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Full text of "891100 "
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GUO JIAN, YONGYI SONG,
YUAN ZHOU
HISTORICAL
DICTIONARY OF THE
DyDER@OvDSIROA)I Ov)
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NAYADNDNNBWNF DOAN ANHKWN FE
HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES OF ANCIENT
CIVILIZATIONS AND HISTORICAL ERAS
Series editor: Jon Woronoff
. Ancient Egypt, Morris L. Bierbrier, 1999.
. Ancient Mesoamerica, Joel W. Palka, 2000.
. Pre-Colonial Africa, Robert O. Collins, 2001.
. Byzantium, John H. Rosser, 2001.
. Medieval Russia, Lawrence N. Langer, 2001.
. Napoleonic Era, George F. Nafziger, 2001.
. Ottoman Empire, Selcuk Aksin Somel, 2003.
. Mongol World Empire, Paul D. Buell, 2003.
. Mesopotamia, Gwendolyn Leick, 2003.
. Ancient and Medieval Nubia, Richard A. Lobban Jr., 2003.
. The Vikings, Katherine Holman, 2003.
. The Renaissance, Charles G. Nauert, 2004.
. Ancient Israel, Niels Peter Lemche, 2004.
. The Hittites, Charles Burney, 2004.
. Early North America, Cameron B. Wesson, 2005.
. The Enlightenment, by Harvey Chisick, 2005.
. Chinese Cultural Revolution, by Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, and Yuan
Zhou, 2006.
Historical Dictionary
of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution
Guo Jian
Yongyi Song
Yuan Zhou
Historical Dictionaries of Ancient Civilizations
and Historical Eras, No. 17
The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Lanham, Maryland ° Toronto ° Oxford
2006
SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of
The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.scarecrowpress.com
PO Box 317
Oxford
OX2 9RU, UK
Copyright © 2006 by Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, and Yuan Zhou
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guo, Jian, 1953-—
Historical dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
/ Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, Yuan Zhou.
p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of ancient
civilizations and historical eras ; no. 17)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5461-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN- 10: 0-8108-5461-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. China—History—Cultural Revolution, 1966—1976—Dictionaries. I. Song,
Yongyi,
1949- II. Zhou, Yuan, 1954— IMI. Title. IV. Series.
DS778.7.G86 2006
951.05'6—de22 2005037614
© "The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Editor’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Reader’s Note
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Map
Chronology
Introduction
THE DICTIONARY
Glossary
Bibliography
About the Authors
Contents
vii
Editor’s Foreword
Despite the tendency of history to repeat itself, some eras are truly unique,
the Chinese Cultural Revolution being a case in point. This was not a
revolution, nor was it a civil war; it probably came closer to a free-for-
all. There were different sides, but the membership constantly changed,
new ruling class against old ruling class, have-nots against haves, young
against elders, uneducated against educated, countryside against city—
just some of the dividing lines. This was exacerbated by ideology, but
power was an even stronger drive. Some of the slogans of the time prob-
ably define it just as well, such as “turning the world upside down to
create a new world,” and it did look as if the monkey god had been let
loose. Yet, even then, someone was pulling the strings and this some-
one was an aging Mao Zedong, unwilling to tolerate any rival and even
to trust old comrades. For the greater part of the decade 1966-1976,
the Cultural Revolution wreaked havoc in the world’s largest society,
undermining the party, government, and army, weakening the economy,
society, and culture, and affecting China’s 800 million people and harm-
ing or destroying an eighth of the population. The strongest hope among
most of the survivors was never to live through such a period again and
to make it truly unique.
Given the confusion that reigned at the time and the uncertainty about
many events that still prevails today, it is essential to have a book like
this Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to help
clear up some of the points. This book does not claim to be the last word,
which is definitely in its favor, but it brings us another step closer to
understanding what still remains an extremely convoluted and confusing
era. This it does, first, through a chronology tracing the events showing
at least what happened and when. The introduction then endeavours to
flesh out the chronology by putting events and people in their places and
showing how these events and people relate to one another. The count-
less details are extensively elucidated in entries on significant persons,
vii
viii © EDITOR’S FOREWORD
places and institutions, the more momentous events, the political and
ideological movements, and much more. Since this did take place in
China, the glossary is a useful tool for those researching it in Chinese.
For those who want to know more, the bibliography is an excellent
starting point.
This volume was written by three scholars who lived through the
Cultural Revolution and therefore know the reality, as well as the theory.
Guo Jian, who was previously on the Chinese faculty at Beijing Nor-
mal University, is presently a professor of English at the University of
Wisconsin- Whitewater. Dr. Guo has written and lectured extensively on
the Cultural Revolution and the world of the 1960s. Yongyi Song, who
studied, among other places, at Shanghai Normal University, is now on
the library faculty at California State University, Los Angeles. He has
published The Cultural Revolution: A Bibliography, 1966-1996. Yuan
Zhou, who was a member of the Department of Library and Information
Science at Peking University, is currently the curator of the East Asian
Collection at the University of Chicago Library. Dr. Zhou has edited A
New Collection of Red Guard Publications: Part I. Each in his way has
contributed to a much-needed guide that is informative, comprehensive
and—much harder, given the circumstances—comprehensible.
Jon Woronoff
Series Editor
Acknowledgments
Our gratitude must first go to a number of colleagues and friends in
mainland China, whose works on the Cultural Revolution have been
invaluable resources to us but whose names we must leave out due to
the unwritten regulations regarding Cultural Revolution studies that the
current Chinese government put in place in recent years. We owe spe-
cial thanks to Mr. Gao Wenqian, to Dr. Wang Youqin of the University
of Chicago, and to Dr. Ding Shu of Normandale Community College,
whose pioneering studies and conversations benefited us immensely. We
are also thankful to Dr. Eric Purchase for his editorial assistance.
We are especially grateful to Mr. Yang Kelin, compiler and editor of
the photo collection The Cultural Revolution Museum, and to Mr. Li
Zhensheng, author of the photo album The Red-Color News Soldier, for
their generosity in permitting us to use the historical photographs from
their collections.
Separately, Guo Jian wishes to thank the City University of Hong
Kong for a generous visiting appointment in 2004, which afforded him
precious time much needed to finalize this collaborative effort. Yongyi
Song is grateful to Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies
and the American Library Association for their financial and moral sup-
port in granting him, respectively, the “21st Century Librarian National
Award” in 2004 and the “Paul Howard Award for Courage” in 2005.
Yuan Zhou wishes to thank the Center for East Asian Studies at the
University of Chicago for funding the editorial work of the project.
Reader’s Note
The Romanization used in this dictionary for Chinese terms is the pin-
yin system that was developed and has by now become standard in the
People’s Republic of China. For example, the full name of Mao, the
CCP chairman, will be spelled Mao Zedong and not Mao Tse-tung or
otherwise. However, names of some well-known figures and institu-
tions (e.g., Confucius; Sun Yat-sen; Kuomintang; Tsinghua University),
already deeply embedded in English because of earlier transcriptions
according to the Wade-Giles or other conventions, are written here as
established terms.
The dictionary keeps personal names in the same order they assume
in Chinese: the family name precedes the given name. Thus the entry on
Mao Zedong can be found under M and not Z.
In the case of certain nonidiomatic and already well-known transla-
tions of Chinese terms (e.g., “Red Five Categories” for “hongwulei’),
the dictionary adopts these translations as established. The same applies
in the dating convention. For instance, the “May 16 Circular” is treated
as an established term although the consistent dating method used in this
dictionary is date followed by month (e.g., 16 May). For the reader’s
convenience, a glossary with pinyin spellings, Chinese characters, and
English translations is included as an appendix to the dictionary.
Since important bodies like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), as well as the country’s
name—People’s Republic of China (PRC)—are used repeatedly, in
many entries only the acronyms will appear. Bolding is used in the
dictionary section to indicate that there are specific dictionary entries
on the bolded items.
xi
Acronyms and Abbreviations
CC Central Committee
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CCRSG Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
CMC Central Military Commission
GLD General Logistics Department
GPD General Political Department
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PRC People’s Republic of China
SC State Council
xiii
Chronology
1965
10 November The Shanghai Wenhui Daily publishes Yao Wenyuan’s
“On the New Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.’ The
production and publication of the article are arranged by Jiang Qing and
Zhang Chunqiao and backed by Mao Zedong.
11 November The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issues a circular
to replace Yang Shankun with Wang Dongxing, Mao’s own chief body-
guard, as director of the CCP General Office.
Mid-November Mao leaves Beijing for East China.
8-15 December Mao chairs an enlarged session of the Politburo in
Shanghai, at which Luo Ruiqing is removed as chief of general staff of
the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and general secretary of the Cen-
tral Military Commission (CMC) upon Lin Biao’s initiative.
1966
2-20 February The Symposium on the Works of Literature and the
Arts in the Armed Forces, chaired by Jiang Qing with the direct back-
ing of Lin Biao, is held in Shanghai. Later, the summary report of the
conference is edited and revised by Chen Boda, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang
Qing, Liu Zhijian, and Mao Zedong himself.
5 February Liu Shaoqi chairs a meeting of members of the CCP Polit-
buro Standing Committee in Beijing, at which the “Outline Report by
the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group Concerning the Cur-
rent Academic Discussion” (soon to be known as the February Outline)
xvii
xviii © CHRONOLOGY
is adopted—a document that is intended to confine the criticism of Wu
Han and others to the academic sphere.
8 February Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, and Kang Sheng go to Wuhan
to report to Mao about the Outline Report. Mao agrees with the docu-
ment’s views.
12 February The CCP Central Committee (CC) issues the Outline
Report within the party nationwide as a guiding document for the ongo-
ing movement.
28-30 March Mao talks with Kang Sheng and others on three occa-
sions: contradicting his earlier view of the February Outline, Mao
accuses the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee, the Five-Person Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group, and the CCP Propaganda Department of
harboring evildoers and threatens to dissolve all three organs.
2 April Zhou Enlai writes Mao a formal report in support of Mao’s
criticism of the Five-Person Group and the February Outline.
9-12 April At a meeting of the CC Secretariat chaired by Deng Xiao-
ping, Deng and Zhou Enlai criticize Peng Zhen for opposing Mao. They
also decide to issue a CC document criticizing the February Outline and
form a new group for drafting Cultural Revolution documents.
10 April Upon Mao’s finalization, the CC issues “Summary of the
Symposium Convened by Comrade Jiang Qing at the Behest of Comrade
Lin Biao on the Work of Literature and the Arts in the Armed Forces” as
an intraparty document, which defines the current academic discussion
as a struggle for leadership between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
and calls for a “great socialist revolution on the cultural front” against an
allegedly long-dominant “antiparty and antisocialist black line.”
16-26 April Mao chairs enlarged Politburo Standing Committee ses-
sions in Hangzhou, criticizing Peng Zhen for his alleged antiparty crimes.
Decisions are made that the Five-Person Group be dissolved and that a
new Cultural Revolution small group be formed. Concurrently, a newly
formed document-drafting group is working on the May 16 Circular.
4-26 May Under Mao’s remote control, Liu Shaoqi chairs the Polit-
buro’s enlarged sessions in Beijing to expose and denounce the so-called
Peng [Zhen]-Luo [Ruiqing]-Lu [Dingyi]-Yang [Shangkun] Anti-Party
Clique. On 16 May, all attendees of the session (including Peng Zhen)
CHRONOLOGY ®©% xix
vote to adopt a CC circular (May 16 Circular) to declare war on the
“representatives of the bourgeoisie who have snuck into the party, the
government, the army, and the various spheres of culture.” The adop-
tion of the circular marks the official launching of the Cultural Revolu-
tion. On 23 May, the Politburo decides to dismiss Peng, Luo, Lu, and
Yang from office and fill some of their positions with Ye Jianying as
general secretary of the CMC, Tao Zhu as director of the CCP Propa-
ganda Department, and Li Xuefeng as first secretary of the CCP Beijing
Municipal Committee. It also decides to reorganize the CCP Beijing
Municipal Committee.
7 May Mao writes a letter to Lin Biao commenting on a report on
“Further Developments of Agricultural and Sideline Production in the
Armed Forces” submitted by the PLA General Logistics Department.
In the letter, Mao articulates his view of labor in a utopian society. On
15 May, the CC issues the letter nationwide as an intraparty document.
The letter later becomes well-known as the “May 7 Directive.”
25 May A big-character poster entitled “What Are Song Shuo, Lu Ping,
and Peng Peiyun Really Doing in the Cultural Revolution?” written by
Nie Yuanzi and others, is put out on the campus of Peking University.
28 May The CC issues a name list of the newly established Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) members, with Chen Boda
as head of the group, Jiang Qing, Wang Renzhong, Liu Zhijian, and
Zhang Chunqiao as deputy heads, and Kang Sheng as adviser.
29 May Ata routine meeting of the CC top leadership in Beijing, Liu
Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping decide to send work groups
to People’s Daily and to Peking University. Zhou reports the decisions
to Mao by phone and obtains Mao’s approval. A group of students at
Tsinghua University Middle School—mostly children of ranking offi-
cials—forms in secrecy an organization named “Red Guards.”
1 June People’s Daily publishes the editorial “Sweep Away All Cow-
Demons and Snake-Spirits,’ which is prepared by Chen Boda, who
took over the leadership of the newspaper as head of the work group a
day before. Following Mao’s instructions, the Central People’s Radio
broadcasts on the evening the big-character poster written by Nie Yuanzi
and others, and People’s Daily runs the text of the poster on 2 June
with a commentary entitled “Hail the Big-Character Poster from Peking
University.”
XX ®© CHRONOLOGY
3 June Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping hold an enlarged session of the
Politburo Standing Committee in Beijing. The meeting approves a pro-
posal made by the new Beijing municipal party committee to dispatch
work groups to colleges and middle and high schools in Beijing to lead
the Cultural Revolution movement.
4 June Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping fly to Hangzhou to report to
Mao in person about their decisions concerning the ongoing movement.
Mao approves their work group policies and entrusts Liu with the respon-
sibility for leading the Cultural Revolution movement in Beijing.
Mid-June Rebellious students in Beijing begin to have conflicts with
the work groups. Following a traditional “class struggle” model, Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping instruct the work groups to launch an “Anti-
Interference” campaign on middle school and college campuses. Those
opposing the work groups are persecuted as Rightists and reactionaries.
21 June Liu Shaoqi sends his wife Wang Guangmei to Tsinghua Uni-
versity as adviser to the work group. Wang leads attacks against those
opposing the work group. Kuai Dafu, a representative of student rebels,
is persecuted as a reactionary.
16 July Mao swims in the Yangzi River, demonstrating his good health
and determination to carry out the Cultural Revolution.
18 July Mao returns to Beijing, soon to withdraw his support for the
work group policy and accuse Liu and Deng of repressing students and
misleading the ongoing political movement.
28 July The new CCP Beijing Municipal Committee announces its
decision to withdraw work groups from college campuses.
29 July The Red Guards of the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics Middle
School post the couplet “If the father is a hero, the son is a real man; if
the father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard—lIt is basically like this,”
advocating a theory of blood lineage and making teachers and students
from politically disadvantaged families targets of the Revolution. The
blood lineage theory causes a heated debate on middle school and col-
lege campuses across China and meets strong resistance from a majority
of students and teachers.
1 August Mao writes a letter to Tsinghua University Middle School
Red Guards in support of their “revolutionary rebel spirit,’ which leads
to an explosive development of Red Guard organizations in the country.
CHRONOLOGY ©% xxi
1-12 August The Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Com-
mittee is convened in Beijing.
5 August Mao writes “Bombarding the Headquarters—My Big-
Character Poster,’ accusing the Liu-Deng leadership of opposing the
Cultural Revolution. Though their names are not mentioned in the
poster, Liu and Deng become main targets of criticism at the plenum.
8 August The CC adopts “The Resolution of the CCP Central Com-
mittee Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (to be
known as the “Sixteen Articles”) as a guideline for the unfolding politi-
cal movement.
12 August Major changes in the central leadership are adopted by the
CC. Lin Biao replaces Liu Shaoqi as second in command and becomes
Mao’s heir apparent.
18 August In army uniform and wearing a Red Guard armband, Mao
receives a million students (many of them Red Guards) and teachers at
Tiananmen Square. A violent Red Guard movement soon spreads across
China.
19 August Beijing’s Red Guards declares war on “old ideas, old cul-
ture, old customs, and old habits” on the city’s streets. The campaign to
destroy the Four Olds soon sweeps the entire country.
23 August The People’s Daily carries two editorials applauding the
Red Guards’ revolutionary rebel spirit and their campaign to destroy
the “Four Olds” in the capital city. The editorials inspire further vio-
lence and terror: during the 40 days in late summer known as the “Red
August,” 1,772 innocent people were killed or committed suicide in the
city of Beijing, 33,695 households were ransacked, 85,196 residents
were expelled from the city, and 4,922 historic sites were ruined.
5 September The CC and the State Council (SC) issue a circular
to support the “great revolutionary networking” campaign by granting
travelers to Beijing free transportation and accommodation.
6 September With the support of the CCRSG, the “Capital College
Red Guards Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters” (commonly known as
the “Third Command Post”) is founded in Beijing.
3 October The Red Flag (Issue No. 13) editorial “March Forward
along the Broad Road of Mao Zedong Thought” initiates the nationwide
campaign to criticize the “bourgeois reactionary line.”
xxii © CHRONOLOGY
6 October The “Red Third Command Post” holds a mass rally of over
a hundred thousand people in Beijing denouncing the bourgeoisie reac-
tionary line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda,
and Jiang Qing appear at the rally to show their support.
9-28 October A CC work session is held in Beijing. On 16 October,
Chen Boda gives a speech entitled “The Two Lines in the Great Prole-
tarian Cultural Revolution.” The script of the speech, with Mao’s final
touches, is distributed nationwide on 24 October. Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping criticize themselves at the work session.
13 November Zhang Chunqiao, representing the CCRSG, resolves
the conflict between the Workers Command Post of Shanghai and the
local authorities during the Anting Incident. Zhang acknowledges the
Workers Command Post as the first cross-industry mass organization in
the country, a decision Mao is soon to endorse.
16 November The CC and the SC issue a circular to halt the “great
revolutionary networking” temporarily.
Mid-November—December A number of big-character posters criti-
cizing Lin Biao and the CCRSG appear in Beijing. The CCRSG and
rebel Red Guards attack the writers of the posters and name their criti-
cism a “Black Wind in November.”
4—6 December Lin Biao convenes an enlarged session of the Polit-
buro Standing Committee to hear reports from Gu Mu on the recently
held Industrial and Transportation Symposium (for national planning).
Lin criticizes Gu’s outline report for diverging the focus from the Cul-
tural Revolution to economic production, and vows to push the mass
movement further into all sectors of society, including industrial and
transportation circles.
5 December Old Red Guards at a number of middle schools in Bei-
jing form the “United Action Committee of the Capital Red Guards.”
The organization opposes the CCRSG’s radical policies toward party
veterans while upholding the theory of blood lineage.
15 December Directed by Lin Biao, an enlarged session of the Polit-
buro Standing Committee passes “The CC Directive on Implementing
the Cultural Revolution in Rural Areas” and authorizes its nationwide
dissemination. This is the official beginning of the Cultural Revolution
in the countryside.
CHRONOLOGY œ% xxiii
16 December Lin Biao publishes the “Foreword to the Second Edi-
tion of the Quotations from Chairman Mao.”
25 December About 5,000 rebels from Tsinghua University dem-
onstrate at Tiananmen Square, shouting the slogan “Down with Liu
Shaoqi!”
26 December At his 73rd birthday, Mao has a party with the CCRSG
members and toasts to the unfolding of an all-round civil war for 1967.
30 December The Kangping Avenue Incident, an armed conflict
between rebels and conservatives, breaks out in Shanghai. The conflict
involves more than 100,000 factory workers, the first factional battle on
such a large scale.
1967
4-5 January Rebels begin to seize power at the Shanghai newspapers
Wenhui Daily and Liberation Daily. This is the beginning of the “Janu-
ary Storm.”
6 January One million Shanghai rebels hold a rally denouncing the
CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee and assume its power.
8 January At a reception for the CCRSG members, Mao speaks of the
Shanghai rebels’ power-seizure as a great revolution.
11 January Following Mao’s directives, the CC, the SC, the CMC,
and the CCRSG send a telegram to the rebel organizations in Shanghai,
congratulating them for their assumption of the municipal power.
13 January The CC and the SC issue the “Regulations on Strengthen-
ing Public Security during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”
(also known as the “Six Regulations of Public Security”).
16 January Red Flag carries the editorial “Proletarian Revolution-
aries Unite” to make power-seizure a nationwide campaign. Within a
month, the new power structure called “Revolutionary Committee”
is established in several provinces including Shanghai, Heilongjiang,
Guizhou, and Shandong.
18 January The Journal of Middle School Cultural Revolution is pre-
miered in Beijing, carrying Yu Luoke’s “On Family Background.”
xxiv ® CHRONOLOGY
23 January Following Mao’s instructions, the CC, the SC, the CMC,
and the CCRSG issue the “Decision to Provide the Revolutionary Masses
of the Left with Firm Support from the PLA.” The army’s involvement
in the Cultural Revolution begins.
5 February “Shanghai People’s Commune” is founded. The name of
the new power organ is to be changed to “Shanghai Municipal Revolu-
tionary Committee” on 24 February at Mao’s suggestion.
11 and 16 February Zhou Enlai chairs top-level CC briefing sessions
in Zhongnanhai. Chen Yi, Ye Jianying, Tan Zhenlin, and other senior
PLA and SC leaders criticize the radicals of the CCRSG. Their criticism
is soon to be denounced by Mao as a “February Adverse Current.”
23 February Zhao Yongfu, deputy-commander of the Qinghai Mili-
tary District, orders the PLA soldiers to retake by force a newspaper
office building occupied by the rebel civilians. The violent conflict
leaves 173 dead and 224 injured.
5 March The CC orders military control in Jiangsu Province where
widespread chaos caused by factional conflict hindered the establish-
ment of the provincial Revolutionary Committee. Military control is
soon to be applied to other provinces under similar circumstances.
16 March Following Mao’s directive, the CC authorizes the distribu-
tion of materials concerning the release of 61 party veterans, includ-
ing Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, and Yang Xianzhen, from the
Kuomintang prison in the 1930s. The group is named a “‘traitors’ clique.”
The CC document intensifies mass organizations’ hunt for “renegades”
among party veterans. The CCP Special Case Examination Group on
Liu Shaoqi is also set up in March.
18 March In response to the February Adverse Current, Mao decides to
replace the meetings of the Politburo with the “extended CCRSG routine
meetings” as executive gatherings of the de facto CCP top leadership.
