China under Mao: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was not a genuine revolutionary upsurge but a top-down phenomenon launched, guided, and ultimately terminated by the Maoist faction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It exposed the absence of proletarian democracy within the Party, where deep divisions were settled through physical subjugation. Mao launched the GPCR to annihilate "capitalist roaders" such as Liu Shaoqi, after his own standing was fatally undermined by the Great Leap Forward catastrophe and the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party following his advice. Forced to act before fully prepared, Mao bypassed the Party hierarchy and mobilised middle and high school students as Red Guards. The People's Liberation Army, under Lin Piao, was transformed into a Maoist bastion by abolishing ranks, granting Mao greater control. The 16-Points Decision of August 1966 called for Cultural Revolutionary Groups with an electoral system "like that of the Paris Commune," but these were intended to remain under Maoist control, not to introduce workers' democracy.
The highest point of the GPCR was the brief emergence of the Shanghai People's Commune, which threatened to break free of Party control. In Shanghai, workers voiced independent demands for better pay and conditions, and formed production management committees elected by secret ballot. However, alarmed by these democratic elements, Mao argued the Party must remain the nucleus and could not be replaced by a commune. The Shanghai Commune lasted only twenty days, replaced by the Shanghai Municipality Revolutionary Committee, which excluded elected elements and restored unelected Party, army, and Red Guard representatives. By August 1969, all mass organisations were ordered to disband.
During February 1967, the army took the initiative nationwide, arresting, imprisoning, and killing rebel Red Guards. Open warfare erupted between Red Guard factions and between Maoist and established Party loyalists, with tens of thousands killed in Yunnan alone. Constant changes from Beijing undermined authority, and by spring 1968, extreme Red Guard groups seized weapons and skirmished with the PLA. Students in Hunan labelled Zhou Enlai and Mao supporters the "new bourgeoisie" and called for genuine communes. These threats to the bureaucracy brought the GPCR to an end.
The Maoist wing could not give power to workers without overturning its own position, so the outcome remained within the Party. The CCP suffered severe loss of legitimacy, as millions recognised the GPCR as an obvious power play between factions. Scarcity caused a leap in corruption, and the strategies of the Great Leap Forward and the GPCR caused near collapse of agricultural production, closure of all schools, and severe disruption of industrial production. The wing of the CCP led by Deng Xiaoping, horrified by these events, began drawing its own conclusions, a process accelerated by the collapse of Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.