940s.
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