Zhou Enlai is to chair these meetings. Regular attendees include mem-
bers of the CCRSG and a number of military and government officials.
19 March The CC announces its decision not to resume the “great
revolutionary networking” campaign.
30 March With Mao’s approval, Qi Benyu’s article “Patriotism or
Betrayal? A Critique of the Reactionary Film Inside Story of the Qing
Court’ is published in People’s Daily. Without mentioning his name, the
CHRONOLOGY ® XXV
article refers to Liu Shaoqi as the “biggest capitalist-roader within the
party” and “China’s Khrushchev” for the first time, which stirs up a new
wave in a nationwide campaign against Liu.
10 April A mass rally of 300,000 is held at Tsinghua University to
struggle against Liu Shaoqi’s wife Wang Guangmei and 300 senior party
officials.
20 April The Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee is estab-
lished.
6 May A massive armed conflict between two rebel factions occurs in
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, leaving 40 to 50 people dead
and 127 wounded. After the “January Storm,” factional violence with
heavy involvement of the military spreads across China. Armed con-
flicts, more severe than that of Chengdu, take place in Yibin (Sichuan
Province), Zhengzhou (Henan Province), and Wuhan (Hubei Province)
during the summer months of 1967.
6 June The CC, the SC, the CMC, and the CCRSG jointly issue a
circular order to stop widespread violence and chaos and to reinforce
the law. The circular proves to be ineffective.
14 June A number of radical students form the “May 16 Capital Red
Guard Corps” in Beijing and attack Zhou Enlai. With the support of the
CCRSG, the Beijing Public Security Bureau disbands the organization
and arrests its leaders before long.
13 July Mao departs from Beijing on an inspection tour of North,
Central-South, and East China. He arrives in Wuhan, Hubei Province,
on the following day.
20 July Infuriated by some central leaders’ unbalanced treatment of
the two rival factions and unaware of Mao’s presence in Wuhan, mem-
bers of the mass organization Million-Strong Mighty Army and soldiers
from the PLA Unit 8201 of the Wuhan Military Region storm the guest-
house where Mao is staying and take Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi by force
for questioning. Upon receiving a letter from Lin Biao that depicts the
disturbance in Wuhan as a mutiny, Mao quietly leaves for Shanghai on
the early morning of 21 July.
25 July Upon their safe return to Beijing, Xie Fuzhi, and Wang Li
receive a heroes’ welcome by Lin Biao and other central leaders at a mass
rally of a million people at Tiananmen Square. The central leadership is
xxvi © CHRONOLOGY
soon to denounce the July 20 Incident as a “counterrevolutionary riot.”
The leaders of the Wuhan Military Region are removed. The persecution
of members of the Million-Strong Mighty Army results in 600 deaths
and 66,000 injuries.
Following Mao’s instructions, Jiang Qing promotes the slogan “ver-
bal attack and armed defense” at a reception for rebels from Henan.
1 August Red Flag carries an editorial entitled “The Proletariat Must
Firmly Grasp the Gun: Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the
PLA.” The editorial calls upon the masses to “ferret out a handful of
capitalist-roaders inside the army.”
7 August Wang Li receives rebels at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and voices support for their effort to seize power at the Ministry.
9 August Lin Biao receives new commanders of the PLA Wuhan Mili-
tary Region and announces his assessment of the Cultural Revolution:
“its achievement is greatest, greatest, greatest; its cost is minimal, mini-
mal, minimal.”
13 August A massacre of the so-called “Five Black Categories” in
Dao County, Hunan Province, begins. In the following 65 days, 4,519
innocent people are killed.
22 August About 20,000 students from the Beijing Foreign Language
Institute, Tsinghua University, and other schools, storm the office of
the British chargé d’ affaires in Beijing to protest the arrest of Chinese
journalists in Hong Kong. The demonstrators beat the British person-
nel and set the office building on fire. Under the leadership of the CCP
underground organizations, ultraleftists in Hong Kong launch Cultural
Revolution-type riots against the British authorities during the summer
months of 1967.
30 August In response to Zhou Enlai’s report about the involvement of
Wang Li and some other members of the CCRSG in foreign and military
affairs, Mao decides to arrest Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu (Qi’s
arrest to be implemented in January 1968) to reassure and pacify Zhou
Enlai and military leaders.
5 September The CC, the SC, the CMC, and the CCRSG jointly issue
an order forbidding the seizure of weaponry, equipments, and other
kinds of military supplies from the PLA by mass organizations.
CHRONOLOGY © xxvii
8 September With Mao’s approval, the People’s Daily publishes Yao
Wenyuan’s article “On Tao Zhu’s Two Books.”
25 September Newspapers report on Mao’s inspection tour of North,
Central-South, and East China, his return to Beijing, and his call for rival
mass organizations to stop factional fighting and form a grand alliance.
7 October The CC issues a circular publicizing Mao’s talks during
his inspection tour, in which Mao offers a positive assessment of the
Cultural Revolution: The situation across China “is not just good but
great; it is better than ever.”
14 October The CC, the SC, the CMC, and the CCRSG issue a notice
that classes be resumed at all schools. The decision is implemented with
limited success.
7 November Drafted by Chen Boda and Yao Wenyuan with Mao’s
approval, a joint editorial entitled “March Forward along the Road of the
October Socialist Revolution: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of
the Great October Socialist Revolution,’ appears in the People’s Daily,
the Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily, articulating a theory of
continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
27 November At a forum of Beijing workers, Jiang Qing proposes
that a campaign to rectify class ranks be launched nationwide.
1968
22 March Lin Biao and Jiang Qing accuse Generals Yang Chengwu,
Yu Lijin, and Fu Chongbi of carrying out antiparty activities. Lin makes
false charges against the three at rallies of military officers on 23 March
and 27 March. Mao greets the assembly of military officers on 24 March
to show his support for Lin.
23 April—26 July A “Hundred-Day Armed Struggle” takes place on
the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing.
25 May The CC and the CCRSG issue “The Experience of the Beijing
Xinhua Printing Factory Military Control Commission in Mobilizing
the Masses to Struggle against the Enemies” with Mao’s comments. The
document offers guidelines for the Rectify the Class Ranks campaign.
xxviii ®© CHRONOLOGY
3 July The CC, the SC, the CMC, and the CCRSG jointly issue a pub-
lic notice concerning factional violence in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous
Region. The armed conflict in Guangxi in the summer of 1968 results in
casualties numbering tens of thousands—perhaps over a hundred thou-
sand—including cases of cannibalism in several counties.
20 July The newly established Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Com-
mittee moves to hunt for members of the “Inner Mongolia People’s
Revolutionary Party” as part of the Rectify the Class Ranks campaign.
The operation involves severe physical abuse and continues well into
1969, falsely implicating 346,000 citizens and leaving 16,222 dead.
24 July The CC, the SC, the CMC, and the CCRSG jointly issue a
public notice concerning factional violence in some areas of Shaanxi
Province. Two months after the document is issued, 70,000 pieces of
weaponry and 4 million pieces of ammunition are confiscated.
27 July Mao sends a workers propaganda team and a PLA propa-
ganda team to Tsinghua University to end factional violence there. Five
workers are killed and 700 are wounded when the armed Red Guards
open fire on them.
28 July Mao receives the “five Red Guard leaders of Beijing”: Nie
Yuanzi, Kuai Dafu, Han Aijing, Tan Houlan, and Wang Dabin. At the
reception, Mao indicates his resolve to send students away from campus
to end the longtime factional conflict. This meeting marks the beginning
of the end of the Red Guard movement.
25 August The CC, the SC, the CMC, and the CCRSG jointly issue
a circular announcing the decision of the central leadership to dispatch
workers’ propaganda teams to the nation’s educational institutions.
7 September The People’s Daily and the Liberation Army Daily carry
a joint editorial celebrating the establishment of Revolutionary Com-
mittees in all provinces and autonomous regions in the country and
announcing that the Cultural Revolution is entering its “struggle, criti-
cism, reform” stage. A mass rally is held in Beijing to mark the comple-
tion of the Cultural Revolution power establishment in the nation as “all
red across China.”
5 October The People’s Daily publishes a report on the Liuhe “May 7
Cadre School” in praise of its experience in revolutionizing government
organizations. The report initiates a nationwide drive to send millions
CHRONOLOGY ©% xxix
of cadres and government workers to “May 7 Cadre Schools” to do
manual labor.
13-31 October The Enlarged Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Cen-
tral Committee is held in Beijing. Over 65% of the living members and
alternate members of the Eighth Central Committee are absent because
they had been denounced since 1966. Mao chairs the opening session.
A number of senior party veterans are under attack for their involvement
in the February Adverse Current of 1967.
31 October At its Twelfth Plenum, the Eighth CC approves the
“Investigative Report on the Crimes of the Traitor, Spy, and Renegade
Liu Shaoqi” by the Central Case Examination Group and moves to expel
Liu permanently from the CCP. All delegates, except Chen Shaomin,
vote in support of the report and the motion.
22 December The People’s Daily publishes Mao’s directive calling
on urban “educated youths” (middle and high school students) to go to
the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor and lower-middle
peasants. A nationwide “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Country-
side” movement follows. The number of “sent down” urban youths
totals 17 million by 1980. The beginning of this movement marks the
end of the Red Guard movement.
1969
2-17 March Sino-Soviet border clashes take place along the Ussuri
River.
1-24 April The Ninth National Congress of the CCP is held in Bei-
jing. Mao presides over the opening session. He speaks at the Military
Region Commander session on 13 April and calls the Ninth Congress
as a meeting of unity and success.
14 April A new CCP Constitution is adopted with the support of all
delegates. In the new Constitution, Lin Biao is designated as the suc-
cessor of Mao.
24 April The CCP Ninth Central Committee is elected. Only 27 per-
cent of the Eighth Central Committee members and alternate members
retain their seats. The rest are mostly cultural revolutionaries.
XXX ® CHRONOLOGY
28 April The First Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee is
convened in Beijing to elect the new Politburo and its standing commit-
tee. Nearly half of the new Politburo members are close associates of
Lin Biao in the military.
14 October Inthe name of preparations against Soviet military attacks,
the CC issues an urgent notice to evacuate senior party leaders from Bei-
jing. Numerous senior leaders leave the capital for the provinces within
a week. Most of them do not return until after the downfall of Lin Biao
in September 1971.
12 November Liu Shaoqi dies in Kaifeng, Henan Province, after
three years of abuse in unlawful custody. His family members are not
informed of his removal from Beijing to Kaifeng and of his death until
years later.
1970
31 January The CC issues its “Directive Concerning the Strike against
Counterrevolutionary Destructive Activities.”
5 February The CC issues its “Directive Concerning Anti-Graft and
Embezzlement and Anti-Speculation and Profiteering” and “Notice on
Anti-Extravagance and Waste.” These two documents, along with the 31
January CC Directive, provide guidelines for a nationwide “One Strike
and Three Antis” campaign. During a 10-month period (February—
November 1970), 1.87 million people are persecuted as traitors, ren-
egades, and counterrevolutionaries, over 284,800 are arrested, and
thousands are executed.
5 March Yu Luoke, author of “On Family Background,” is executed
in Beijing.
17-20 March Following Mao’s instructions, a CC work session is
held in Beijing in preparation for the Fourth National People’s Congress
of the PRC. Mao suggests that the position of the president of state be
eliminated in a new PRC constitution.
27 March The CC issues its “Notification Concerning the Investiga-
tion of the ‘May 16’ Counterrevolutionary Conspiratorial Clique,’ both
to lead the investigation further and check the excesses of persecution.
CHRONOLOGY ® Xxxi
The hunt for members of the “May 16” counterrevolutionary clique con-
tinues until the end of the Cultural Revolution. An estimated 3.5 million
people are falsely implicated in this nine-year-long campaign.
12 April In a brief message, Mao rejects Lin Biao’s suggestion that
Mao serve as president of the PRC.
27 June The CC approves the Proposal by Peking University and
Tsinghua University to resume admissions of students. By the end of
1970, approximately 41,870 “worker-peasant-soldier students” enter
colleges nationwide.
22 August The Politburo Standing Committee meets in Lushan,
Jiangxi Province. At the meeting, all of the committee members, except
Mao, favor the retaining of the office of the PRC president.
23 August-6 September The Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Cen-
tral Committee is held in Lushan. At the opening session, Lin Biao
speaks of Mao as a genius and proposes that Mao be the head of the
proletarian dictatorship. During small-group sessions on 24 August,
Lin’s associates, including Chen Boda, lead the attack on Zhang Chun-
qiao without mentioning his name and voice support for the retaining of
the office of the national president. On 31 August, Mao writes “Some
Views of Mine,” to be known as his second big-character poster, attack-
ing Chen Boda. A scapegoat of the Mao-Lin conflict, Chen is soon
dismissed from office.
16 November The CC issues a document concerning Chen Boda’s
“antiparty problems.” The Criticize Chen and Conduct Rectification
campaign is launched within the party.
18 December Mao receives U.S. journalist Edgar Snow. During the
conversation, Mao indicates his intention to improve Sino-American
relations. He also blames Lin Biao for promoting the Mao cult without
mentioning Lin’s name.
1971
26 January The CC issues the “Criminal Records of the Anti-Party
Element Chen Boda” nationwide.
xxxii © CHRONOLOGY
8 February The CC establishes a special investigation group on the
“May 16” clique.
18-24 March Lin Liguo and his young colleagues in the air force
meet in Shanghai allegedly to draft a coup plan called the 577 Project
Summary.
7 April Mao decides to invite the United States ping-pong team to
visit China.
29 May The Politburo issues a report on China-American talks to
prepare the nation for the dramatic change in the PRC government’s
diplomatic policy toward the United States.
14 August-12 September Mao tours South China. During his meet-
ings with local leaders, Mao criticizes Lin Biao and his followers.
12 September Lin Liguo’s alleged plan to assassinate Mao is aborted.
Mao returns to Beijing in the evening.
13 September Upon learning of Mao’s attack on Lin Biao and Mao’s
arrival in Beijing, Lin, his wife Ye Qun, and their son Lin Liguo board the
aircraft Trident 256 at Shanhaiguan military airfield in the early morn-
ing, heading for the Soviet Union. The plane crashes near Undurkhan
in Mongolia; all passengers and crew are killed.
18 September The CC issues a circular concerning Lin Biao’s “ren-
egade escape,” charging him with treason.
29 September The CC issues a circular announcing its decision to
remove Lin Biao’s associates Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuo-
peng, and Qiu Huizuo from office.
3 October The CC issues the “Circular Concerning the Dissolution
of the CMC Administrative Group and the Establishment of the CMC
Administrative Conference Office.” Ye Jianying is appointed head of the
Conference Office in charge of the PLA’s routine affairs.
25 October The United Nations passes a motion to restore the seat of
the PRC in the United Nations and its Security Council.
14 November At a reception for the participants of the Chengdu
Symposium, Mao reverses his early verdict on the February Adverse
Current.
CHRONOLOGY © xxxiii
11 December The CC issues to party committees at the provincial level
the first set of materials concerning the “Struggle to Defeat the Counter-
revolutionary Coup of the Lin-Chen Anti-Party Clique.” The nationwide
campaign against the Lin Biao clique is officially launched.
1972
10 January Mao makes the last-minute decision to attend the memo-
rial service of Chen Yi, one of the senior leaders implicated in the Feb-
ruary Adverse Current.
13 January The CC issues its second set of materials concerning the
“Struggle to Defeat the Counterrevolutionary Coup of the Lin-Chen Anti-
Party Clique.” The CC also authorizes the distribution of the first set of
materials (dated 11 December 1971) at the grassroots level nationwide.
21-28 February U.S. President Richard Nixon visits China. Mao
meets Nixon on 21 February. A joint communiqué is signed in Shang-
hai on 27 February, with both sides embracing the prospects of the
normalization of relations.
2 July The CC issues its third set of materials concerning the “Strug-
gle to Defeat the Counterrevolutionary Coup of the Lin-Chen Anti-Party
Clique” and the “Investigation Report on the Past Counterrevolutionary
Crimes of the Kuomintang Anti-Communist, Trotskyist, Traitor, Spy,
and Revisionist Chen Boda.”
3 August Deng Xiaoping writes Mao a letter in which he criticizes Lin
Biao, vows never to attempt to reverse the verdict of his case, and asks
for a second chance to work for the party.
14 August Mao comments on Deng Xiaoping’s letter, acknowledging
his merits and distinguishing him from Liu Shaoqi.
7 September Considering Wang Hongwen to be a candidate for the
position of his successor, Mao transfers Wang from Shanghai to Beijing.
1973
10 March With Mao’s approval, the CC issues its resolution to reinstate
Deng Xiaoping as an active party member and vice-premier of the SC.
xxxiv @ CHRONOLOGY
20 April A decision is made at a CC work session to reinstate a num-
ber of the party veterans and to admit Wang Hongwen, Hua Guofeng,
Wu De, and a few others into the Politburo.
19 July A letter of plea and complaint written by Zhang Tiesheng at
the college entrance examination is published in Liaoning Daily. With
the support of Jiang Qing and the cultural revolutionaries in the central
leadership, all major newspapers reprint the letter three weeks later,
setting off an anti-intellectual propaganda campaign nationwide. The
newly revived attention to examination scores is denounced as a bour-
geois counteroffensive against the revolution in education.
20 August The CC approves the “Investigation Report on the Counter-
revolutionary Crimes of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique,” permanently
expelling Lin Biao, Chen Boda, and other “Clique” members from the
party.
24-28 August The Tenth National Congress of the CCP is held in
Beijing. Wang Hongwen delivers a report on the revision of the CCP
Constitution.
30 August At the First Plenum of the CCP Tenth Central Committee,
Wang Hongwen is elected a vice-chairman of the CCP, Zhang Chunqiao
a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, and Jiang Qing and Yao
Wenyuan members of the Politburo.
25 November-5 December Following Mao’s instruction, the Polit-
buro holds an enlarged session to criticize Zhou Enlai’s “revisionist
line” and “Right capitulationism” because Zhou agrees to negotiate with
the U.S. on military matters. Jiang Qing names the Mao-Zhou conflict
the “eleventh line struggle in the party.” Deng Xiaoping is also present
at the meeting and criticizes Zhou. Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao
Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen began to band together as a “gang of
four.”
12 December Mao chairs a Politburo meeting. At this meeting, Mao
criticizes the work of the Politburo and the CMC under the leadership
of Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying. Mao also suggests rotating command-
ers of the major military regions and appointing Deng Xiaoping to the
positions of the PLA chief of general staff and a member of the CMC
and the Politburo.
CHRONOLOGY ® XXXV
1974
18 January Following Mao’s directive in response to Jiang Qing and
Wang Hongwen’s request, the CC authorizes the distribution of “Lin
Biao and the Way of Confucius and Mencius,” a collection of materi-
als prepared by Jiang’s supporters at Peking University and Tsinghua
University. The “Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius” campaign is
launched nationwide. The campaign implicitly aims at Zhou Enlai.
6-19 April The PRC delegation, led by Deng Xiaoping, attends the
6th Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. This
is the PRC’s first delegation at the UN.
17 July Mao criticizes the Gang of Four for the first time: at a meeting
of the Politburo, Mao calls Jiang Qing, Zhang Chungiao, Yao Wenyuan,
and Wang Hongwen a “little faction of four.”
29 September The CC issues a circular announcing its decision to
redress the case of Marshal He Long.
4 October Mao proposes that Deng Xiaoping be first vice-premier
of the SC.
18 October To gain more government positions at the upcoming
Fourth National People’s Congress of the PRC, Wang Hongwen, rep-
resenting the Gang of Four, goes to Changsha to see Mao and lodge
complaints about Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. Mao rebukes him.
7 November The big-character poster “On Socialist Democracy and
the Socialist Legal System: Dedicated to the Fourth People’s Congress”
by Li Yizhe (a penname adopted by three young authors) appears in
Guangzhou. The poster suggests that the rule of law be established in a
new constitution to protect the rights of ordinary citizens.
1975
5 January Upon Mao’s suggestion, the CC appoints Deng vice-
chairman of the CMC and chief of general staff of the PLA and Zhang
Chunqiao director of the General Political Department of the PLA.
xxxvi ® CHRONOLOGY
8-10 January The Second Plenum of the CCP Tenth Central Commit-
tee is convened in Beijing. Zhou Enlai’s agenda for the Fourth National
People’s Congress and Deng Xiaoping’s appointments are approved at
the Plenum.
13-17 January The Fourth National People’s Congress is held in
Beijing. Zhu De, and Zhou Enlai are reelected as chairman of the NPC
and premier of the SC, respectively. Zhou Enlai delivers the government
work report, reiterating the blueprint of “four modernizations” for China
(modernization in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science
and technology), a proposal initially adopted at the first meeting of the
Third National People’s Congress (December 1964—January 1965). A
new constitution is adopted by the Fourth Congress.
25 January Deng Xiaoping talks to ranking PLA officers about the
rectification of the army. An all-round nationwide campaign aiming to
rectify the errors of Cultural Revolution begins.
1 March Zhang Chungiao speaks against “empiricism” at a meeting
of the General Political Department of the PLA, making insinuations
against the moderate faction of party veterans headed by Zhou Enlai
and Deng Xiaoping.
4 April Following instructions from Mao Yuanxin, the authorities of
Liaoning Province execute Zhang Zhixin, an outspoken critic of the
Cultural Revolution, on a counterrevolutionary charge.
3 May At a reception for Politburo members in Beijing, Mao speaks
against factionalism in the central leadership, reproaches the Gang of
Four led by Jiang Qing, and dismisses Zhang Chungqiao’s antiempiricist
remarks concerning veteran leaders. Later, the Politburo holds two meet-
ings to criticize the Jiang Qing group.
24 June-15 July Enlarged sessions of the CMC are held in Beijing.
Deng Xiaoping and Ye Jianying give speeches calling for a reform and
restructuring of the PLA in the overall rectification campaign.
13 August Liu Bing, deputy-secretary of the CCP Tsinghua University
Committee, and three other committee members write Mao, criticizing Chi
Qun and Xie Jingyi, Jiang Qing’s trusted leaders at Tsinghua. They write
a second letter on 13 October about the same issue. The letters reach Mao
via Deng Xiaoping and prompt Mao’s angry responses to Liu and Deng.
CHRONOLOGY œ xxxvii
14 August Mao Zedong comments on the classical novel Water Mar-
gin. A nationwide political campaign to appraise Water Margin begins,
in which Zhou Enlai is attacked by innuendo as a capitulator within the
party.
2 November Upon hearing several reports from Mao Yuanxin, his
liaison at the Politburo, who is harshly critical of Deng Xiaoping and his
rectification program, Mao expresses his concern about the widespread
negative attitude toward the Cultural Revolution.
20 November Upon Mao’s request, the Politburo holds a meeting
to evaluate the Cultural Revolution. At the meeting, Deng Xiaoping
declines to take charge of drafting a resolution on the issue.
26 November The CC issues Mao’s criticism of Liu Bing and oth-
ers along with their letters to Mao. The “Counterattack the Right-
Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend” campaign begins. Most of
Deng Xiaoping’s official duties are soon suspended.
1976
8 January Premier Zhou Enlai dies.
15 January Deng Xiaoping delivers a memorial speech at the state
funeral for Zhuo Enlai. This is Deng’s last public appearance until after
the Cultural Revolution.
21 and 28 January Mao proposes that Hua Guofeng be appointed
acting premier of the SC and that Hua take charge of the routine work
of the CC.
25 February The CC holds a conference of provincial and military
region leaders in Beijing to promote the “Criticize Deng, Counterattack
the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend” campaign.
Late March and Early April Millions of Beijing citizens visit
Tiananmen Square during the Qingming Festival (4 April in 1976) sea-
son to commemorate Zhou Enlai. Numerous posted elegies contain a
strong political message against the cultural revolutionary faction of the
central leadership. Mourning activities become a mass protest move-
ment in Beijing and a number of large cities around the country.
xxxviii © CHRONOLOGY
5 April With Mao’s approval, Beijing authorities send thousands of
soldiers, policemen, and militia members to Tiananmen Square to crack
down on the protesters.
7 April Following Mao’s directives, the Politburo passes resolutions
to dismiss Deng Xiaoping from office and appoint Hua Guofeng first
vice-chairman of the CC and premier of the SC.
6 July Chairman of the National People’s Congress Zhu De dies.
9 September Chairman Mao Zedong dies.
6 October After nearly a month’s careful planning with Wang
Dongxin and Ye Jianying, Hua Guofeng orders the arrest of the Gang of
Four: Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan.
The Cultural Revolution ends.
Introduction
As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of
the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976) marked the heyday as well as the eventual
bankruptcy of Chairman Mao Zedong’s ultraleftist politics. Purportedly
to prevent China from departing from its socialist path, Mao mobilized
the masses in a battle against what he considered to be the bourgeoisie
within the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This 10-year-long
class struggle on a massive scale caused unprecedented damage to tra-
ditional culture and to the nation’s economy. To a great extent, it was
the disaster of the Cultural Revolution that prompted post-Mao Chinese
Communist leaders, ahead of their Soviet counterparts, to implement
pragmatic economic reforms. Major policies that the post-Mao govern-
ment has adopted, even today, may still be best understood as a reaction
to the radical politics of the Cultural Revolution.
The revolution was cultural because Mao conceived of it in Marx-
ist terms as a thoroughgoing revolution in ideological spheres and at
superstructural levels. It aimed to eradicate old culture and customs and
to educate the masses through a series of political campaigns. Knowl-
edge in general was also under attack because it was permeated by
nonproletarian culture. Mao considered a populace with revolutionized
consciousness to be the best defense against the country’s power take-
over by the bourgeoisie. Mao’s formulation of cultural determinism
against the original Marxist emphasis on economic base structure as the
essential determining factor in a social transformation was hailed during
the Cultural Revolution as a great contribution to Marxism. Although
Mao’s program achieved considerable success in destroying much of
traditional culture, the Cultural Revolution also brought about a revival
of China’s feudal and imperial past in the widespread personality cult of
Mao and the deification of the leader, so much so that religious fervor
XXXİX
xl © INTRODUCTION
often passed as revolutionary enthusiasm, especially in the early stages
of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was political as well since the main task of
this movement was to purge “those power holders in the party who take
the capitalist road” (also known as “capitalist-roaders”). Even though
some of the leaders thus named—such as Mao’s first chosen succes-
sor President Liu Shaogi, whom Mao had begun to consider to be his
main political rival in the CCP leadership in the early 1960s—took an
approach less radical than Mao’s to China’s economic development, all
of them were committed communists and had never designed a pro-
gram, as charged, to “restore capitalism” in China.
The Cultural Revolution had a far greater impact on the lives of ordi-
nary people and on Chinese society in general than any other political
movement in the history of the PRC. Citizens classified as being in the
“Black Five Categories” were regarded as traditional enemies. They
were invariably persecuted and remained downtrodden during the entire
10-year period. A large percentage of school teachers and college pro-
fessors, as natural targets of a Cultural Revolution, were persecuted as
“bourgeois intellectuals” during its early stages and were subject to the
orders of factory workers and army soldiers sent by Mao to take control
of the nation’s schools in the later years of the Cultural Revolution. A vast
majority of government officials and party cadres were named capitalist-
roaders or followers of a bourgeois revisionist line; in the late 1960s
and the early 1970s, most of them were sent to factories or labor camps
called “May 7 Cadre Schools” to reform themselves through manual
labor. Enthusiastic urban youths in middle schools and colleges formed
Red Guard organizations and served as Mao’s crusading army against
the traditional party and state establishment before they—17 million in
total—were sent to the countryside to receive reeducation from local
peasants. Deprived of regular school education in their formative years,
most members of this Cultural Revolution generation were at a loss
in the competition for employment in the post-Revolution reform era.
During and after a power-seizure campaign in 1967 and 1968, factional
violence among mass organizations that included people from all walks
of life escalated nationwide into civil war. The armed conflict in this
period resulted in substantial military and civilian casualties that still
remain uncounted, except for sporadic provincial and local statistics.
In the meantime, nationwide campaigns to persecute suspected class
enemies continued. According to official estimates, the total number
The Dictionary
-A-
ALL FORCES CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP
(quanjun wenhua geming xiaozu). Established in June 1966, the
group was responsible for directing the Cultural Revolution in the
armed forces and military institutes. Liu Zhijian, deputy head of the
General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
and one of the deputy heads of the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group (CCRSG), was appointed head of the All Forces Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded
throughout the country, serious differences developed between several
marshals in the Central Military Commission and the radical members
of the CCRSG led by Jiang Qing concerning how the Revolution
should be carried out in PLA units and military schools. Because Liu
and his group sided with the marshals on the issue, Jiang Qing spoke
against Liu as she met with rebels from military schools on 4 January
1967, accusing Liu of carrying out the bourgeois reactionary line
of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in the military. With the approval
of Chairman Mao Zedong, Liu was replaced by Marshal Xu Xiang-
qian as head of the All Forces Cultural Revolution Small Group on
11 January 1967. Jiang Qing was appointed advisor of the reformed
group. Xiao Hua, Yang Chengwu, Xie Tangzhong, Wang Xinting,
Guan Feng, Xu Liging, and Li Mancun were named deputy heads.
Other members of the group include Yu Lijin, Liu Huaging, Wang
Hongkun, Tang Pingzhu, Ye Qun, Hu Chi, Gu Yan, Wang Feng, and
Zhang Tao. In late March 1967, after Mao ordered Xu Xiangqian to
go on leave for self-criticism for his role in the February Adverse
Current, Xiao Hua, head of the PLA General Political Department,
acted in Xu’s place to lead the All Forces Cultural Revolution Small
Group. However, after a violent incident at the theater of Beijing
1
2 © ALLUSORY HISTORIOGRAPHY
Exhibition Hall between two rival mass organizations in the PLA art
and literary circles during a performance on 13 May 1967, Lin Biao
voiced support for one side, whereas Xiao Hua and the PLA General
Political Department were accused of having been on the wrong side.
Xiao was soon dismissed from office, and the All Forces Cultural
Revolution Small Group ceased to function.
ALLUSORY HISTORIOGRAPHY (yingshe shixue). This term,
coined during the mid-1970s and becoming widely known after the
Cultural Revolution, refers to the practice of some high-powered writ-
ing teams in the service of the Jiang Qing group to attack Premier
Zhou Enlai and praise Jiang Qing in numerous articles and books that
took the form of historical studies. This kind of writing first appeared
in late 1973 and continued to appear until early 1976. The topic was
invariably “Confucianism versus Legalism.” Reflecting on an obser-
vation that Chairman Mao Zedong had made in mid-1973, these
publications projected an image of a conservative or reactionary Con-
fucius and Confucians in contrast to that of progressive or reformist
Legalists in Chinese history. The present-day parallel, as suggested by
allusions and innuendoes, to this highly innovative account of history
was the opposition between the “backward-looking” Zhou Enlai and
his supporters—ready to reverse the course of the Cultural Revolution
at their first chance—and the radical cultural revolutionaries led by
Mao Zedong who were determined to carry Mao’s program through
to completion. See also CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFU-
CIUS; PEKING UNIVERSITY AND TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY
GREAT CRITICISM GROUP; SHANGHAI MUNICIPAL PARTY
COMMITTEE WRITING GROUP.
ANTI-INTERFERENCE (1966). This was a campaign launched in
late June and early July 1966 by the work groups in response to
some students’ challenge to their authority in leading the Cultural
Revolution movement on the campuses of Beijing’s middle schools
and colleges. These students had accused the work groups of repress-
ing their rebellion against teachers and school authorities, and they
attempted to drive the work groups off campus. With the support
of the Liu Shaogi-led central leadership, the work groups accused
the students of interfering with the implementation of the Cultural
Revolution movement in their institutions. Some of these students
ANTING INCIDENT ° 3
were named Rightists and reactionaries and were struggled against
at mass meetings. The Anti-Interference Campaign ended in late July
and early August when Mao Zedong, upon returning to Beijing,
decided to reverse the policies of the work groups and withdraw all
work groups from the campuses.
ANTING INCIDENT (1966). This railway blockade, organized by
the mass organization the Workers Command Post of Shanghai
at the Anting station near Shanghai on 10 and 11 November 1966,
marked the beginning of workers’ massive engagement in the Cul-
tural Revolution. Mao Zedong welcomed such engagement as con-
sistent with his efforts to pushing the Cultural Revolution beyond
government agencies and cultural and educational circles.
On 9 November, a mass rally of about 10,000 people was held
in Shanghai’s Culture Square to announce the establishment of the
Workers Command Post and to denounce the “bourgeois reactionary
line” that was allegedly being carried on by the Shanghai municipal
party committee. After the Shanghai party committee refused to rec-
ognize the Workers Command Post in accordance with the stipulation
of the central leadership that disallowed transindustry organizations,
about 2,000 members of the Workers Command Post, led by Wang
Hongwen, a member of the five-person presidium of the newly estab-
lished organization, rushed into the Shanghai railway station on 10
November and boarded three trains. They declared that they would
go to Beijing to present a petition for their organization. On orders of
the Shanghai railway bureau, Wang’s train was halted at Anting and
some members got off the train and lay down on the rails to protest.
As a result, transportation between Shanghai and Nanjing was para-
lyzed for more than 30 hours. In response to the report from Shang-
hai, Chen Boda, head of the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group (CCRSG), sent telegrams to Shanghai and Anting supporting
the municipal party committee’s position and asking the workers to
go back. On 12 November, the CCRSG sent Zhang Chunqiao to
Shanghai to work with the East China Bureau and Shanghai party
committees to resolve the conflict at Anting. Zhang, however, negoti-
ated directly with Wang Hongwen and other leaders of the mass orga-
nization at Anting as soon as he arrived.
On 13 November, Zhang attended a rally held by the Workers
Command Post and, probably having already cleared the idea with
4 © ANTONIONI’S CHINA
Mao Zedong, agreed to the organization’s demands for recognition
and power. The Shanghai party committee pleaded the case with the
central leadership but to no avail. The legitimation of the Workers
Command Post pushed Shanghai a step closer to the 1967 power
seizure movement known as the January Storm. It also helped make
Shanghai a base for the ultraleftist forces in the central leadership,
especially the “Gang of Four,’ which would form after Lin Biao’s
downfall and of which both Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao
would become part.
ANTONIOND’S CHINA (1974). With Premier Zhou Enlai’s special
permission, the Italian film maker Michelangelo Antonioni visited
China in spring 1972. His tour of the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and
Nanjing and the rural areas of Lin Xian County, Henan Province,
resulted in a three and a half hour documentary film entitled China.
Antonioni’s unflattering, realistic representation of various aspects
of Chinese social life was seen by the CCP leadership as a deliber-
ate distortion of reality “with a particular intention to vilify the great
achievements of the Cultural Revolution.” The film was termed “anti-
China” and “reactionary” and became the target of a propaganda
campaign in early 1974. Considering Antonioni’s political affiliation
with the Italian Communist Party, Yao Wenyuan saw him as associ-
ated with both Italian and Soviet “revisionists.” Attacking Zhou Enlai
by insinuation, Chi Qun said that films like this were actually made
by spies and traitors.
APRIL 5 MOVEMENT (1976). Taking place simultaneously in major
cities across the nation around the Qingming Festival—traditionally
a time to “sweep the graves” (saomu) and pay homage to the dead—
this political event was at once a public mourning for the late Premier
Zhou Enlai and a mass protest against the ultraleftist faction of the
CCP leadership headed by Jiang Qing. Commemoration as a form
of protest was the invention of the April 5 Movement. The widely
shared discontent with Mao Zedong’s radical policies erupted for
the first time, and this public outburst of grief and rage anticipated
the swift ending of the Cultural Revolution soon after the death of
Mao and the downfall of the Jiang Qing group. See also NANJING
INCIDENT; TIANANMEN INCIDENT.
ARMED CONFLICT IN GUANGXI @ 5
ARMED CONFLICT (wudou). Factional fighting among mass organi-
zations became widespread in 1967 when those organizations began to
take over provincial and local governments during the power seizure
movement. In some places, especially where People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) troops took sides while on a “left-supporting” mission, military
weapons were used in the fighting. In July and September 1967, Jiang
Qing twice voiced support for the slogan “Verbal attack but armed
defense,” which further intensified nationwide violence. Between sum-
mer 1967 and summer 1968, factional fighting escalated into large-
scale armed conflicts in many provinces. In some provinces, army
troops were split and fought among themselves. According to an offi-
cial estimate, a million guns were in the hands of civilians at the time.
This was a time that Chairman Mao Zedong referred to as a period of
“all-round civil war” that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
To end factional violence and nationwide chaos, Mao made several
decisive moves in July 1968. He authorized nationwide issuance of
two party central documents (July 3 Public Notice and July 24 Public
Notice) concerning armed conflicts in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous
Region and Shaanxi Province and indicated the broader applications
of these documents. He dispatched a workers propaganda team of
over 30,000 members led by PLA officers to end a prolonged fac-
tional battle known as the One Hundred Day Armed Conflict on
the Tsinghua Campus in Beijing. He sent all college students away
from campuses and thus dissolved a major force of factional violence.
Later in 1968, armed conflict gradually receded in the nation.
ARMED CONFLICT IN GUANGXI (1967-1968). One of the lon-
gest and deadliest factional battles in the country, the escalating
armed conflict in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, caused
the central leadership, with Mao Zedong’s endorsement, to issue a
harshly worded July 3 Public Notice in 1968 to stop the violence.
The nationwide issuance of this document was the first of a series of
decisive steps that Mao took in summer 1968 to end what he called
an “all-round civil war” in the country.
Beginning in April 1967, mass organizations in Guangxi split into
two camps: the conservative Joint Headquarters, on the one hand,
and the 4-22 rebel faction with its allies, on the other. Factional
violence started in late 1967 and escalated in 1968. With the support
6 © AUGUST 4 INCIDENT
of the former First Party Secretary of the Autonomous Region Wei
Guoging, army troops of the Guangxi Military District, and the local
militia, the Joint Headquarters gained the upper hand in armed fight-
ing. The 4-22 faction and its allies won support from the 141st Divi-
sion of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) field army and initially
had much sympathy from central leaders in Beijing until mid-1968
when they began to storm military warehouses, clash with army sol-
diers, and stop cargo trains to seize military supplies that were being
transported to Vietnam. They halted the major railway transportation
system in Guangxi for more than a month.
Although the Public Notice of 3 July from Beijing did not mention
any mass organization by name, the document was aimed appar-
ently more at the 4-22 faction in its denunciation of the weapon-
seizure, the clashes with the military, and the railway blockade as
“counterrevolutionary crimes” committed by “a small handful of
class enemies.” The harsh condemnation, then, was used by the Joint
Headquarters and its supporters to justify another wave of persecu-
tion and killing of the members of its political rivals before the final
end of violence and the establishment of the Guangxi Revolutionary
Committee in late August 1968. The persecution in some cases also
involved cannibalism. Throughout the armed conflict and persecution,
tens of thousands—perhaps as many as a hundred thousand—people
were killed in Guangxi. Most of the dead were members of the 4-22
rebel faction and those classified as the “Black Five Categories.”
AUGUST 4 INCIDENT (1967). Also known as the “Shanghai Diesel
[Engine Factory] United Headquarters” incident, the bloodshed of 4
August 1967 was the gravest case of factional violence in Shanghai.
There were two mass organizations in the Shanghai Diesel Engine fac-
tory that had been in intense conflict with each other for the first half
of 1967: the East-Is-Red (dongfang hong) Rebels Headquarters who
had joined the citywide organization Workers Command Post led by
Wang Hongwen, and the Workers United Rebels Headquarters who
had been accusing Wang and the Workers Command Post of jeopardiz-
ing production, blockading transportation, and provoking violence. On
18 July 1967, a dispute among workers belonging to different factions
turned violent and resulted in the death of a workshop party secretary.
In the capacity of vice-chairman of Shanghai Revolutionary
Committee, the current municipal power organ, Wang Hongwen
BADGES OF CHAIRMAN MAO @ 7
sided with the Workers Command Post and ordered the Workers
United Headquarters to submit a list of murderers for interrogation.
On 4 August, Wang mobilized 100,000 workers to carry out a battle
plan against the Workers United Headquarters. Heavy fighting lasted
more than 10 hours, leaving 18 people dead and 983 wounded. The
factory was so badly damaged that production closed down for two
months. Members of the Workers United Headquarters who were not
in the factory on 4 August were forced to “make up” the beatings
they missed. The incident of factional violence ended with a total
victory of Wang Hongwen’s rebel faction and won the praise of
Zhang Chunqiao as a “beautiful battle.”
AZALEA MOUNTAIN (Dujuanshan). One of the few modern Peking
operas performed during the Cultural Revolution besides the eight
model dramas, Azalea Mountain is about the transformation of a
greenwood gang of uprising peasants into an orderly unit of Mao
Zedong’s army in the Jinggang Mountain revolutionary base area dur-
ing the early stages of the Chinese communist revolution. Originally a
stage play, Azalea Mountain was adapted for the Peking Opera by the
Peking Opera Troupe of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in 1963 and
by the Peking Opera Troupe of Beijing in 1964. During 1968 and 1969,
Jiang Qing began to be interested in making over the play according to
her idea of model drama, especially the so-called three prominences
principle. The new version, finally produced by the Peking Opera
Troupe of Beijing in 1973 following Jiang Qing’s instructions, was
much different from the 1963 and 1964 versions: the role of the male
protagonist, the peasant leader, in earlier versions was modified in
the later version to the extent that the heroine Ke Xiang (He Xiang in
earlier versions), the female representative of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) who wins the trust and respect of the peasant troops and
leads them through struggles against both the armed local tyrants from
without and a hidden class enemy—a traitor—from within, became the
sole center of the play. She was elevated to such a height as to become
a flawless, perfect, superhuman revolutionary stereotype.
-B-
BADGES OF CHAIRMAN MAO. Although badges carrying the image
of Mao Zedong first appeared in the 1940s during the Rectification
8 © BADGES OF CHAIRMAN MAO
Campaign in Yan’an, it was not until late 1966 and early 1967 that
wearing Mao badges became a fashion and a rage for the whole nation,
marking the height of the personality cult of Mao during the Cultural
Revolution. In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, more than
90% of the Chinese population wore Mao badges. According to Pre-
mier Zhou Enlai, as he was speaking of economic planning in March
1969 and deploring the wasteful use of aluminum in producing larger
and larger badges, some 2.2 billion Mao badges had been produced
since the summer of 1966. About 2.5 to 5 billion badges in more than
20,000 different types were manufactured during the 10 years of the
Cultural Revolution.
Most badges show a left profile of Mao’s head, some a frontal
view, and still others his whole figure. The predominant background
color of the badges is red. A common representation of Mao as the
“red sun in the heart of the people” shows red or golden rays radiat-
ing from Mao’s portrait at the center. The badges often have as back-
ground a historical theme of Chinese revolution, which is sometimes
labeled with a name or highlighted with a slogan. While the badges
were considered a display of the wearer’s loyalty to Mao and enthu-
siasm for the revolution, wearing badges also served the purpose of
protecting the wearer from suspicion of disloyalty, although in some
places and at some times those who were said to have a bad family
background were forbidden to wear them.
Noting the waste of industrial material in badge production, Mao
protested in 1969, “Give our airplanes back to us!” After that, the
CCP Central Committee issued the circular “Certain Issues Worthy
of Attention concerning the Promotion of Chairman Mao’s Image”
(dated 12 June 1969) to stop mass production of Mao badges. After
the downfall of Lin Biao, who was the nation’s loudest advocate for
Mao’s personality cult, in September 1971, the number of people
wearing Mao badges declined rapidly. In the mid-1970s, only a hand-
ful of government officials and some farmers in the countryside still
wore them.
In the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution, Mao badges were
primarily obtained through one’s work unit or could be purchased
at certain stores in urban areas. But production fell so short of the
nation’s demand in both quantity and variety that in mid-1967 a black
market for Mao badges sprang up in cities throughout China. These
“illegal markets” were speedily banned by the government. After the
BAIYANGDIAN POET GROUP ® 9
Cultural Revolution, however, Mao badges were traded again on the
market and became profitable items for collectors.
BAIYANGDIAN POET GROUP. A reading and poetry-writing group
of educated youths in the Baiyangdian Lake District, Hebei Prov-
ince. In January 1969, Meng Ke, Genzi, and Duoduo went with their
classmates at the Beijing No. 3 Middle School to Baiyangdian to
settle down and be reeducated by local peasants. Soon they organized
a reading group. Their readings included some of the Grey Books
and Yellow Books (foreign books translated into Chinese for ranking
officials). Many of these books were part of the personal collection
of Genzi’s parents. Others, especially books of foreign literature,
were obtained from underground literary salons in Beijing. Sharing
the same interest in literature and rejecting the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) propagandistic doctrine of art, the three young men
wrote poetry and became readers and critics of each other’s work.
Meng Ke and Duoduo agreed to exchange “yearbooks” of their poetry
every New Year’s Eve. Close contact and frequent exchanges among
the three poets resulted in some remarkable similarities in the early
examples of their poetic composition, such as their embrace of free
verse, the richness of often personified natural imagery, the occasional
use of highly private symbolism, and their shared fondness for a gran-
diloquent and humorous tone. These affinities showed the distinct
features of what scholars later called “experimental poetry.” Bei Dao
and Jiang He, two prominent voices of the “obscure poetry” of the late
1970s and the early 1980s, visited the Beiyangdian district frequently
to exchange materials and views on poetry with Meng Ke, Duoduo,
and Genzi while enjoying the beauty of the lake district. These travels
stimulated the writing of experimental poetry.
Despite political repression, young poets of the Baiyangdian group
entered a golden season of artistic creation in the early 1970s while in
the countryside. Most of their major poems were completed during this
period, including some critically acclaimed works of modern Chinese
poetry, such as Genzi’s “The Month of March and the End” (1971),
Meng Ke’s “Sky” (1973), and Duoduo’s “When People Stand Up for
Their Snoring” (1972). Meng Ke completed his three collections of
poems in 1972, and Duoduo put together his first collection in the
same year. Since no works of literature other than those of propaganda
were produced during the Cultural Revolution, underground poetry, of
10 © BAREFOOT DOCTORS
which the works of the Baiyangdian group were part, shocked readers
with its freshness when it began to surface in the late 1970s and cre-
ated a new direction for Chinese poetry. See also UNDERGROUND
READING MOVEMENT.
BAREFOOT DOCTORS (chijiao yisheng). Barefoot doctors were
part farmer and part doctor, with minimal training in both Chinese
and Western medicine. The idea of a farmer as a doctor originated
in rural parts of Shanghai where peasants were usually barefoot
while working in the wet rice fields; hence the term barefoot doctor.
Although the first group of barefoot doctors was trained in 1958,
they did not become popular until a report relating the “revolution in
medical education” to barefoot doctors was published in the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) official organ Red Flag in March 1968.
Along with the development of various kinds of collective health
care in the countryside, the troops of barefoot doctors were enlarged
rapidly nationwide from 1968 on—they became a million strong
by 1973. Although they lacked professional skills, barefoot doctors
helped alleviate the drastic shortage of professionally trained doctors
in rural areas and contributed to the fairly limited improvement of
health and hygiene in the countryside.
On the other hand, the success of barefoot doctors was often blown
out of proportion by official media. Mao Zedong’s dismissal of the
central government’s Ministry of Hygiene as an agency of “urban
masters” led to the invention of a “medical revolution” policy called
“post exchange” during the Cultural Revolution. Under this policy, a
large number of urban medical professionals were sent to the country-
side to be reeducated and reformed, many of them working in the
fields, while some barefoot doctors were assigned work in urban hos-
pitals that was well beyond their capacity. The system of employing
barefoot doctors began to phase out after the Cultural Revolution. In
January 1985, the Ministry of Hygiene delegitimized the use of the
term “barefoot doctors”; in its place were “rural doctors” and “health
workers,” depending on qualifications.
BEIJING PARTY COMMITTEE REORGANIZATION. One of the
landmark decisions made by the central leadership at the enlarged
Politburo sessions, 4-26 May 1966, at which the Cultural Revolu-
tion was officially launched. The reshuffle of the Chinese Communist
BEIJING PARTY COMMITTEE REORGANIZATION © 11
Party (CCP) Beijing Municipal Committee was a major step Mao
Zedong took to remove what he considered to be an obstacle to his
Cultural Revolution program.
On 10 November 1965, Yao Wenyuan’s article “On the New His-
torical Drama Hairui Dismissed from Office,’ which was soon to be
known as the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural Revolution, appeared
in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Daily. The article accuses Wu
Han—the author of the historical play who was also a renowned
historian and a deputy mayor of Beijing—of using a story of the
past to criticize China’s communist policies. Peng Zhen, mayor and
first party secretary of Beijing, called the municipal committee to a
meeting on the same day to discuss Yao’s article. Almost all of the
committee members disagreed with Yao’s charge. Without knowing
Mao Zedong’s full support for Yao Wenyuan, Peng ordered Beijing’s
newspapers not to reprint Yao’s article. A few days later, when the
article was printed as a pamphlet by Shanghai People’s Press for
nationwide distribution, Peng responded to an inquiry by the Beijing
Xinhua Bookstore with an instruction that bookstores not order any
copies. In early 1966, as the criticism of Wu Han and a few other
“academic authorities” continued, the Peng-led Five-Person Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group prepared a document that, despite
its leftist-sounding rhetoric, stresses the importance of keeping criti-
cism within the realm of academia. With approval from the Politburo,
the document, known as the February Outline, was disseminated
nationwide as a policy guide to the ongoing academic criticism and
debate.
Peng’s series of actions appeared to Mao to be a conscious resis-
tance to his developing Cultural Revolution program. In March 1966,
Mao criticized the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee and the Five-
Person Group on several occasions, calling the Beijing party com-
mittee an “impenetrable and watertight independent kingdom.” Mao
also threatened to dismiss the Beijing committee should it continue
to “protect bad people.” In April, Mao chaired an enlarged meeting of
the Politburo Standing Committee at which decisions were made to
abrogate the February Outline and dismiss the Five-Person Cultural
Revolution Small Group. At the Enlarged Politburo Sessions held in
Beijing in May 1966, Peng Zhen was denounced as a member of the
Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique, and a motion was adopted
that the Beijing party committee be reorganized. On 4 June, People’s
12 © BIAN ZHONGYUN
Daily announced the central leadership’s appointment of Li Xue-
feng, first secretary of the CCP North-China Bureau, and Wu De,
first party secretary of Jilin Province, as first and second secretaries
of Beijing’s new municipal party committee. In the meantime, many
officials of the old municipal committee and municipal government
were condemned as members of Peng Zhen’s “black gang” and
were subjected to brutal physical abuse by the masses at struggle
meetings.
Before long, however, the reorganized Beijing municipal committee
ran into trouble, too. Because of its decision to dispatch work groups,
first to Peking University and then to many other schools in Beijing,
the committee was criticized in autumn 1966 for carrying out a bour-
geois reactionary line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. It was
sidelined from power until April 1967 when it was finally replaced by
the new power organ Beijing Revolutionary Committee.
BIAN ZHONGYUN (1916-1966). A native of Wuwei, Anhui Prov-
ince, Bian joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1941 and
graduated from Qilu University in 1945. When the Cultural Revo-
lution began in 1966, Bian was deputy principal of the prestigious
Beijing Normal University Female Middle School, where she had
worked since 1949. On groundless charges, she was denounced and
struggled against by the students in late June 1966. On 5 August
1966, five days after the Red Guards organization was formed at
the school, she, along with four other school officials, was attacked
by the Red Guards. Bian died after several hours of humiliation and
brutal beating. This was Beijing’s first case of the killing of educa-
tion workers by the Red Guards. Many cases followed, and violence
and brutality escalated especially after the Mass Rally of 18 August
1966. At this rally, Mao Zedong received a Red Guard armband
from a student from this school, whereupon he recommended that
her name be changed from genteel “Binbin” to the overtly militant
“Yaowu,’ which means in Chinese “be valiant.” In 1978, Bian’s name
was Officially cleared at a memorial service organized by the CCP
committee of Beijing’s Xicheng District, but the legal proceedings
that Bian’s widower brought in 1979 against the killers were rejected
by the district People’s Procuratorate on the grounds that the action-
able period had already expired.
BLACK FIVE CATEGORIES ® 13
BIG-CHARACTER POSTERS (dazibao). Written in black ink with
pen-brushes on large sheets of paper and pasted on walls or specially
made poster boards for a standing crowd to read, big-character post-
ers were the major form of mass communication during the Cultural
Revolution. While the government controlled major media channels,
such as newspapers and radio broadcasting, the masses used big-
character posters as effective vehicles with which to express their
views. The designated areas for posting and reading posters on school
campuses and in factories and government agencies became centers
of activity and information gathering and networking places for visi-
tors as well.
Chairman Mao Zedong used the big-character posters of the
masses as a weapon against his political enemies in the party leader-
ship. The nationwide broadcasting and publication of what Mao called
the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster” by Nie Yuanzi
and her colleagues at Peking University on 1 June 1966 marked the
beginning of the Cultural Revolution for the public. To mobilize the
masses against Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, Mao attempted to
identify himself with the masses by calling his militant piece, Bom-
barding the Headquarters, “my own big-character poster.”
After the Cultural Revolution, big-character posters remained
popular as a method of expressing dissent, especially during the
Democracy Wall Movement in the late 1970s. In September 1980,
the National People’s Congress outlawed big-character posters in a
revised Constitution.
BIGGEST CAPITALIST-ROADER WITHIN THE PARTY. Along
with “China’s Khrushchev,” this was a reference to President Liu
Shaoqi in official media in 1967 and 1968. Liu’s name was not men-
tioned in officially published denouncements until after the Twelfth
Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (13—31 October
1968). See also CAPITALIST-ROADERS; LIU SHAOQI.
BLACK FIVE CATEGORIES (hei wulei). A pejorative label com-
monly used in the Cultural Revolution, the “Black Five Categories”
refers to people who were classified as landlords and rich peasants
during the Communist-led Land Reform in the late 1940s and the
early 1950s and to those labeled as counterrevolutionaries, bad
14 © BLACK GANG
elements, and Rightists in a series of political campaigns after the
founding of the PRC. Already seen as “targets of the proletarian dic-
tatorship” before the Cultural Revolution, people in these categories
were invariably persecuted and repressed during the entire 10-year
period of the Revolution. They were subject to public humiliation,
physical abuse, forced labor, confiscation of personal property, exile
from the cities, and, in a number of isolated cases, even massacre.
Their children and even grandchildren—especially in the country-
side, where the CCP class identification criteria were often applied
to the third generation—were discriminated against and were often
forced to declare a “clean break” with their parents. Many of them,
like their parents, were also subject to humiliation and abuse, espe-
cially at the hands of the Red Guards from families of the “Red Five
Categories” in the beginning months of the Cultural Revolution.
BLACK GANG (heibang). This pejorative term was initially used in
summer 1966 to refer to the so-called Three-Family Village Anti-
Party Clique of Deng Tuo, Wu Han, and Liao Mosha. The refer-
ence soon extended to the old CCP Beijing Municipal Committee led
by Peng Zhen. Anyone who was then associated with the Municipal
Committee was called a member or an element of the “black gang.”
As the Cultural Revolution evolved, “black gang element” became a
label for any denounced academic authority or party official. The term
continued to be used until 1968 when the central leadership began
to distinguish between “unrepentant” and “corrigible” capitalist-
roaders, associating “black gang” only with the former.
BLACK SEVEN CATEGORIES (hei qilei). A commonly used
pejorative, the “Black Seven Categories” refers to persons who were
labeled as landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad ele-
ments, Rightists, capitalists, and “black gang” members. The last
two categories were an addition to the “Black Five Categories” dur-
ing earlier stages of the Cultural Revolution.
BLACK WIND IN NOVEMBER (shiyiyue heifeng). Also known as
the “Black Wind in December,” this officially sanctioned pejorative
refers to a series of big-character posters that appeared in Beijing
in the last two months of 1966 criticizing the Cultural Revolution
faction of the CCP central leadership—the Central Cultural Revo-
BLOOD LINEAGE THEORY ® 15
lution Small Group (CCRSG) in particular. Although most of the
student authors acted independently, they were part of a general
reaction of conservatives—usually those with a “red” family back-
ground—against the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary
line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. In the early stages of the
Cultural Revolution, they had either supported or tolerated the blood
lineage theory and abused students from politically disadvantaged
families. Politically, they sympathized with the old party establish-
ment represented by Liu and Deng. The CCRSG became their main
target due to its sweeping denunciation of party veterans, its support
for the emerging rebel faction, and its encouragement of the politi-
cally disadvantaged students to criticize their abusers in the Criticize
the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign.
The better-known posters representing this conservative reaction
include “Kick aside the CCRSG and Closely Follow Chairman Mao
in the Revolution” (2 December) by a number of student organiza-
tions at Beijing Institute of Forestry and the four installments of
“Question the CCRSG” (late November and early December) by the
August 1 Column of the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics Red Guards.
The former questions the legitimacy of the CCRSG by evoking the
“Sixteen Articles,’ which demands that power organs to lead the
Cultural Revolution be established through a democratic process of a
broad election under the CCP leadership.
Also prominent among the posters labeled “reactionary” was a
voice of students of rebel faction, such as the “Open letter to Com-
rade Lin Biao” (15 November) by two high school students assuming
the penname Yilin Dixi, which criticized Lin Biao for his formula-
tion of a “peak theory” and for his promotion of the personality
cult of Mao Zedong. By the end of December 1966, the massive
protest of the rebel faction in defense of the CCRSG and the arrest
of most of the student authors by the authorities put to an end the
so-called Black Wind.
BLOOD LINEAGE THEORY (xuetonglun). This popular variation
of the CCP’s long-time organizational policy known as “class line” or
“class status” was embraced by some Red Guards, especially those
who came to be known as the Old Red Guards, in the initial stage of
the Cultural Revolution. According to the blood lineage theory, one’s
family background determines and defines who one is. People who
16 © BLOOD LINEAGE THEORY
belong to the Red Five Categories, especially children of ranking
officials, are “born-reds” (zilaihong). They are trusted as successors
to the revolutionary cause and enjoy political privileges. By contrast,
people who belong to the Black Seven Categories are deemed politi-
cally untrustworthy. Already deprived of equal opportunity for college
education, employment, and promotion in the regular practice of the
official CCP class policy, they were dismissed as “sons of dogs” (gou-
zaizi) by many Old Red Guards on the grounds of the “bad” blood in
them. The CCP organizational policy required authorities to “consider
family class status, but not just family class status, and stress the
importance of political behavior.’ Although more moderate than its
popular version, this policy was never seriously implemented.
In June and July 1966, a couplet (duilian) that would become the
most popular expression of the blood lineage theory was circulating
among students at the Peking University Middle School. The parallel
lines read, “If the father is a hero, the son is a real man” and “If the
father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard.” The work group on a
mission to direct the Cultural Revolution at the school was critical of
the couplet. But after Mao Zedong dismissed the work groups as a
repressive force in late July, the couplet began to be circulated rapidly
and widely on middle school campuses all over Beijing. On 29 July
1966, some students posted the couplet at the Beijing Institute of
Aeronautics Middle School, with the original two parallel lines run-
ning vertically in the form of traditional Chinese calligraphy scrolls
and an added “It is basically like this, making demons anxious”
placed horizontally on top. The couplet, along with its several varia-
tions, became a subject of heated debate among students in Beijing.
Those who embraced the idea represented by the couplet, including
a majority of ranking officials’ children, made it a fundamental basis
for admitting fellow students into their own Red Guard organiza-
tions, keeping out whoever was not a “born-red.” The couplet served
as both a prompt and a justification for the humiliation, torture, and
killing of innocent people of the Black Seven Categories and their
children during Beijing’s Red August—a brutal act perpetrated
mostly by Old Red Guards whom Chairman Mao Zedong received
for the first time at the Mass Rally of 18 August 1966. At a debate
on 20 August 1966, Tan Lifu, a leader of Red Guards at Beijing
Industrial University and the son of a ranking official, gave a long
speech in support of the couplet. Tan’s speech, printed and widely
BOYIBO @ 17
distributed, helped make the blood lineage theory and its controversy
well-known across China.
The blood lineage theory became a political issue in the central
leadership in late 1966 during the campaign against the so-called
bourgeois reactionary line allegedly carried out by Liu Shaoqi and
Deng Xiaoping. To win support of the students from nonproletarian
families, Chen Boda dismissed “born-redism” as reactionary at the
CCP Central Committee Work Sessions on 9-28 October 1966
and linked it to the bourgeois reactionary line. Chen’s speech out-
lawed the controversial couplet and made the blood lineage theory
officially a target of criticism.
A majority of students who had opposed the theory at the outset
now became much more vocal with their views. The best-known critic
was the young worker Yu Luoke, who was to present a point-by-point
refutation of the blood lineage theory in his article “On Family Back-
ground.” However, since Yu’s criticism went so far as to repudiate the
system of political discrimination underlying the CCP class policy and
to embrace the idea of equality and human rights, he was eventually
named a counterrevolutionary and was put to death by the authorities.
BO YIBO (1908- ). Deputy premier of the State Council (SC) since
1956, Bo was denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a member
of the so-called Sixty-One Traitors Clique, a major case fabricated
by the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership to incriminate Presi-
dent Liu Shaoqi.
A native of Dingxiang, Shanxi Province, Bo Yibo joined the CCP
in 1925 and soon became a leader in the CCP’s underground work in
north China. In 1931, Bo was arrested in Beijing by the Nationalist
government. In 1936, the North China Bureau of the CCP—with the
support of Liu Shaoqi, who was then in charge of the work of the
bureau, and the approval of the central party leadership—instructed
Bo to sign an anticommunist declaration prepared by the National-
ists to earn his release. After the founding of the PRC, Bo became
one of the most influential leaders on economic matters: first as min-
ister of finance (1949-1953) and then director of the State Economic
Commission (since 1956).
In fall 1966, as Mao Zedong’s intention to bring down Liu Shaoqi
became clear, Kang Sheng began to gather material from news-
papers of 1936 as incriminating evidence against Bo Yibo and others
18 © BOMBARDING THE HEADQUARTERS
as members of a “traitors clique” formed by Liu Shaoqi. Soon after
Mao approved Kang’s work in February 1967, Bo was arrested and
imprisoned. The 20,000-word appeal that Bo wrote in prison in the
summer of 1967 was of no avail. Bo Yibo’s name was not cleared
until late 1978 when the CCP Organization Department finally issued
an investigative report on the “Case of the Sixty-One,” dismissing the
charges against Bo and 60 others as groundless.
In 1979, Bo was reappointed deputy premier of the SC and became
a member of the CCP Central Committee. In 1982, he was elected
deputy director of the Central Advisory Committee, a newly estab-
lished body of retired ranking leaders. In his retirement, Bo Yibo
still exerted considerable, mostly conservative influence on the CCP
decision-making process. He was also one of the few ranking CCP
leaders to produce substantive, and often revealing, memoirs.
BOMBARDING THE HEADQUARTERS (paoda silingbu). This
was a big-character poster that Chairman Mao Zedong wrote on
5 August 1966 during the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth
Central Committee to attack President Liu Shaoqi. The poster
was originally a long note Mao put down on the margin of the 2
June 1966 issue of the Beijing Daily. Mao’s secretary proofread the
note and made a clear verbatim transcription of the original. Mao
then added the title “Bombarding the Headquarters—My Own Big-
Character Poster.” The final version of the poster contains 205 Chinese
characters.
In the poster, Mao denounces the leadership of Liu Shaoqi and
Deng Xiaoping, without naming either, as a “bourgeois headquar-
ters” that has been hostile and repressive toward the Cultural Revolu-
tion since early June. In strong terms, he accuses them of persecuting
the dissenters and imposing a “white terror” of the bourgeois dicta-
torship. Mao also connects the current situation with what he calls
a right deviation of 1962 and the wrong tendency of 1964 that was
“Left? in form but Right in essence,” both implicating Liu Shaoqi.
The former points to the critical measures taken by the CCP leader-
ship—especially at an enlarged Politburo meeting chaired by Liu in
late February 1962—to adjust the radical policies of the late 1950s
that caused the great famine of 1959-1962. The latter refers to the
earlier guidelines for the Socialist Education Movement based on Liu
Shaoqi’s ideas.
BOMBARDING ZHANG CHUNQIAO œ% 19
On 7 August, copies of Mao’s big-character poster were printed
and distributed to all participants of the plenum. Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping immediately became targets of attack. On the following
day, the Central Committee (CC) passed the Resolution of the CCP
Central Committee concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revo-
lution, commonly known as the “Sixteen Articles.” On 17 August,
Mao’s big-character poster was issued across China by the CC as a
central party document. From then on, the title of the big-character
poster, “Bombarding the Headquarters,” became a popular slogan for
rebels attacking party officials at various levels.
One year after Mao wrote his big-character poster, the People’s
Daily published the entire text in its 5 August 1967 issue with an
editorial entitled “Bombarding the Bourgeois Headquarters.” Another
editorial, “Completely Destroy the Bourgeois Headquarters—Com-
memorating the First Anniversary of the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP
Ninth Central Committee,” came out in the Red Flag on 17 August.
Both editorials consider Mao’s big-character poster to be his bugle
call to the campaign to overthrow Liu Shaoqi.
BOMBARDING ZHANG CHUNQIAO. This phrase refers to the
efforts of some rebel organizations in Shanghai to bring down Zhang
Chungiao, first in January 1967 and again in April 1968. During the
January Storm of 1967, four attempts to seize power in Shanghai by
different mass organizations—none of them was Zhang Chunqiao’s
choice—were delegitimized by Zhang. The College Red Guards Revo-
lutionary Committee of Shanghai in particular, which had been used
by Zhang before, felt betrayed when its own attempts to take over the
municipal power met Zhang’s opposition. On 28 January, some college
Red Guards challenged Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan in a six-
hour debate. In the meantime, in reaction to Zhang’s order to send army
troops to Fudan University where his close associate Xu Jingxian was
detained by two rebel organizations, thousands of students took to the
streets, with big-character posters, leaflets, and banners condemning
Zhang for his double dealings with mass organizations and for his
attack on the revered modern Chinese writer Lu Xun in the 1930s. The
protest came to be known as the “28 January bombardment.”
The preparation for another anti-Zhang rally and demonstration
was underway on the early morning of 30 January when the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), following instructions
20 © “BORN-REDS”
from Chairman Mao Zedong, sent an emergency missive that identi-
fied Zhang as part of Mao’s “proletarian headquarters” and forbade
demonstrations against him. With the full support of the powerful
CCRSG and the largest local mass organization the Workers Com-
mand Post, Zhang, Yao, and their close associates in Shanghai were
now able to eliminate opposition and further consolidate their power
in China’s most populous city. Since the bombarding was denounced
as “counterrevolutionary action” in the telegram sent by the CCRSG,
thousands of participants of the “bombardment” were mistreated, and
at least 2,500 people were persecuted. Interrogation and torture left
five persons dead.
On 12 April 1968, big-character posters and hand-written slogans
with the same charges against Zhang appeared again on the main
streets of Shanghai. The action was planned by Hu Shoujun and
some other students at Fudan University. Also involved were rebels
at the Second Army Medical College, who had been supported by
Lin Biao. The protest was again put down. The two protests were
said to have involved rebel organizations with some 100,000 to
200,000 members altogether, most of them students. After the events,
they were mistreated and persecuted. The best known case is that of
the Hu Shoujun Clique in 1970; the number of deaths resulting from
such persecution was said to amount to several hundred.
“BORN-REDS” (zilaihong). This term started as a proud self-
reference of the Old Red Guards embracing the blood lineage the-
ory. It first appeared in August 1966 in “The Born-Reds Have Risen,”
a big-character poster by the Peking University Middle School Red
Flag Combat Team, one of the earliest Red Guard organizations.
“Born-reds” later became a popular term referring to anyone from
any of the Red Five Categories of families in the early stages of the
Cultural Revolution. The group of Red Guards who invented and first
used the term were mostly children of ranking CCP and PLA officials.
Already of a privileged class above those of workers, peasants, and
soldiers, which were also “red,” they regarded themselves as natural
successors to China’s revolutionary cause; that is, natural successors
to the power acquired by their parents’ generation. They humiliated
and abused students from politically disadvantaged families, espe-
cially those of Black Seven Categories, provoking much protest and
creating much antagonism among students. This abuse took various
“BORN-REDS” è 21
forms, including the use of the pejorative “born-blacks,” “born-
yellows,” and “‘sons-of-dogs” in contrast to “born-reds.”
BOURGEOIS REACTIONARY LINE. This is a pejorative phrase
that Chairman Mao Zedong adopted in autumn 1966 to designate
the party policies that had been implemented in the summer of 1966
and, in Mao’s view, deviated the thrust of the ongoing mass move-
ment away from what he had intended to be the main target of the
Cultural Revolution—the capitalist-roaders in the party leadership.
Consequently, a campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line
was launched in late 1966 against the alleged framers of these poli-
cies, President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping.
In the early summer of 1966 when student revolt erupted on col-
lege campuses and in middle schools in Beijing, Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping were in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the CCP. With
the approval of Mao Zedong, who was away from Beijing, the Liu-
Deng leadership adopted an old party policy for leading a political
campaign and for dealing with extraordinary situations: it dispatched
work groups to most chaotic places to lead the mass movement and
keep it under the control of the party. When disputes took place on a
college campus, the work group there would typically protect party
officials and denounce their challengers. In the meantime, the work
groups allowed persecution of the so-called Black Seven Categories,
which included those associated with the already fallen “black gang”
of the old CCP municipal committee of Beijing.
Upon returning to Beijing, however, Mao began to criticize of the
work group policy. He wrote a short piece entitled “Bombarding the
Headquarters—My Own Big-Character Poster” on 5 August, accus-
ing some unnamed central and regional leaders of taking a “reaction-
ary bourgeois stand” against the proletarian Cultural Revolution.
However, in August and September, Mao’s idea of getting at “those in
power” (dangquanpai) and shaking up the party leadership from bot-
tom to top was still not carried out, while student Red Guards began
to focus their attention on a movement called “Destroy the Four
Olds,” targeting alleged class enemies mostly outside the party. Mao
was contemplating a new move, and finally he settled on a Criticize
the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign.
The term “bourgeois reactionary line” appeared for the first time in
an editorial of the party organ Red Flag published on 2 October 1966
22 © BREAKING
(issue number 13). On 6 October 1966, the “Third Command Post”
of college Red Guards in Beijing held a mass rally at the Workers’
Stadium to declare war against the bourgeois reactionary line. With
the attendance of Premier Zhou Enlai and members of the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) along with a hundred
thousand people, this was arguably the most celebrated event of the
campaign. In a speech delivered on 16 October at a work session
of the CCP Central Committee, Chen Boda, head of the CCRSG,
defined Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line against the bourgeois
reactionary line on the basis of their attitudes toward the masses:
Mao’s line encouraged the masses to educate themselves and liberate
themselves, Chen said, while the reactionary line carried out by the
work groups was self-righteous and repressive. Chen also attempted
to clarify Mao’s “class line” while associating the bourgeois reac-
tionary line with the controversial blood lineage theory that was in
fact more akin to Mao’s own ultraleftism.
Chen’s interpretation of Mao’s mass and class policies generated
much enthusiasm among students from families other than those of
the “Red Five Categories.” These students had been discriminated
against in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. Now that the
“Red Guard” was no longer a patent for those from the so-called “red
families,” these students, as part of the rebel faction of Red Guards
that had been more tolerant of their family backgrounds than the Old
Red Guards, were able to join Mao’s crusading army against the
party establishment from Liu and Deng down to grassroots levels.
The campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line continued
well into 1967 and prepared the way for the turbulent nationwide
power seizure movement. This campaign also led to rehabilita-
tions of some ordinary citizens who had been denounced under the
work groups and of a still greater number of people who had been
condemned and tortured under the “mass dictatorship” after the
withdrawal of the work groups. See also CENTRAL COMMITTEE
WORK SESSIONS ON 9-28 OCTOBER 1966; WORK GROUPS.
BREAKING (juelie). Directed by Li Wenhua and produced by Beijing
Film Studio in 1975, this film is based on a story about how the Com-
munist Labor University of Jiangxi Province was built in 1958. Its
intention, however, is to attack the so-called revisionist line in edu-
cation of both the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. The protagonist—
BRITISH CHARGE INCIDENT @ 23
Long Guozheng, president of the university—is a hero going against
the tide of the “revisionist line.” Long bases college admission deci-
sions not on test scores but on the number of callouses on the palms
of the candidate. He regards college professors as bourgeois intel-
lectuals. In a comic episode, a professor with a foreign academic
degree is ridiculed for specializing in “the function of a horse’s tail.”
In short, the film epitomizes the Cultural Revolution’s belittling of
knowledge and politicizing of education. When the film was almost
completed in October 1975, the conflict between the Gang of Four
and Deng Xiaoping intensified. Following orders from Gang of Four
supporters at Beijing Film Studio, the crew added episodes to meet
the needs of current politics. The veteran revolutionary and Long’s
political rival Cao Zhonghe, for instance, was labeled an “unrepen-
tant capitalist-roader” in the party, a term soon to be associated
with Deng Xiaoping in the campaign to counterattack the right-
deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend. Shortly after its release, the
film became a popular tool for political education across China. With
theatre tickets distributed by party branches, people were obligated to
watch it. The film was also praised by official media as an excellent
work taking after the Eight Model Dramas and reflecting a com-
plete break with the “revisionist line in education.” In the post-Mao
era, critics dismissed the film as a notorious piece of “conspiratorial
literature.”
BRITISH CHARGE INCIDENT (1967). In a mass protest against
the arrest of Chinese journalists by British colonial authorities in
Hong Kong, some Red Guards set fire to the office building of the
British chargé d’affaires in Beijing on 22 August 1967. Tensions
in Hong Kong started in early May 1967 when a labor dispute took
place and strikers and demonstrators clashed with the police. Partly
due to the interference of members of the Central Cultural Revo-
lution Small Group (CCRSG) Wang Li and Guan Feng, China’s
reaction to the Hong Kong crisis was so highly confrontational that
about a million Beijing citizens, inspired by the official reaction,
demonstrated in front of the British chargé office on 15 June 1967. In
Beijing, chaos in foreign affairs escalated after Wang Li told rebels
in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 7 August that it was all right to
“collar” Minister Chen Yi (here Wang was actually rephrasing Mao
Zedong’s instructions) and to seize power at the Foreign Ministry.
24 © BYSTANDERS
The subsequent arrest of journalists in Hong Kong triggered another
angry response from the masses in Beijing: On 22 August, Red Guards
from the Beijing Foreign Language Institute, Beijing Normal Univer-
sity, Tsinghua University, and other schools, as well as many factory
workers, held a “Mass Meeting of the Capital Proletarian Revolution-
ary Rebels Denouncing British Imperialist Crimes against China.” in
front of the British chargé office. Despite Premier Zhou Enlai’s spe-
cific directive forbidding violence against diplomatic establishments
in China, the participants of the rally crashed into the offices of the
British chargé that night, beating, smashing, confiscating, and burning
automobiles and documents. They also burned the office building and
struggled against the chargé d’affaires. In late August, Zhou Enlai
reported to Mao on the chaotic state of foreign affairs. The British
chargé incident and Zhou’s report prompted Mao to take drastic mea-
sures for the first time against his trusted cultural revolutionaries: he
named Wang Li’s 7 August speech a “poisonous weed” and ordered
the detention of Wang Li and Guan Feng.
BYSTANDERS (xiaoyaopai). This term refers to a large number of
people who were neither rebels nor conservatives and who were not
engaged in factional fighting during the Cultural Revolution. Bystand-
ers usually did not have their own organizations. In the early stages of
the Cultural Revolution, they were mostly students with undesirable
family backgrounds who were either lacking revolutionary zeal or
shunning dangerous Chinese politics. The setback for the conservative
faction during the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary
line and in the process of the power seizure movement turned some
of its members into bystanders. As nationwide violent sectional fight-
ing escalated in 1967 and 1968, more and more people, including
a large number of rebels, became disillusioned with the revolution;
they began to withdraw from their organizations and stay away from
armed conflicts. The mass of bystanders grew larger and faster as the
Cultural Revolution continued to unfold.
ey ee
CANNIBALISM IN GUANGXI. In the spring and summer of 1968,
factional violence in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region became
CAPITAL RED GUARD PICKETS ® 25
so fierce that hatred of the rival faction led to cannibalism in several
counties. The victims of this horrific crime also included those clas-
sified as the Black Five Categories (landlords, rich peasants, counter-
revolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists). The perpetration of
cannibalism against this group was often seen as evidence of one’s
rightful indignation at class enemies and of one’s acute proletarian
class sentiment. According to a number of unofficial investigative
reports, several hundred people were cannibalized in a 6-month period
from March to August 1968 in the autonomous region.
CAPITAL RED GUARD PICKETS (shoudu hongweibing jiucha-
dui). Established by some Red Guard organizations in Beijing in
summer 1966, the Pickets were meant to prescribe rules for Red
Guards and to exercise control over the chaotic situation created by
the Red Guards themselves. Except for a brief period immediately
after the establishment of the Pickets, however, some picket mem-
bers acted even more self-righteously and more violently than other
Red Guards against innocent people in the second half of 1966.
During the movements to destroy the Four Olds and to sweep
away “cow-demons and snake-spirits” in summer 1966, espe-
cially during the terrifying Red August, lawlessness and violence
escalated. Humiliation and physical abuse were commonplace on
the streets of Beijing. Red Guards struggled against and tortured
school teachers, the so-called Black Gang members from academic
institutions, art and literary circles, and party and government organs,
and the people of the “Black Five Categories.” They searched and
ransacked private homes and confiscated personal belongings in the
name of revolution. In the face of the widespread chaos, 31 Red
Guard organizations of Beijing’s middle schools formed the Xicheng
District Branch of the Capital Red Guard Pickets on 25 August 1966.
In support of what appeared to be the Red Guards’ self-regulating
effort, leaders of the Beijing party committee and the State Council
acknowledged the organization and maintained frequent contact with
it for some time. Before long, Red Guards in Dongcheng District and
Haidian District also formed their Pickets. During its brief existence,
the Xicheng District Pickets issued 13 decrees forbidding the search-
ing of government offices and the abuse of ranking officials. Accord-
ing to these decrees, Red Guards were to notify the local authorities
before searching a residence of anyone labeled under the Black Five
26 © CAPITAL RED GUARDS
Categories or a capitalist and make every effort to avoid violence.
These decrees were largely in line with the policies of the central
leadership at the time and helped contain violence and lawlessness
to some extent but not for long. As the rage of the war on the “Four
Olds” reached its height, physical abuse including whipping, tortur-
ing, even downright killing, surged again.
As Mao Zedong launched the battle against those in power and
moved to shake up the party and state apparatus, parents of many
Picket members came under attack. Some members of the Pickets and
Old Red Guard organizations became increasingly resistant to the
new move; they willingly went back to attack traditional “class ene-
mies,” mostly outside the party. To the Cultural Revolution faction of
the central leadership, the Pickets now represented roadblocks to the
Revolution. On 16 December 1966, at a mass rally of Beijing middle
school students and teachers to criticize the bourgeois reactionary
line, the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group announced a
decision by the central leadership to disband the Red Guard Pickets;
the Pickets were accused of serving as the “military police of the
bourgeois reaction line.” After the rally, various picket offices were
ransacked and closed. A number of picket members were arrested.
Despite several attempts to regenerate, the Pickets and the Old Red
Guards they represented were never able to come back again as an
effective political force.
CAPITAL RED GUARDS (shoudu hongweibing). A major Red Guard
newspaper, the Capital Red Guards made its debut on 13 September
1966 as a publication of the Capital Revolutionary Rebel Headquar-
ters of College Red Guards (popularly known as the Third Com-
mand Post). This was a prominent mass organization supported by
Mao Zedong and the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG) during the Criticizing the Bourgeois Reactionary Line
campaign. Since the headquarters sent its members throughout the
country to promote rebel activities, the paper was distributed across
China and had great influence on mass movements far beyond the
capital. In February 1967, when college Red Guards in Beijing came
together to form a grand alliance known as the Capital Congress of
College Red Guards, the Capital Red Guards became the official
newspaper of the new organization after its 32nd issue. As the pub-
lication continued—totaling nearly 70 issues from March 1967 to
CAPITALIST-ROADERS ® 27
September 1968—it carried the CCP’s policy announcements and the
central leaders’ speeches, publicized the stories of Red Guards, and
reported on major events on college campuses both in Beijing and in
the provinces. In July 1968, Mao Zedong and the Central Commit-
tee of the CCP began to dispatch workers propaganda teams and
PLA propaganda teams to all college campuses in Beijing. This
decisive move of the central leadership soon put to an end the col-
lege Red Guard movement as well as the publication of the Capital
Red Guards.
CAPITALIST-ROADERS (zouzipai). When first used by Mao Zedong
in January 1965 in a party policy guideline for the Socialist Education
Movement, “‘capitalist-roaders”—literally “those in power within the
party who take the capitalist road’”—apparently referred to the party
officials who implemented certain pragmatic economic policies in the
countryside in response to the disaster of Mao’s Great Leap Forward
policies and hence, in Mao’s view, betrayed socialism. In the “Six-
teen Articles,” a party resolution adopted at the Eleventh Plenum of
the CCP Eighth Central Committee in August 1966, “capitalist-
roaders” refers to the party officials who opposed the Cultural Revolu-
tion. According to Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the
dictatorship of the proletariat, capitalist-roaders were representa-
tives of the bourgeoisie within the ruling communist party; they had
either “wormed their way into the party” or had become corrupted
while in power; they were China’s Khrushchevs aiming to restore
capitalism in China. And yet, since the term was never clearly defined,
and since virtually no party leader advocated capitalism, “‘capitalist-
roader” became a catchphrase in political witch-hunting.
Mao used this criminal title effectively to mobilize the masses and
shake up the party establishment, especially in the early stages of
the Cultural Revolution. In the central leadership, those whom Mao
considered to be his political rivals or their followers were almost
invariably dismissed as capitalist-roaders, as in the case of President
Liu Shaoqi, a dedicated communist who was named “the number
one capitalist-roader in the party.” Elsewhere, it was used to label
any party official who was not completely in line with Mao’s ultra-
leftist politics. In spring 1968, after some formerly denounced party
officials were admitted into the new power organ, the revolution-
ary committee, at various levels, the modifier “unrepentant” was
28 © CCP CENTRAL SPECIAL COMMITTEE HANDBILL
prefixed to “‘capitalist-roaders” in official media to distinguish them
from the “majority of corrigible capitalist-roaders.” In 1976, when
Deng Xiaoping, who had earlier been named “the number two capi-
talist-roader,” fell from power the second time, he was dismissed as
“unrepentant” and was named a “capitalist-roader who is still on the
road.” After the Cultural Revolution, the CCP leadership abandoned
the term “‘capitalist-roader.”
CCP CENTRAL SPECIAL COMMITTEE HANDBILL. On 8 Octo-
ber 1967, copies of a handbill in the form of an open letter to all CCP
members appeared on the streets of Beijing. Assuming the authorship
of a CCP Central Special Committee, the handbill was critical of the
Cultural Revolution. The Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG) listed this incident as a major counterrevolutionary case.
On 20 November 1967, Shen Jianyun, a worker at a briquette factory
in Tianjin, and 14 others involved in the handbill case were arrested.
Both their confessions and all of the evidence indicated that they had
made the handbill on their own and that the “CCP Central Special
Committee” was fake. However, apparently for the purpose of attack-
ing their political rivals within the CCP leadership, the CCRSG did
not want the case to be closed. Chen Boda insisted that there must be
a connection between the handbill and the February Adverse Cur-
rent. Xie Fuzhi, minister of public security, attempted to link the inci-
dent with a long list of ranking leaders including Deng Xiaoping. A
special investigation group was formed to search for “black backstage
bosses,” which led to the notorious fabrication of the Chinese Com-
munist Party (Marxist-Leninist) case implicating dozens of top-
ranking veteran leaders including Zhu De, Chen Yi, and Li Fuchun.
CENTRAL COMMITTEE WORK SESSIONS IN JANUARY-
FEBRUARY 1962. Also known as the “meeting of seven thousand,”
these were a series of enlarged Central Committee work sessions in
which CCP leaders at both central and provincial levels reflected crit-
ically upon the radical policies of the party in the 1950s, especially
those of the 1958 Great Leap Forward, that led to the great famine of
1959-1961 (commonly known by the euphemism of the “three years
of natural disasters” or “three difficult years”) in which 20 million
peasants starved to death. The adoption of certain remedial policies
by the central government following the self-reflection and self-
CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP ® 29
criticism at these work sessions was cited as a case of “Right devia-
tion” in Mao Zedong’s August 1966 big-character poster “Bom-
barding the Headquarters.” See also LIU SHAOQI.
CENTRAL COMMITTEE WORK SESSIONS ON 9-28 OCTO-
BER 1966. The work meeting was held in Beijing at Mao Zedong’s
suggestion to “sum up our experience and perform political-ideological
work [on party leaders]. Mao’s words, from a speech he gave at the
meeting, indicated that there was still much resistance among central
and provincial party officials to the Cultural Revolution that had
begun a few months before. The purpose of the meeting, then, was to
criticize a so-called bourgeois reactionary line represented by Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and to educate those party officials who
allegedly followed this line and did not support the mass movement.
In his speech “Two Lines in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolu-
tion,’ Chen Boda distinguished between the proletarian revolution-
ary line of Mao and the bourgeois antirevolutionary line of Liu and
Deng in terms of their attitudes toward the masses and criticized Liu
and Deng for repressing the mass movement with a work group
policy. Lin Biao, who also spoke at the meeting, pointed out that the
Liu-Deng line dominated the nation until Mao’s timely reversal of the
trend at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Commit-
tee. In Lin’s view, the ongoing and widespread violations of legal-
ity and human rights were a small element of chaos within a mass
movement and were necessary for preventing China from changing
its revolutionary color.
Having approved Chen’s and Lin’s views, Mao instructed that the
two speeches be distributed to every party branch and to every Red
Guard organization in order to push forward the movement to criti-
cize the bourgeois reactionary line. Chen Boda’s speech proved to be
influential largely due to its reproach of ranking officials’ children for
their self-righteousness, its criticism of the controversial “blood lin-
eage theory,” and its call for redressing the wrongs done to ordinary
people during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. These points
were made in the name of criticizing the bourgeois reactionary line.
CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP (zhong-
yang wenhua geming xiaozu; also known as zhongyang wenge). The
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) was established
30 © CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP
on 28 May 1966 to replace the Five-Person Cultural Revolution
Small Group as an organ under the Politburo Standing Committee
to direct the Cultural Revolution. The replacement was suggested by
Mao Zedong, approved by the Politburo at the enlarged Politburo
sessions, 4-26 May 1966, and documented in the May 16 Circu-
lar. Chen Boda was made head of the CCRSG. Kang Sheng was
appointed advisor. Jiang Qing, Wang Renzhong, Liu Zhijian, and
Zhang Chunqiao were named deputy heads. Other members of the
group include Yao Wenyuan, Wang Li, Guan Feng, Qi Benyu,
Xie Tangzhong, Mu Xin, and Yin Da. According to the May 16 Cir-
cular, the CCRSG would have an additional member from each of
the North, Northeast, Northwest, and Southwest regions, but these
turned out to be members in name at best and only for a short period
before they were dismissed from office locally. On 2 August 1966,
Tao Zhu was added to the CCRSG as another advisor.
As the Cultural Revolution continued to unfold, the CCRSG began
to act as a top decision-making office of the party, directly answer-
able to Mao; it virtually ruled over the Politburo, the Secretariat of
the Central Committee, and, to a large extent, the Central Military
Commission (CMC), especially after Mao launched an offensive
against the so-called February Adverse Current and made pow-
erless the old marshals in the CMC and the vice-premiers in the
Zhou Enlai-led State Council. In the first three years of the Cultural
Revolution, Mao used the CCRSG to mobilize the country for the
movement, guide the Cultural Revolution in the direction he desired,
and exercise his control of the country largely independent of the tra-
ditional party apparatus, which made the CCRSG the most powerful
and influential organization of the country for the period.
At the same time, a number of politically moderate members,
including Wang Renzhong, Liu Zhijian, Xie Tangzhong, Yin Da,
Mu Xin, and Tao Zhu, were purged from the group. Some radi-
cal members of the group were also expelled—Wang Li and Guan
Feng in August 1967 and Qi Benyu in January 1968. The three were
generally considered to be scapegoats; that is, they rather than the
CCRSG as a whole were made to bear the blame for creating chaos
in the armed forces, in the area of foreign affairs, and in the nation
in general. After the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in April
1969 when the new party apparatus was established and power
redistributed, the CCRSG ceased to function. See also EXTENDED
CENTRAL MILITARY COMMISSION ADMINISTRATIVE GROUP ® 31
CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP ROU-
TINE MEETINGS.
CENTRAL MILITARY COMMISSIONADMINISTRATIVE CON-
FERENCE OFFICE (junwei bangong huiyi). Established on 3
October 1971 to replace the Central Military Commission Admin-
istrative Group, the Central Military Commission Administrative
Conference Office was in charge of the daily business of the CCP
Central Military Commission (CMC). The Administrative Group was
dissolved because its members were mostly Lin Biao’s close associ-
ates, who were all removed from power after the death of Lin in the
September 13 Incident in 1971. The newly formed Administrative
Conference Office consisted of Ye Jianying, Xie Fuzhi, Ji Dengkui,
Li Xiannian, Zhang Chunqiao, Li Desheng, Wang Dongxing,
Zhang Caigian, Chen Shiju, and Liu Xianquan. Ye Jianying was
named head of the Conference Office. On 5 February 1975, exactly
one month after Deng Xiaoping was appointed a vice-chairman of
the CMC and chief of general staff of the PLA, the CCP Central
Committee decided to dissolve the CMC Administrative Conference
Office and resume the function of the standing committee of the
CMC. The standing committee, with both old and new members,
included Ye Jianying, Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian, Liu Bocheng, Xu
Xiangqian, Nie Rongzhen, Zhang Chungiao, Su Yu, Chen Xilian,
and Wang Hongwen, with Ye as chairman.
CENTRAL MILITARY COMMISSION ADMINISTRATIVE
GROUP (junwei banshizu). In 1967, when most of the vice-
chairmen of the Central Military Commission (CMC) were openly
criticized by mass organizations and were virtually forced out of
power largely due to their involvement in the February Adverse
Current, the executive office of the CMC, its standing committee,
stopped functioning. With Lin Biao’s support, the Central Military
Commission Administrative Group was formed in August 1967.
General Wu Faxian, commander of the air force, was appointed head
of the group. Other members of the group included Qiu Huizuo, Ye
Qun, and Zhang Xiuchuan. Ye was Lin Biao’s wife. Both Wu and
Qiu were Lin’s close associates. In September 1967, Wu became
deputy head when General Yang Chengwu, chief of general staff
of the PLA, was appointed head of the Administrative Group at the
32 © CENTRAL ORGANIZATION AND PROPAGANDA GROUP
recommendation of Premier Zhou Enlai and with the approval of
the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group. At the same time,
Li Zuopeng, another supporter of Lin Biao, replaced Zhang Xiu-
chuan as a member of the group. In March 1968, Yang Chengwu was
dismissed from all of his positions because of his involvement in the
so-called Yang-Yu-Fu Affair. General Huang Yongsheng, again a
close associate of Lin Biao, soon took Yang’s place as head of the
Administrative Group. Now the Group was made up of Lin’s wife
and his “four guardian warriors.”
Soon after Huang’s appointment, Chairman Mao Zedong sus-
pended the already-irregular meetings of the standing committee of
the CMC. Thus, the CMC Administrative Group virtually replaced
the CMC standing committee as the leading body in charge of mili-
tary affairs—a significant victory for Lin Biao and his supporters. In
April 1969, the First Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee
approved a move to add five more members to the CMC Administra-
tive Group: Liu Xianquan, Li Tianyou, Li Desheng, Wen Yucheng,
and Xie Fuzhi. After the Lushan Conference of 1970 (23 August-
6 September), at which the conflict between the Lin Biao group and
the Jiang Qing group surfaced, Mao no longer trusted Lin Biao
and, in April 1971, recommended Ji Dengkui and Zhang Caiqian
as additional members of the CMC Administrative Group to weaken
Lin’s influence and control. Finally, after Lin Biao’s death in the
September 13 Incident (1971), the CMC Administrative Group was
dissolved, and a new Central Military Commission Administrative
Conference Office was formed to take its place.
CENTRAL ORGANIZATION AND PROPAGANDA GROUP. This
was an outcome of the power reshuffle after the Second Plenum
of the CCP Ninth Central Committee (23 August—6 September
1970) when Chen Boda, one of the most influential figures in the
area of theory and propaganda and an ally of Lin Biao, was purged.
With Mao Zedong’s approval, the CCP Central Committee (CC)
announced on 6 November 1970 the dissolution of its Department
of Propaganda, an alleged stronghold of Chen Boda, and the estab-
lishment of the Central Organization and Propaganda Group so that,
according to the announcement, the leadership of the CCP’s organi-
zation and propaganda work would be more unified. Directly answer-
able to the Politburo, the Group was charged with overseeing the
CHEN BODA œ% 33
operation of the CC’s Department of Organization, the Xinhua News
Agency, the Bureau of Broadcasting Affairs, the All-China Labor
Union, the All-China Women’s Federation, and a host of official pro-
paganda agencies and organs including People’s Daily and Red Flag.
Members of the Group included Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang
Chungqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Ji Dengkui, and Li Desheng. Mao made
the move to assure the control of these key party apparatuses by those
he trusted and to contain the power of Lin Biao and his followers
after their differences with Mao surfaced during the Second Plenum
of the CCP Ninth Central Committee. Kang Sheng was appointed
head of the Group though he did not really assume the responsibility
due to poor health. Li Desheng did not become substantially involved
in the Group mainly because of his other official duties. The Central
Organization and Propaganda Group, therefore, was essentially con-
trolled by Jiang Qing and her close associates.
CHEN BODA (1904-1989). Head of the Central Cultural Revolu-
tion Small Group (CCRSG) and a top aide to Chairman Mao Zedong
in theoretical and ideological matters, Chen was elected to the Stand-
ing Committee of the CCP Politburo in August 1966 and became
one of the few veteran cadres who were entrusted with the new task
of leading an unprecedented mass movement. However, his gradual
alienation from Jiang Qing and her close associates in the CCRSG
and his developing alliance with the Lin Biao group eventually led to
his dismissal in September 1970 at the Second Plenum of the CCP
Ninth Central Committee.
A native of Huian, Fujian Province, Chen was born on 29 July
1904 and worked as an elementary school teacher before he joined
the CCP in 1927. Upon finishing his political training at the Sun
Yat-sen University in Moscow, Chen returned to China and went to
Yan’an in 1937. Serving as Mao’s political secretary and drafting
speeches and theoretical essays for Mao, Chen rose to prominence
as a leading theorist of the CCP and was elected to the Central
Committee in 1945. After the founding of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC), Chen served as deputy director of the CCP Propaganda
Department, director of the Political Research Institute of the CCP
Central Committee, editor-in-chief of the CCP theoretical organ Red
Flag, and vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Science. He
became an alternate member of the CCP Politburo in 1956.
34 © CHEN BODA
Appointed head of the CCRSG in May 1966 upon the recom-
mendation of Premier Zhou Enlai, Chen began to play an important
role in articulating Mao’s radical policies and directing the student
movement in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. Follow-
ing his instructions as leader of the work group for the People’s
Daily, the newspaper published an editorial entitled Sweep Away All
Cow-Demons and Snake Spirits on 1 June 1966. This article, edited
and revised by Chen himself, served publically to inaugurate the
Cultural Revolution. During the campaign to criticize the bourgeois
reactionary line, he attempted to explain CCP class policies against
a politically discriminatory blood lineage theory and became a
leading supporter of the emerging rebel faction that included many
students from politically disadvantaged families. As the Cultural
Revolution further unfolded, however, personal and political conflicts
began to develop in the CCRSG, especially between Chen and Jiang
Qing, deputy head of the CCRSG, and her close associates Zhang
Chungqiao and Yao Wenyuan. The conflicts intensified when Chen
began to work on the party’s political report in preparation for the
Ninth National Congress of the CCP and to discuss the content
of the report with Lin Biao. Mao criticized Chen’s first draft for its
“productionist” tendencies and entrusted Zhang Chunqiao and Yao
Wenyuan instead with the task of redrafting and revision, which vir-
tually ended Chen’s cooperation with his colleagues in the CCRSG
and pushed him further toward an alliance with the Lin Biao group.
Later, Chen made an ironic comment on the Zhang-Yao version of
the political report: “all movement and no goal.”
In August 1970, at the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central
Committee, Chen joined Lin Biao and the majority of CCP leaders
in proposing that the PRC state presidency be restored. He was also
involved in a strategic move, with the full support of the veteran lead-
ers attending the plenum, against Zhang Chunqiao. Opposing both
moves, Mao wrote a short piece entitled “Some Views of Mine” in
which he singled out Chen Boda as the leader creating chaos. Chen
was dismissed from office and was imprisoned. After Lin Biao’s
downfall, the CCP leadership denounced Chen Boda as a leader in
the “Lin-Chen Anti-Party Clique.” The CCP’s investigation report
dated 2 July 1972, named Chen a “Kuomintang anti-Communist,
Trotskyite, renegade, spy, and revisionist,” most of which turned out
to be baseless charges. In 1980, Chen was tried as one of the leading
CHEN LINING @ 35
members of the “Lin Biao, Jiang Qing Counterrevolutionary Clique”
and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Chen was released in Octo-
ber 1988 for health reasons and died on 20 September 1989.
CHEN ERJIN (1945- ). A worker in Xuanwei, Yunnan Province, Chen
read a great deal of political literature, particularly works by Marx,
Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and wrote between 1974 and 1976 a long
treatise entitled On Proletarian Democratic Revolution, advocating
a democratic reform of the socialist system. Adhering to what he
believed to be true Marxist principles and borrowing much from
what he understood as the American political system, Chen argued
for a communist two-party system with a separation of legislative,
executive, and judicial powers. Although he quotes Mao Zedong
frequently, his essay seems to imply strong criticism of personal-
ity cult, persecution, and the authorities’ abuse of power during the
Cultural Revolution: “No criticism of a president should constitute a
crime,” Chen wrote, “much less for anyone to be brutally executed for
saying no to a president.” According to his proposal, an elected presi-
dent should serve for only four years, and there should be no prayer
of “long live” for any president. Chen also proposed that systems of
legal counsel, people’s jury, and public trial be implemented, and that
secret trial be abolished. He called for recognition of personal liberty
and human rights under a proletarian dictatorship.
Chen’s treatise was widely circulated among underground read-
ing groups toward the end of the Cultural Revolution. After the
Cultural Revolution, it was carried in the underground democratic
journal Forum of April 5 in June 1979 and was published in English
translation as China: Crossroads Socialism in 1984. Chen has resided
in Thailand since 2000.
CHEN LINING (1933- ). A low-level party functionary at the Xiang-
tan city government, Hunan Province, and a mental patient with a
political paranoia about President Liu Shaoqi, Chen emerged in the
early stages of the Cultural Revolution as a new star known as “a
madman in a new era,” a name echoing Lu Xun’s well-known story
“A Madman’s Diary.”
While still a young clerk in 1957, Chen began to worry about Liu
Shaoqi’s opposition to Chairman Mao Zedong although he did not
have any evidence. The ultraleftist theory of class struggle that Mao
36 © CHEN LINING
put forth in 1960s, however, intensified Chen’s suspicion of Liu. From
1962 to 1964, Chen sent about 30 letters to Mao Zedong, Lin Biao,
Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, and party newspapers in which
he raved against Liu’s speeches and works, including his well-known
Cultivation of a Communist. At first, the local government treated
Chen as a lunatic and sent him to a psychiatric hospital three times. As
soon as he was out of the hospital, however, Chen began to send letters
to other leaders of the CCP Central Committee. In 1965, he was finally
arrested by the authorities on a counterrevolutionary charge.
When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Chen was in Beijing’s
Anding Psychiatric Hospital for a check of his mental state. During
this period, he wrote several letters to the Central Cultural Revolu-
tion Small Group (CCRSG) to appeal his case. Some of these let-
ters were totally illogical, while others were lucid. When Liu Shaoqi
clearly became the main target of the Cultural Revolution, some psy-
chiatrists of the rebel faction in the hospital began to see Chen not as
a madman but as a political prisoner. With much help from their allies
at Tsinghua University, they managed to send the CCRSG a proposal
for rehabilitating Chen. On 7 January 1967, Wang Li and Qi Benyu,
both members of the CCRSG, went to the hospital to meet Chen, his
psychiatrists, and the Red Guards from a number of colleges working
on his rehabilitation. Wang and Qi regarded Chen as a victim of per-
secution by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping; they redressed his case
and called him “a new madman in the socialist revolution era.” On 17
January, the major Red Guard newspaper Capital Red Guards pub-
lished a four-page report on Chen’s heroic deeds. The report claims
that Mao also spoke well of Chen’s act upon reading a note from
Jiang Qing. Chen thus burst onto the political stage of the Cultural
Revolution and began to give speeches everywhere about his battles
against Liu Shaoqi. And two stage adaptations of his story, Dairy of a
Madman and A Madman in the New Era, were soon produced.
After Mao decided to remove Wang Li in August 1967, however,
the debate about Chen’s case resumed in Anding Hospital, and Chen
became a pawn of the two rival mass organizations there and a hin-
drance to a grand alliance that Mao had been calling for. The one
faction of psychiatrists somehow managed to present enough evi-
dence—contrary to the earlier diagnosis of their rivals—to show that
Chen was indeed a mental patient and that he even criticized Mao’s
works. On 21 October 1967, Xie Fuzhi, minister of public security,
finally pronounced Chen a madman, but Xie also said that further
CHEN XILIAN ° 37
investigation was still needed because Chen was right to attack Liu
Shaoqi but wrong to oppose Chairman Mao. On the same day, Chen
was arrested again by the security forces and disappeared from
China’s political scene.
CHEN SHAOMIN (1902-1977). A veteran communist, Chen was the
only member of the CCP Central Committee (CC) who refused to
support the party’s resolution to denounce and expel President Liu
Shaoqi in 1968.
Formerly named Sun Zhaoxiu, Chen was a native of Shouguang
County, Shandong Province. She joined the CCP in 1928 and soon
distinguished herself as a leader of women’s and labor movements
and was later a high-level political commissar in the communist
army. In 1945, she became an alternate member of the CC. Chen led
the Textile Workers’ Union after 1949 and became deputy chair of
the All-China Federation of Trade Unions in 1957. She gained full
membership of the CC in 1956 and became a member of the Standing
Committee of the National People’s Congress in 1965.
When a discussion session was held concerning the “Investigative
Report on the Crimes of the Traitor, Spy, and Renegade Liu Shaoqi”
during the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee
(13-30 October 1968), Chen resorted to silence as a way of express-
ing her disagreement with the fabricated charges against Liu and was
therefore criticized by other attendants. An official briefing of the 23
October meeting accused Chen of not drawing a clear line between
herself and Liu Shaoqi and of opposing the party’s decision. When
votes were taken concerning the adoption of the anti-Liu report and
the resolution to expel Liu permanently from the CCP, Chen alone
did not raise her hand. Later, in response to the reproach by Kang
Sheng who had also tried to force her to go along with the majority
before the voting session, Chen answered: “That was my right [to
vote in favor of Liu].” Chen was soon sent to the Henan countryside
for reeducation, where the harsh living conditions and the lack of
proper medical care made her already poor health deteriorate rapidly.
Chen died on 14 December 1977. Ironically, however, the official
obituary honored her as “a proletarian revolutionary who firmly
opposed Liu Shaoqi and his bourgeois reactionary line.”
CHEN XILIAN (1915-1999). A native of Huang’an, Hubei Province,
and a member of the CCP from 1930, Chen was a veteran Red Army
38 © CHENYI
soldier and a well-known military general. He served as commander
of the Shenyang Military Region from 1959 to 1973, became chair-
man of the revolutionary committee of Liaoning Province in 1968,
and was elected to the Politburo of the CCP 9th, 10th, and 11th
Central Committees. Chen was transferred to Beijing in late 1973
and became commander of the Beijing Military Region. He was also
made vice-premier of the State Council in January 1975 and an execu-
tive member of the Central Military Commission (CMC) in February
1975. Politically Chen stayed rather close to the ultraleftist faction of
the CCP leadership, which led to his appointment in February 1976
as the person in charge of the day-to-day work of the CMC, replacing
Marshal Ye Jianying. In February 1980, Chen resigned from all his
responsible positions. In the remainder of his life, Chen was given a
number of honorary titles, including executive member of the CCP
Central Advisory Commission.
CHEN YI (1901-1972). A senior leader of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP), Chen Yi played a significant role in the CCP’s internal
politics as well as its battle against the Kuomintang before 1949 and
in the foreign affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after
1958. In the Cultural Revolution, Chen was one of the veteran offi-
cials involved in the 1967 February Adverse Current.
Born in Lezhi County, Sichuan Province, Chen initally became
engaged in the communist movement while studying in France from
1919 to 1921. He joined the CCP in 1923. A veteran of the Northern
Expedition and a leader of the 1927 Nanchang Uprising, he served in
such prominent military posts as party secretary of the front commit-
tee of the Fourth Red Army (1930s), commander of the New Fourth
Army in the war of resistance against Japan, and commander of the
Third Field Army of the People’s Liberation Army (1947—1948). After
the founding of the PRC, Chen served as mayor of Shanghai (1949-
58), minister of foreign affairs and vice-premier of the State Council
(1958-1972), and vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission
(1961-1972). In 1955, he was named one of the 10 marshals of the
PRC. Chen was elected to the Seventh Central Committee of the CCP
in 1945 and became a member of the Politburo in 1956.
At the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4-26 May 1966, Chen sup-
ported Mao’s decision to purge the so-called Peng-Luo-Lu- Yang
Anti-Party Clique. He also joined a number of ranking officials
CHEN YONGGUI ® 39
in attacking Marshal Zhu De for his alleged ambition to surpass
Mao and attempt a coup. As the Cultural Revolution continued to
unfold, Chen himself became a major target of the mass movement
manipulated by members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group (CCRSG) who wanted to take over foreign affairs. In Febru-
ary 1967, Chen, along with Tan Zhenlin, Xu Xiangqian, and a few
other senior party and military leaders, sharply criticized the radicals
of the CCRSG at a top-level meeting in Zhongnanhai. The outburst
of their anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment was denounced by Mao
as a February Adverse Current. Mao approved struggles against
Chen by the masses but protected him from further humiliation and
removal. Chen retained his seat in the Central Committee at the
Ninth National Congress of the CCP (1-24 April 1969) because
Mao, apparently in an attempt to balance factional power in the
central leadership, called for all delegates to vote for him as a repre-
sentative of the “Right side” of the party. But Chen was nevertheless
removed from actual power and sent to a factory for reeducation. At
Mao’s request, he held a symposium in 1969 on the international situ-
ation with Ye Jiangying and other marshals and made a suggestion
that China establish diplomatic relations with the United States.
After Lin Biao’s demise in 1971, Mao began to seek support
from the “old government” faction of the central leadership and sent
friendly signals to Chen and other senior party and military leaders.
However, Chen was already gravely ill; he died on 6 January 1972.
Two days later, Mao, to everyone’s surprise, made a last-minute deci-
sion to attend Chen’s memorial service, at which he spoke of Chen as
“a good man and a good comrade.”
CHEN YONGGUI (1914-1986). Born in Xiyang County, Shanxi
Province, Chen joined the CCP in 1948. A hardworking farmer and
party secretary of Xiyang’s Dazhai village and later Dazhai produc-
tion brigade, Chen contributed much to the transformation of his poor
home village into a highly productive farming community. While
Chen Yonggui earned numerous medals as a model worker, Mao
Zedong’s words, “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai,’ made Dazhai
the nation’s best known village. Chen also became a positive example
in Mao’s belittlement of intellectuals in favor of the “uncouth”
(dalaocu) in the mid-1960s. During the Cultural Revolution, Chen
was promoted as an “uncouth” leader and the peasant element in
40 © CHEN ZAIDAO
the leadership: he became chairman of the revolutionary commit-
tee of Xiyang County in 1967, vice-chairman of the revolutionary
committee of Shanxi Province in 1969, secretary of the CCP Shanxi
provincial committee in 1971, and vice-premier of the State Council
in 1975. He was elected to the CCP 9th, 10th, and 11th Central Com-
mittees and the CCP 10th and 11th Central Committee Politburos.
After the Cultural Revolution, Chen’s essentially ceremonial position
in the party central leadership declined: his vice-premiership ended
in 1980, and in 1983, he was appointed advisor of the Dongjiao State
Farm east of the city of Beijing. He died on 26 March 1986.
CHEN ZAIDAO (1909-1993). A native of Macheng, Hubei Province,
a member of the CCP from 1928, and commander of the Wuhan Mili-
tary Region from 1955 to 1967, General Chen was accused by Lin
Biao and Jiang Qing of a mutiny because of his support for the mass
organization Million-Strong Mighty Army when factional battles
started in Hubei in the spring and summer of 1967. Dismissed from
office on 27 July 1967, he was seen as the most prominent of “that
small handful (of capitalist-roaders) within the armed forces.” After
the downfall of Lin Biao, Chen was appointed to various positions
including deputy commander of the Fuzhou Military Region, CMC
adviser, and member of the CCP Advisory Committee. He was also
a member of the Executive Committee of the Fifth People’s National
Congress and a member of the Eleventh Central Committee of the
CCP. See also JULY 20 INCIDENT.
CHI QUN (1932- ). A native of Rushan, Shandong Province, Chi was
deputy chief of the propaganda section of the CCP central leaders’
security troop unit 8341. In July 1968, Chi left Zhongnanhai, the
CCP Central Committee headquarters, for the prestigious Tsinghua
University as a member of the PLA propaganda team. By the time
he became party secretary and revolutionary committee head of
Tsinghua University, a close alliance had been formed between him
and Xie Jingyi, a member of the workers propaganda team and
deputy head of the Tsinghua revolutionary committee. Chi and Xie,
both closely associated with the Jiang Qing group, became the two
most powerful officials at Tsinghua and remained as such—and the
two were almost always mentioned together—until their arrest after
Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.
CHINA'S KHRUSHCHEV © 41
Together, they turned both Tsinghua University and Peking Uni-
versity into models of repression and strongholds of ultraleftism.
During the Rectify the Class Ranks campaign, 1,228 of Tsinghua’s
6,000 staff members were suspected of being class enemies and
were investigated. In the fall of 1973, Chi and Xie started a cam-
paign at Tsinghua against what they considered the rightwing resur-
gence in education; hundreds of people were implicated. In January
1974, Chi and Xie led the effort at the two universities to compile
the material for the nationwide Criticize Lin and Criticize Con-
fucius campaign. Also in January 1974, they followed Jiang Qing’s
orders and investigated a student suicide case in Mazhenfu middle
school, Henan Province. Their investigation report led to widespread
persecution of school teachers and school officials nationwide. In
March 1974, they put together a writing team called the Peking
University and Tsinghua University Great Criticism Group, bet-
ter known by its penname Liang Xiao (a homophonic reference to
“two schools”).
Following directions from Jiang Qing and her faction via Chi and
Xie, this writing group published dozens of articles between 1974 and
1976, making insinuations against Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.
In late 1975, Mao spoke in favor of Chi and Xie in his comments on
a letter from Liu Bing and three other veteran cadres at Tsinghua
that criticizes Chi and Xie. Following Mao’s comments, Chi and Xie
led a “great debate on the revolution in education” on the Tsinghua
campus, directly attacking Minister of Education Zhou Rongxin and
implicitly aiming at Deng Xiaoping. This “debate” turned out to be
the prelude to the nationwide anti-Deng campaign known as Counter-
attack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend. After
Mao’s death in September 1976, Chi and Xie urged staff and students
at Tsinghua University and Peking University to pledge loyalty to
Jiang Qing in writing. In October, within a month of Mao’s death,
however, they were arrested with the Gang of Four. The verdict was
announced officially in November 1983 that Chi Qun was sentenced
to 18 years in prison.
CHINA’S KHRUSHCHEYV. Along with the “biggest capitalist-roader
within the party,” this was a reference to President Liu Shaoqi dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution. He was labeled as such in official media
in 1967 and 1968, but his name was not mentioned until after the
42 © CHINA-SOVIET DEBATE
Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (13-31
October 1968).
CHINA-SOVIET DEBATE. A significant prelude to the Cultural
Revolution, the heated ideological battle between the world’s two
largest communist parties broke out in 1963. Although the conflict
between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union
began in 1956 when General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev delivered
a destalinization speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union, the differences between the two parties were
not publicized until 4 April 1963 when the People’s Daily, following
directions from Mao Zedong and the Standing Committee of the
CCP Politburo, published the letter of 30 March from the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Central
Committee of the CCP. Then the CCP sent out a carefully composed
letter of dispute in mid-June, while the Soviet leadership issued “An
Open Letter to Soviet Party Organizations at All Levels and to All
Party Members” on 14 July criticizing China. The CCP’s response
to this letter and to the subsequent Soviet propaganda campaign took
the form of a series of polemics, commonly known as the “nine com-
mentaries” (jiuping), published between September 1963 and July
1964, in the name of the editorial departments of the CCP official
organs People’s Daily and Red Flag. The authors of these articles
included Chen Boda, Peng Zhen, and Wang Li. Mao Zedong also
contributed to the second and ninth commentaries. Deng Xiaoping
was in charge of the entire project.
These articles criticized the Soviet leadership for creating a split in
the international communist movement and promoting revisionism,
a deviation from the “basic principles of Marxism and its universal
truths.” Major issues of difference between the two communist par-
ties as laid out in the nine commentaries included the following: the
post-Stalin Soviet leadership had imposed on the international com-
munist movement a policy of “peaceful coexistence” of socialist and
capitalist states which was based on the belief that socialism would
eventually win the battle against capitalism worldwide by its higher
productivity in a “peaceful competition” in the economy; China, on
the other hand, supported a more radical, and supposedly Marxist,
“united front” and a violent proletarian revolution against colonial-
ism and imperialism. The Soviets proposed an “all-people party”
CHINA-SOVIET DEBATE ® 43
and “all-people state” against Stalin’s proletarian state, whereas the
Chinese charged Khrushchev and his comrades with not only aban-
doning the Leninist proletarian dictatorship but also denying and
covering up the class conflicts in the Soviet Union between the work-
ing people and a new breed of bourgeoisie consisting of privileged
bureaucrats and technocrats. And finally, the Soviets and the Chinese
were sharply divided over the issue of Joseph Stalin: Khrushchev
called Stalin a dictator and a tyrant and accused him of promoting
a personality cult and violating socialist legality, while the CCP
leadership considered Stalin to be a great proletarian revolutionary
on the world stage who made some mistakes but nevertheless upheld
the revolutionary course of Marxism developed and defended by
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; therefore, destalinization in the home of the
October Revolution meant betraying the Marxist-Leninist legacy in
the Soviet Union as well as reversing the rightful course of the inter-
national communist movement at large.
The political thaw in the post-Stalin Soviet Union alerted the CCP
leaders, especially Mao Zedong, to the danger of a capitalist restora-
tion after the communists took power. The last of the nine commen-
taries, which includes Mao’s own writing, concludes on a note about
the historical lesson of the proletarian dictatorship: Not hostile forces
from the outside but political deterioration and moral corruption of the
party and state leadership itself pose the greatest threat to a socialist
state. As Stalin should have done but failed to do, the Chinese com-
munists must “watch out for careerists and conspirators like Khrush-
chev and prevent such bad elements from usurping the leadership of
the party and the state at any level.” In order to prevent Khrushchev’s
revisionism from being reenacted in China and to dash the “hopes of
the imperialist prophets for China’s ‘peaceful evolution’” into capital-
ism, Mao writes, “we must everywhere give constant attention to the
training and upbringing of successors to the revolutionary cause from
our highest organizations down to the grass-roots.”
Mao’s contribution to the ninth commentary was to be chosen as the
longest passage in the Quotations from Chairman Mao and studied
as a keynote of his theory of continuing revolution under the dic-
tatorship of the proletariat. Its vocabulary was to become standard
during the Cultural Revolution, a political movement to mobilize
and educate the masses on the grassroots level in the course of class
struggle against “China’s Khrushchevs,” the “capitalist-roaders,”
44 © CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY
and the “bourgeoisie within the Party,” so that socialist China, unlike
the Soviet Union, would never change its color.
CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY (MARXIST-LENINIST) CASE.
This was a fabricated case against dozens of top-ranking CCP leaders.
In December 1968, four public security officers, following the instruc-
tions of Xie Fuzhi, extorted from Zhou Ci’ao, an assistant research
fellow at the Economics Institute of the Chinese Science Academy
and a suspect of the May 16 Counterrevolutionary Clique, a wild
tale about a Soviet-backed and coup-minded party within the CCP.
According to the confession Zhou gave under torture, Zhu De was
general secretary of this so-called Chinese Communist Party (Marxist-
Leninist), and Chen Yi was deputy general secretary and minister
of defense. The party’s nine-member standing committee included,
among others, Li Fuchun, Xu Xiangqian, Ye Jianying, and He
Long. A congress was said to have been held secretly in July 1967.
As planned by an “uprising operation committee,’ General Chen
Zaidao was to lead his troops to capture the city of Wuhan, while
a telegraph was said to have been prepared by military marshals to
seek cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek. Apparently with the back-
ing of the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership, Xie Fuzhi was
still able to press aggressively for further investigation of the veteran
leaders even after they were elected to the Ninth National Congress
of the CCP in April 1969. Because no trace of evidence was found
to support Zhou Ci’ao’s forced confession, the case of the Chinese
Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) finally came to an end around
August 1969 without an official conclusion.
CIRCULAR OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE CONCERNING
THE QUESTION OF “FERRETING OUT TRAITORS.” A
party central document (zhongfa [1967] 200) issued on 28 June 1967,
the circular contains guidelines and regulations regarding the wide-
spread activities taken by mass organizations to “ferret out traitors.”
Three months before, on 16 March 1967, the CCP Central Committee
(CC) had issued the “Instructions on Materials Concerning Such Self-
Confessing Traitors as Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, and Yang
Xianzhen” to publicize the falsified case of the so-called Sixty-One
Traitors Clique, which was a major step Mao authorized to bring
down Liu Shaoqi. The document inspired mass organizations to
CLASS STRUGGLE ® 45
launch a political campaign to “ferret out hidden traitors.” The move-
ment quickly turned into chaos: many veteran revolutionaries were
denounced as traitors without real evidence, and in some places the
campaign became a fierce factional battle.
In order to keep these activities in check, the CC issued the 28
June circular that specifies five rules: solid evidence is required for
any conclusion on a “traitor”; investigation of betrayal should be
focused on capitalist-roaders within the party; distinction must be
made between a cadre with some ordinary problems in the past and a
real traitor or a spy; mass organizations are not to engage in factional
battles in the name of “ferreting out traitors”; no mass organization
should attack another because the latter is investigating traitors or
spies from within. But, due to the influence of the earlier document,
the circular had a limited effect in regulating the mass organizations’
actions, and numerous falsified cases resulted in an environment of
political witch-hunting.
CLASS LINE. The phrase refers to the CCP’s class policy: in judg-
ing a person, consider the person’s family background but not fam-
ily background alone; give more attention to the person’s political
performance. This class policy gave rise to widespread political dis-
crimination against and persecution of people from the families of the
so-called Black Seven Categories during the Cultural Revolution,
especially in its early stages. Based on this policy, early Red Guard
organizations admitted only those from the families of the “Red Five
Categories.” See also BLOOD LINEAGE THEORY; “ON FAMILY
BACKGROUND.”
CLASS STRUGGLE. The classical Marxian concept of class strug-
gle—the economically based conflict between a ruling, exploiting
class of those who own the means of production and an exploited
class of laborers—was much revised by Mao Zedong in his theory
of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat
to mean the conflict in Chinese society, especially in the CCP and in
cultural/ideological spheres, between the revolutionary proletariat and
those who represented the reactionary bourgeoisie. In 1956, after the
completion of the socialist transformation of the nation’s economic
structure, eliminating private ownership, Mao temporarily entertained
the idea that the “conflict among people” was beginning to outweigh
46 © COLLAR LIU BATTLEFRONT
the conflict between mutually antagonistic classes in socialist China.
But, under much pressure from within the party leadership after the
failure of his radical policies of the Great Leap Forward, Mao, in the
early 1960s, warned “never to forget class struggle,” which turned out
to be an early signal of the Cultural Revolution.
During the China-Soviet Debate and the Socialist Education
Movement in the first half of the 1960s, Mao came to the conclusion
that class struggle existed and would continue to exist for a long time
to come after the proletarian class took power and that the gravest
danger of a capitalist restoration lay within the ruling communist
party in which a new bureaucratic class representing the bourgeoisie
was formed and was ready to direct the socialist country to capital-
ism by way of peaceful evolution. Based on such judgments, Mao
decided that carrying out class struggle against “capitalist-roaders”
within the party (literally, “those in power within the party who take
the capitalist road”) in nationwide political campaigns, such as the
Socialist Education Movement and the Cultural Revolution, was
necessary to ensure that China’s political power remain in the hands
of proletarian revolutionaries. In addition, Mao believed in carry-
ing out class struggle in ideological spheres—that is, waging wars
against what he considered to be nonproletarian culture and habits of
mind—so as to revolutionize the consciousness of the masses; hence
the revolution of 1966-1976 was called a cultural revolution.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s reformulation of class
struggle served to justify the persecution of the majority of party
leaders, and tens of millions of ordinary citizens, especially those of
the so-called Black Seven Categories and their children, who were,
in many cases, also treated as class enemies. According to an estimate
by the post-Mao leadership, persecution in the name of class struggle
during the Cultural Revolution affected one-eighth of China’s entire
population.
COLLAR LIU BATTLEFRONT (jiu Liu huoxian). A short form
for “The Liaison Station of the Battlefront for the Capital Proletarian
Revolutionaries to Collar, Struggle, and Criticize Liu Shaoqi.” The
“Battlefront” was a coalition of college Red Guard organizations
formed in July 1967 for the sole purpose of removing President Liu
Shaoqi from Zhongnanhai—the resident compound for CCP top
leaders in the heart of Beijing—to face criticism from the masses.
COLLAR LIU BATTLEFRONT @ 47
In August 1966, to experience the mass movement firsthand, Liu,
accompanied by the newly appointed first secretary of the Beijing
municipal party committee Li Xuefeng, went to the Beijing Institute
of Architectural Engineering and met with students from two rival
Red Guard organizations at the Institute. As the Cultural Revolution
continued to unfold, it became increasingly clear to the public that
Liu was on the wrong side of the movement. The rebels of the Insti-
tute, then, began to denounce Liu’s visit as an attempt to obstruct the
mass movement. They wrote Liu several times, demanding that he
talk to the masses at the Institute and openly acknowledge his guilt.
This was a prelude to the later organized effort to “collar” Liu.
On 5 January 1967, Liu wrote Chairman Mao Zedong for instruc-
tions as to how to respond to the rebels’ demands. Mao forwarded
Liu’s letter to Premier Zhou Enlai on the next day with a note sug-
gesting not going. The rebels’ demand was then put off after Zhou
talked to them on 7 January. As a new round of criticism of Liu surged
in April 1967, however, the demand from the rebels resurfaced. On
9 July, Liu, following orders from the central leadership, submitted
a self-criticism report to the rebels at the Beijing Institute of Archi-
tectural Engineering. Dismissing the report as Liu’s “manifesto of
retaliation” and “a big poisonous arrow” aimed at Mao’s revolution-
ary line, the rebels began to camp around the west gate of Zhong-
nanhai and set up their “Collar Liu Frontline Command Post” there,
demanding from Liu not only a guilty plea but also that he remove
himself from Zhongnanhai. On 18 July, some campers declared that
they were starting a hunger strike. With support from student organi-
zations at other schools and from members of the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), a “Collar Liu” mass rally was
held at the west gate that evening, drawing a crowd of several hun-
dred thousand representing more than a hundred mass organizations.
A large coalition of “Collar Liu Battlefront” was then formed.
When the word of the mass rally, the hunger strike, and the “Battle-
front” spread, many mass organizations outside Beijing sent their
representatives to join the effort. Hundreds of camps were set up
outside Zhongnanhai. More than a hundred loudspeakers were blast-
ing the demand of the “Battlefront” and slogans against Liu from
dawn till after midnight, and time and again the campers attempted to
storm in from each of the five gates of Zhongnanhai to haul Liu out.
The CCRSG lent its support by having medical teams dispatched to
48 © COMRADE CHIANG CH’ING
tend the campers. In the meantime, the attack on Liu Shaoqi and his
family escalated within the compound. Several struggle meetings
against Liu and his wife were held by the rebels within Zhongnanhai.
Physical abuse intensified at these meetings, and Liu’s residence was
ransacked. Finally, Liu, his wife, and their children were separated
and put under surveillance. The “Collar Liu Battlefront” lasted for
more than a month while Mao Zedong was on an inspection tour of
three regions. It was only by Mao’s directive that the crowd outside
of Zhongnanhai withdrew in August. Liu, however, never regained
his freedom or had a chance to see his family. The humiliation and
brutal abuse of Liu continued until his death on 12 November 1969.
COMRADE CHIANG CH’ING. A biography of Jiang Qing written
by Roxane Witke and published by Little, Brown and Company in
1977 in the United States. This book was the outcome of a series
of interviews Witke had with Jiang Qing in 1972 when the former,
an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York
at Binghamton, was visiting China as a member of a delegation of
American women.
The original goal of the delegation’s visit was to gather information
and conduct interviews on Chinese women’s liberation. After Witke
expressed her desire to meet Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai instructed that
if Jiang agreed to meet with Witke, “they could talk for an hour or
two.... But it’s all right also if Jiang does not want to meet her.” Jiang,
on the other hand, not only met Witke in Beijing on 12 August 1972
but also managed to have a long series of interviews with Witke in
Guangzhou from 25 to 31 August. During the weeklong private inter-
views—some 60 hours in all—Jiang told Witke about her personal
life and expressed her wish for a biography to be published overseas
that was comparable to Red Star over China, a story of Mao Zedong
by Edgar Snow. The result was Witke’s five-part story of Jiang Qing,
detailing Jiang’s impoverished, violence-filled childhood, her acting
career in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, her first meeting with
and later marriage to Mao in Yan’an, her increasingly active engage-
ment in culture and arts, and her emergence as a nationally recog-
nized leader during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1975, when the conflict between the Jiang Qing group and
the more moderate and more pragmatic faction of the party central
leadership intensified and when the Jiang group became increasingly
CONFUCIANISM VERSUS LEGALISM © 49
unpopular among ordinary Chinese citizens, the leak of the Jiang-
Witke interview caused a scandal. A popular political rumor spread
across China that Witke’s Comrade Chiang Ch’ing was translated
into Chinese with the title Queen of the Red Capital, and the book
caused an angry response from Mao: “[Jiang Qing is so] ignorant and
ill informed. Drive her out of the Politburo immediately. We shall
separate and go our different ways.” Premier Zhou Enlai ordered
the PRC delegation in the United Nations to purchase the copyright
of Comrade Chiang Ch’ing to prevent it from further distribution.
In fact, Comrade Chiang Ch’ing was neither published in 1975 nor
translated into Chinese. The Chinese Queen of the Red Capital came
out of Hong Kong and had nothing to do with Witke’s yet-to-be-
completed book.
After the downfall of the Gang of Four, Jiang Qing’s self-
exposure was listed as a crime. On 23 September 1977, the CCP Cen-
tral Committee issued part three of the collected material denouncing
the Gang of Four. In this document, Jiang Qing’s 1972 interviews
with Witke, Witke’s newly published book on Jiang, and the his-
torical military maps that Jiang had given Witke were mentioned
together as evidence of Jiang Qing’s “betrayal of the state in pursuit
of personal fame.”
CONFUCIANISM VERSUS LEGALISM (ru fa douzheng). An
observation by Chairman Mao Zedong on political conflicts in the
early stages of Chinese history, the idea of the “struggle between
Confucianism and Legalism” became in late 1973 and early 1974 the
focus of a propaganda campaign criticizing the allegedly Confucius-
worshipping Lin Biao. The real, though unnamed, target of the cam-
paign was Zhou Enlai, whose moderate and pragmatic approach to
state affairs was perceived by Mao and the ultraleftist Jiang Qing
group to be a main obstacle to a full realization of Mao’s radical
Cultural Revolution program.
Confucianism and Legalism were two among many competing
schools of thought in pre-Qin China. Mao’s view of the conflict
between the two as the major political conflict of the ruling class in
feudalist China, however, accorded Legalism an unprecedented high
status. Concerned with the politics of his own day rather than what
happened in the remote past, Mao seemed to be reacting to the report
that quotations of Confucius were found in Lin Biao’s residence and
50 © CONSERVATIVES
that in the “571 Project’? Summary, allegedly a blueprint for Lin’s
armed coup, Mao was called the present-day Qin Shihuang (the First
Emperor of Qin, or the First Emperor of China, known as a tyrant
embracing Legalism and persecuting Confucian scholars to consoli-
date his power). Mao’s high opinion of the Qin Emperor and Legalists
and his dislike of Confucius became known from a poem he wrote to
Guo Moruo, which was widely circulated at the time. On 4 July 1973,
during a conversation with Zhang Chunqiao and Wang Hongwen,
Mao made harsh comments on the work of foreign affairs directed by
Premier Zhou Enlai and mentioned “criticizing Confucius” as well.
With Mao’s approval, an article entitled “Confucius: A Thinker
Who Stubbornly Defended the Slave-Owning System,” by Profes-
sor Yang Rongguo of Zhongshan University, appeared in People’s
Daily on 7 August 1973. On 4 September, Beijing Daily carried the
article “Confucius and Reactionary Confucianism” by the Peking
University and Tsinghua University Great Criticism Group, a
major writing team in the service of Jiang Qing and her faction. The
Beijing Daily article inaugurated a series of publications, both in
essay and in book form, examining cases of the Confucian-Legalist
conflict in Chinese history but implicitly attacking Zhou Enlai. The
tactic of launching an attack by innuendo and insinuation was known
later as “allusory historiography.” In addition to this high-powered
media offensive, the discussion of Confucianism and Legalism also
took the form of lectures and study sessions among grassroots units
though the masses were largely unaware of the loaded present-day
references of the historical subject. See also CRITICIZE LIN AND
CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS.
CONSERVATIVES (baoshoupai). A counterreference to rebels (zao-
fanpai), this term was used to identify negatively the mass faction
that stood by party officials (the so-called capitalist-roaders) and
was supported by the work groups in the beginning stage of the
Cultural Revolution. Originally, the official label for this faction, as it
was referred to in the 5 June 1966 People’s Daily editorial “Becom-
ing Proletarian Revolutionaries or Bourgeois Royalists,’ was the
blatantly pejorative “royalists” (baohuangpai). After Premier Zhou
Enlai dismissed the term as inappropriate in a public speech on 10
September 1966, “conservatives” became its replacement but still
retained its negative tone and negative connotations. Compared to the
CONTINUING REVOLUTION UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT @ 51
rebel faction, the conservative camp had a significantly larger number
of people who were closely associated with the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) and had a vested interest in the current social and politi-
cal system—members of the CCP and the Communist Youth League,
members of the armed militia, students from families of the Red
Five Categories, and so on—although they never called themselves
“conservatives.”
Because of Mao’s support of the rebels, the conservative faction
tumbled during the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary
line (1966), so much so that during the nationwide power seizure
campaign (1967), competing rebel factions all dismissed their rivals
as “conservatives.” By then a large number of conservatives had
already joined moderate rebel organizations, and it was in the name
of rebellion that their conflict with radical rebels continued during
the nationwide armed conflict in 1967 and 1968. These moderate
rebels were sometimes referred to as “new conservatives.” See also
BYSTANDERS.
CONTINUING REVOLUTION UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP
OF THE PROLETARIAT. Also known as the theory of uninter-
rupted revolution, this is a major theory Mao Zedong developed in
his later years concerning the course of revolution under socialism.
The Cultural Revolution may be considered as an experiment or
implementation of this theory. Hailed as Mao’s greatest contribution
to Marxism-Leninism during the Cultural Revolution, the theory
was written into the party constitution twice (1969 and 1973) and
the state constitution once (1975) as the “third great landmark in the
development of Marxism” and the key to “resolving all conflicts and
contradictions under socialism,’ especially to preventing a “capitalist
restoration.”
Important elements of this theory began to appear in Mao’s politi-
cal thinking after 1956, the year of the 20th Soviet Congress at which
General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev criticized Joseph Stalin. Consid-
ering the Soviet destalinization to be a clear signal of departure from
socialism and regression to capitalism, Mao began to study the cause
of this backward turn under socialism and to search for ways of pre-
venting such a regression from happening in China. During the Anti-
Rightist campaign of 1957, he considered people’s political attitudes
(rather than just their socio-economic status) to be one of the defining
52 © CONTINUING REVOLUTION UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
features of their class identity. In the early 1960s, he called his col-
leagues’ attention to the ongoing class struggle in a socialist society.
He developed the concept of an emerging bureaucratic class in 1964
and coined the term “capitalist-roaders within the party” in 1965. In
the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, more ideas relevant to the
theory—such as Mao’s increasing attention to class struggle in ideo-
logical and cultural spheres and the education of the masses through
such struggle—appeared in the party documents the May 16 Circular
and the Sixteen Articles. However, the systematic formulation of
these ideas into a coherent theory did not take place until 1967.
On 18 May 1967, the People’s Daily and the Red Flag carried the
joint editorial “A Great Historical Document” written by Wang Li
with Mao’s revisions, marking the first anniversary of the passage
of the May 16 Circular. This article publishes the phrase “revolution
under the dictatorship of the proletariat” for the first time and calls
Mao’s theory represented by this phrase as “the third great landmark
in the development of Marxism.” The term is further developed in a
joint National Day (1 October) editorial of the People’s Daily, the
Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily, as a theory of “continu-
ously conducting revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
And, finally, the complete formulation of the theory appears in
“March Forward along the Road of the October Socialist Revolution:
Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist
Revolution.” This important theoretical piece was drafted by Chen
Boda and Yao Wenyuan, approved by Mao upon review, and pub-
lished on 6 November 1967, as a joint editorial of the People’s Daily,
the Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily. This article sums up the
theory with six major points:
1. The Marxist-Leninist law of the unity of opposites must be
employed in observing a socialist society.
2. During the long historical period of socialism, classes, class
contradictions, and class struggle still exist; so do the struggle
between the socialist and the capitalist roads and the danger of a
capitalist restoration. In order to prevent such a “peaceful evolu-
tion” into capitalism, a socialist revolution on the political and
ideological fronts must be carried out to the end.
3. Class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat is, in
essence, still a battle for power. To prevent a bourgeois takeover,
COUNTERATTACK ® 53
the proletariat must exercise an all-round dictatorship over the
bourgeoisie in the superstructure, including all cultural spheres.
4. The struggle between the two classes and the two roads in soci-
ety will necessarily find expression in the party as well. The
handful of those in power within the party who take the capital-
ist road are simply the bourgeois representatives in the party. To
strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat, we must watch out
for the Khrushchevs among us, expose them, and take back the
power they had seized.
5. The most important form of continuing revolution under the
dictatorship of the proletariat is the great proletarian cultural
revolution, in which the masses liberate themselves and educate
themselves.
6. The fundamental program of the great proletarian cultural revo-
lution in the ideological sphere is “fight selfishness, repudiate
revisionism.” This is a great revolution that touches the depths
of human consciousness and aims to establish in the people’s
mind the world outlook of the proletariat.
The same day as the article appeared, Lin Biao, at a mass rally,
spoke of the Cultural Revolution as Mao’s continuing revolution
theory in practice, an “indication of enormous significance that
Marxism-Leninism, in its developing process, has reached the stage
of Mao Zedong Thought.”
At the Sixth Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee, held
in June 1981, the central leadership repudiated Mao’s continuing
revolution theory. According to the Resolution on Certain Questions
in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s
Republic of China adopted at the plenum, Mao’s theory of continuing
revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat consists of “errone-
ous leftist notions” divorced from both Marxist-Leninist theory and
Chinese reality. The resolution embraces Mao Zedong Thought as
an “integration of the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism with
concrete practice of the Chinese revolution” but insists that Mao’s con-
tinuing revolution theory is inconsistent with and, therefore, must be
thoroughly distinguished from, the system of Mao Zedong Thought.
COUNTERATTACK ( fanji). Directed by Li Wenhua and produced by
Beijing Film Studio in 1976 following orders from Jiang Qing and
54 © COUNTERATTACK THE RIGHT-DEVIATIONIST REVERSAL-OF-VERDICTS TREND
Zhang Chungqiao, this was a film intended to be a propaganda piece
against Deng Xiaoping during the campaign to counterattack the
right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend. Portrayed with strik-
ing resemblance to Deng Xiaoping in terms of his political views and
political experience, a villainous provincial party chief, after his rein-
statement, sets going a trend against the Cultural Revolution. There is
also direct mention of Deng’s name and his policies of overall recti-
fication in the film. The piece was hastily put together in six months,
and by September 1976 it was ready for internal preview. However,
before the film was publicly released, Jiang Qing and her supporters
were arrested. The post-Cultural Revolution Chinese government
named the film a standard piece of conspiratorial literature.
COUNTERATTACK THE RIGHT-DEVIATIONIST REVERSAL-
OF-VERDICTS TREND (fanji youging fan’anfeng) (1975-77).
Launched in November 1975, the campaign against the so-called
reversal of verdicts was Mao Zedong’s response to Deng Xiaoping’s
tactically anti-Cultural Revolution overall rectification program.
The political campaign became more specifically identified as a
“Criticize Deng, Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-
Verdicts Trend” movement in February 1976, continued briefly under
Hua Guofeng after Mao’s death, and officially ended with the full
reinstatement of Deng in July 1977.
Mao started the campaign initially in educational circles by writing
harsh comments on one of the two letters Liu Bing and three other
veteran officials at Tsinghua University had written him in August and
October 1975 criticizing Chi Qun and Xie Jingyi, Mao’s trusted PLA
propaganda team and workers propaganda team leaders at Tsing-
hua University. Mao considered the two letters to have represented a
widespread anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment, and Deng Xiaoping,
who took the letters to Mao, was partial to the authors in Mao’s view.
On 20 November, the Politburo met upon Mao’s request to evaluate
the Cultural Revolution. Deng disappointed Mao by refusing to take
charge of drafting a resolution on the issue. Later in the month, Mao’s
comments on the letters by Liu Bing and his colleagues were presented
to ranking officials in the form of briefing at a meeting organized by the
Politburo, and the phrase “a trend of right-deviationist reversal of ver-
dicts” was mentioned for the first time. Implicated in this trend if not
yet identified with it, Deng’s rectification program was forced to end.
COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ARMED REBELLION IN SHANGHAI ° 55
On 1 December, the party organ the Red Flag carried an article
entitled “The Direction of the Revolution in Education Cannot Be
Altered” by the Great Criticism Group of Peking University and
Tsinghua University. The publication of this article marked the
beginning of a massive propaganda campaign against Deng Xiaoping
and, implicitly, Deng’s strongest supporter Premier Zhou Enlai.
On 25 February 1976, a provincial leaders’ meeting was called by
the central leadership, at which Hua Guofeng, who was made act-
ing premier after Zhou Enlai’s death, said that Deng could be criti-
cized by name. Also at this meeting, Mao’s order to “criticize Deng,
counterattack the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend” was
presented. Mao’s words were said to be gathered by Mao Yuanxin,
the chairman’s liaison at the Politburo. Mao allegedly said that the
bourgeoisie was within the party, that capitalist-roaders were still
on the road, that some veteran cadres were discontent and would
settle scores with the Cultural Revolution, and that Deng Xiaoping
did not care for class struggle. In the ongoing media campaign, Deng
was referred to as “the biggest unrepentant capitalist-roader within
the party.’ On 7 April, the Politburo passed a resolution at Mao’s
request, dismissing Deng from office and implicating him with the
Tiananmen Incident of 5 April—a historical event at the time of the
Qingming Festival, in which millions of people came to Tiananmen
Square to commemorate the late Premier Zhou Enlai and protest
against the Jiang Qing group.
After the downfall of the Gang of Four in October 1976, Hua Guo-
feng, Mao’s hand-picked successor, insisted on a policy called “two
whatever’s” (supporting whatever decisions Mao had made and fol-
lowing whatever instructions Mao had given) and decided to continue
with the campaign against Deng and against the right-deviationist
reversal of verdicts and to defend the Cultural Revolution. Ranking
cadres Chen Yun and Wang Zhen, among others, objected to Hua’s
decisions on Deng, while Deng himself challenged the idea of “two
whatever’s.” Eventually, with broad support from members of the CCP
Central Committee, Deng was reinstated in all his party, government,
and military positions at the Third Plenum of the Tenth CCP Central
Committee in July 1977. See also OVERALL RECTIFICATION.
COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ARMED REBELLION IN
SHANGHAI (1976). This is the official reference to a long- and
56 © COW-DEMONS AND SNAKE-SPIRITS
ambitiously planned armed resistance in Shanghai in anticipation of
the political struggle and leadership change in Beijing after the death
of Mao Zedong. Considering Shanghai to be the base of the cultural
revolutionaries, members of the Jiang Qing group, Wang Hongwen
in particular, paid much attention to building up a strong militia,
and even “the second army” (second to the PLA), as Wang put it,
in Shanghai. In 1975, Wang demanded that the militia be prepared
for a guerilla war. In August 1976, as Mao was dying, 74,000 guns,
300 cannons, and much ammunition were given to the militia troops
in Shanghai. However, due to the lack of leadership and the lack of
popular support, the ultraleftists’ battle plan to defend their cause
was easily foiled by the CCP central leadership after the arrest of the
Gang of Four in Beijing on 6 October 1976.
COW-DEMONS AND SNAKE-SPIRITS (niuguisheshen). This is
a generic term referring to all citizens denounced as class enemies,
including landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, “bad ele-
ments,” Rightists, capitalists, “black gang” members, “reactionary
academic authorities,” traitors, spies, capitalist-roaders, and even
the children of the denounced. The term was adopted by the CCP
official organ the People’s Daily in its editorial “Sweep Away All
Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits” (1 June 1966). Mao Zedong also
used the term in his writing and speeches. The official endorsement
helped make “cow-demons and snake-spirits” one of the most popu-
lar dehumanizing terms during the Cultural Revolution.
COW SHED (niupeng). This is a common reference to illegal prisons
for those denounced as class enemies, or “cow-demons and snake-
spirits” (hence the name “cow shed”), during the Cultural Revolu-
tion. See also MASS DICTATORSHIP.
CRITICIZE CHEN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION (1970-
1971). Initiated by Mao Zedong at the Second Plenum of the CCP
Ninth Central Committee (23 August-6 September 1970), this
political campaign against Chen Boda for his support of Lin Biao in a
power intrigue against the Jiang Qing faction at the plenum was also
Mao’s strategic move against Lin Biao and his associates. After the
downfall of Lin Biao in September 1971, the campaign against Chen
became the movement to criticize Lin and conduct rectification in
CRITICIZE CHEN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION © 57
which the political target, the “Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique,” was also
referred to as the “Lin-Chen Anti-Party Clique,” though in official
media both campaigns were known as the “Criticize Revisionism and
Conduct Rectification” movement until late August 1973 when Lin’s
downfall was officially publicized.
At the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee,
Chen Boda, with Lin Biao’s approval, compiled a brief collection of
quotations called “Engels, Lenin, and Chairman Mao on Genius” and
distributed it in the form of a pamphlet to the delegates. The unstated
aim of this move was to make insinuations against the radical fac-
tion of the central leadership, especially Zhang Chunqiao who had
insisted on excluding from the revised Constitution (on the agenda to
be discussed at the plenum) the word “genius” and two other modi-
fiers praising Mao’s contribution to Marxism. After hearing the com-
plaint from Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, Mao
wrote “Some Views of Mine,” accusing Chen Boda of trickery and
deceit with a fake Marxist theory on genius, and called on CCP offi-
cials to study classic works of Marxism so as not to be deceived by
the likes of Chen. In the meantime, Chen was under investigation.
The CCP Central Committee (CC) officially launched the cam-
paign against Chen internally on 16 November 1970 with a document
called “Directives Regarding the Anti-Party Question of Chen Boda.”
Mao’s “Some Views of Mine” was attached, and a series of quota-
tions on genius that Chen compiled was included in the document
as an appendix. This was the beginning of the campaign to criticize
Chen and conduct rectification. The campaign continued and deep-
ened as Mao guided it with a series of directives, mostly in the form
of comments on the relevant briefings, reports, and self-criticisms
of Lin Biao’s associates. The targets of the campaign, theoretically,
were Chen’s supposed “productionism” in opposition to the revolu-
tionary line of the Ninth National Congress of the CCP (the charges
were based on his conflict with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan
over the drafting of the party’s political report for the meeting), his
revisionism or “fake Marxism,’ and his divisionism. But the real
political aim of the campaign appeared to be, as the process of the
campaign itself showed, to implicate Lin Biao’s associates and force
them to fall into step with Mao’s ideological and political line. This
effort culminated in a two-week “report session” (15-29 April 1971)
in Beijing at which central and local cadres gathered to talk about
58 © CRITICIZE LIN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION
their experience in exposing and criticizing Chen, discuss written
self-criticisms submitted by Lin Biao’s cohorts Huang Yongsheng,
Wu Faxian, Ye Qun, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo, and study
Mao’s critical comments on their self-criticisms. On the last day of
this meeting, the CC issued a circular to communicate the Chen Boda
issue to all party members, and the campaign reached the grassroots
level nationwide.
As Mao summarized after Lin Biao’s downfall, issuing directives,
which he called “throwing rocks,” was an approach he adopted to
guide the Criticize Chen and Conduct Rectification movement and
to undermine Lin Biao’s power. The fall of Chen Boda the “scholar,”
as he was often called, turned out to be a prelude to the fall of Lin
Biao the commander and his generals. Both, in Mao’s view, were part
of the 10th major line struggle in the history of the CCP, which was
also a struggle between two headquarters, like the one between Mao
and President Liu Shaoqi in the early part of the Cultural Revolu-
tion. See also ELIMINATING THE OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL
PRESIDENT.
CRITICIZE LIN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION (pilin zheng-
feng) (September 1971—August 1973). Referred to in official media
as the “Criticize Revisionism and Conduct Rectification” until August
1973 when the Tenth National Congress of the CCP convened
to close the case of the “Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique,’ the phrase
“Criticize Lin and Conduct Rectification” was the name of a political
campaign against Lin Biao and his supporters after the September 13
Incident. Also known as part of the 10th line struggle in the history
of the CCP, this campaign was a continuation of the Criticize Chen
and Conduct Rectification movement that began in August 1970 at
the Lushan Conference.
The campaign proceeded first with a series of emergency notices
and measures. On 18 September 1971, five days after the fatal crash
of the aircraft Trident 256 at Undurkhan, Mongolia, that killed Lin
Biao, Ye Qun, their son Lin Liguo, and six others aboard the plane,
the CCP Central Committee (CC) issued a circular to ranking cadres
concerning Lin Biao’s flight and death, charging Lin with treason and
calling on party members to “break clean” with him. On 24 Septem-
ber, the CC ordered Generals Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li
Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo—all implicated in the Lin Biao case—to
CRITICIZE LIN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION ° 59
leave office and conduct self-examination. On 3 October, the CC
disbanded the Lin Biao-controlled Central Military Commission
Administrative Group and formed the Central Military Commis-
sion Administrative Conference Office in its place, with Marshal
Ye Jianying as chair. On the same day, the CC also formed a special
case group with Zhou Enlai as director to investigate the problems
of the “Lin [Biao]-Chen [Boda] Anti-Party Clique.” On 6 October,
the CC issued another circular concerning the alleged coup d’état
by Lin Biao and his associates. This document, to be circulated at
the county level of party leadership first, also outlined a schedule for
gradually releasing the information to grassroots party organizations
and the general public. On 24 October, the CC ruled that the informa-
tion of the Lin Biao affair be communicated to the masses but not be
published in newspapers or on radio or in the form of big-character
posters or slogans.
On 11 December 1971, 13 January 1972, and 2 July 1972, respec-
tively, the CC authorized the issuance of part one, two, and three of
“The Crushing of the Counterrevolutionary Coup of the Lin-Chen
Anti-Party Clique,” all of which had been prepared by the special case
group. Part one focused on the activities of Lin and company around
the time of the 1970 Lushan Conference; part two on the “5-7-1 Proj-
ect Summary,” said to be Lin’s “program of armed coup”; part three
on evidence of the coup attempt itself. On 20 August 1973, four days
before the Tenth National Congress of the CCP, the CC approved
the special case group’s “Investigative Report on the Counterrevolu-
tionary Crimes of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique” and expelled Lin
Biao, Chen Boda, Ye Qun, Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuo-
peng, and Qiu Huizuo from the party. The words about Lin Biao as the
greatest defender of Mao’s revolutionary line and the statement about
Lin as Mao’s successor were deleted in the revised CCP Constitution.
The deletion was approved by the Tenth National Congress.
The guideline of the Criticize Lin and Conduct Rectification cam-
paign underwent a considerable revision as the movement proceeded.
At first, Zhou Enlai characterized Lin Biao’s tendencies and policies
as “ultraleftist.” In so doing, Zhou, who was in charge of the daily
affairs of the central government and had full power for some time
when Mao Zedong was gravely ill immediately after Lin’s fall,
attempted to take advantage of the political situation to reverse the
kind of extremism that had dominated Chinese politics, sabotaged
60 © CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS
the national economy and caused chaos nationwide since the begin-
ning of the Cultural Revolution. Zhou began to be vocal, as he had
not before, about the importance of the nation’s economy, of the
skills and expertise of the workforce, of education, and of diplomatic
relations. He also advocated “liberating cadres” and “implementing
the party’s policies for intellectuals.” In the meantime, Mao reflected
upon the Lin Biao affair and began to acknowledge some missteps in
the past. He suggested the redressing of the cases of the February
Adverse Current and the Yang-Yu-Fu Affair and allowed the prac-
tical-minded Deng Xiaoping to return from a virtual exile to Beijing
to serve as deputy premier—a move that Zhou supported.
However, Zhou’s measures and ideas against “ultraleftism” met
strong resistance from cultural revolutionaries of the Jiang Qing
group. They labeled Lin Biao and company as “ultrarightist” and saw
Zhou’s slogans and policies as symptoms of aresurgence of right-lean-
ing tendencies. Well aware that Zhou’s attack on ultraleftism might
lead to a complete reversal of the course of the Cultural Revolution,
Mao supported Jiang Qing and her associates. In his conversation
with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan on 17 December 1972,
Mao concurred with their judgment of Lin Biao. In September 1972,
Mao transferred 38-year-old Wang Hongwen, Zhang and Yao’s close
associate in Shanghai, to Beijing and allowed him to attend top-level
meetings of the Politburo, the State Council, and the Central Military
Commission. The rapid rise of Wang Hongwen, who was given the
honor of delivering the report on the revision of the CCP Constitu-
tion at the CCP Tenth National Congress, entered the Politburo, and
became vice-chairman of the CCP, signaled that Mao was choosing
another successor after his first choice turned out to be disastrous.
As the Criticize Lin and Conduct Rectification movement drew to a
close around the CCP Tenth Congress, another campaign, Criticize
Lin and Criticize Confucius, was about to begin. This movement,
supposedly with Lin Biao as the main target, was implicitly a general
offensive against Zhou Enlai for his criticism of ultraleftism and his
tactic of revising some of Mao’s radical policies.
CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS. This was a
political and ideological campaign that Mao Zedong launched in
1974 supposedly for a dual purpose: first, to link Lin Biao’s ideology
to what Mao saw as China’s moralistic, backward-looking, and reac-
tionary legacy, namely Confucianism; second, to defend the Cultural
CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS © 61
Revolution against the kind of criticism that in Mao’s view paralleled
the Confucian resistance to essentially Legalist social transformations
in the early “feudal” period of Chinese history. However, with a strong
aversion to Zhou Enlai’s “Confucian” inclination to moderation and
realism and in reaction to Zhou’s well-received critique of Lin Biao’s
ideology as ultraleftism, Mao was also directing from behind the
scene a general offensive against Zhou Enlai in the name of an anti-
Lin campaign. Zhou was never named as a target; rather, by innuendo
and insinuation he was referred to as, among other names, “the major
Confucian within the party” and “the Duke of Zhou (Dynasty).”
Mao began to connect Lin Biao with Confucius in early 1973 after
he learned that notes on Confucius and Mencius and hand-copied
quotations from the Analects of Confucius had been found in Lin’s
residence. Mao also knew that in the “571 Project” Summary,
allegedly a blueprint for Lin’s armed coup, he himself was called
the present-day Qin Shihuang (the First Emperor of China). In May
1973, at a work session of the CCP Central Committee (CC), Mao
proposed to “criticize Confucius” as he was talking about Lin Biao.
On 4 July 1973, Mao told Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chungqiao
that like the Kuomintang, Lin Biao followed the dictates of Confu-
cius and opposed the Legalists. In Mao’s view, the Legalists, who
helped the Qin Shihuang build an empire, favored the present over
the past, while Confucians, politically short of accomplishments,
tended to turn the course of history backwards. On 1 January 1974,
three official organs, the People’s Daily, the Red Flag, and the Liber-
ation Army Daily, carried a joint New Year’s Day message that called
upon the nation to criticize the tradition of revering Confucianism
and debasing Legalism and designated the criticism of Confucius to
be a component of the criticism of Lin Biao. On 18 January, Mao
authorized the dissemination of the collection entitled Lin Biao and
the Way of Confucius and Mencius, which was put together by Jiang
Qing’s followers at Peking University and Tsinghua University. The
issuance of this document nationwide marked the beginning of the
Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius movement.
Despite its name, however, the actual content of the campaign had
little to do with Lin Biao. Jiang Qing and her associates in the central
leadership were prompted by Mao as to the real purpose of the cam-
paign. They directed the campaign with several loyal writing teams,
especially the Peking University and Tsinghua University Great
Criticism Group and the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee
62 © CRITICIZE REVISIONISM AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION
Writing Group. The writing teams published a series of supposedly
historical commentaries with Zhou Enlai as an implicit target. In
these articles, Confucius was said to have represented the old order
of a slave-owning aristocratic society and to have devoted his life
to the reactionary cause of “restoring the perished kingdoms, reviv-
ing the doomed dynasty, and recalling those retired from the world.”
The intended but unsaid parallel was Zhou Enlai’s painstaking effort,
especially after the downfall of Lin Biao, to deradicalize the party’s
policies, to rehabilitate veteran cadres and intellectuals, and to restore
order and normality to the economy, education, and national life in
general. In the meantime, some of these articles applauded the Qin
Shihuang for burning books and burying alive Confucian scholars
and, with unmistakable references to Jiang Qing, praised “outstand-
ing stateswomen” of the past, such as Queen Dowager Lü of the Han
Dynasty and Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty, for upholding
the so-called Legalist line of social progress against reactionary Con-
fucianism. Referring to this campaign, Jiang Qing suggested that the
11th line struggle within the party had begun, while Wang Hongwen,
who was now closely associated with Jiang Qing, called it the “Sec-
ond Cultural Revolution,” both alluding to Zhou Enlai as the target of
the political movement.
This propaganda campaign in the manner of allusory historiog-
raphy did not gain much support from within the party and without,
so much so that Mao eventually detached himself from Jiang Qing
and said at the Politburo meeting of 17 July 1974, “She does not
represent me; she represents herself.” Articles of vicious insinuations
against Zhou, however, continued to appear in major newspapers in
the second half of 1974. But the campaign had lost steam and eventu-
ally ended without an official closure when Deng Xiaoping as first
vice-premier assumed Zhou Enlai’s responsibilities in January 1975
and pursued Zhou’s course much more aggressively in a nationwide
overall rectification program. See also CONFUCIANISM VERSUS
LEGALISM.
CRITICIZE REVISIONISM AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION
(pixiu zhengfeng). This was the publicized name for both the politi-
cal campaign against Chen Boda (August 1970—September 1971) and
the one against Lin Biao and his supporters (September 1971—August
1973). In the course of these campaigns, the names of Chen and Lin
CULTURAL REVOLUTION COMMITTEE © 63
were not mentioned in official media; Chen was often referred to as
a “fake Marxist swindler” and Lin as a “swindler of the Liu Shaoqi
kind.” See also CRITICIZE CHEN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICA-
TION; CRITICIZE LIN AND CONDUCT RECTIFICATION.
CULTIVATION OF A COMMUNIST (lun gongchandangyuan de
xiuyang). Based on a series of lectures that Liu Shaoqi had deliv-
ered at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Yan’an in July 1939,
this well-known work appeared in book form for the first time in
1943 and was subsequently widely regarded as an essential textbook
and classical literature for the CCP’s ideological education. Its first
revised edition came out in 1949 and second in 1962. On several
occasions, Mao Zedong offered favorable comments on the book
as well. In mid-February 1967, however, Mao spoke of Liu Shaogqi’s
book as a “deceitful work” that only talks about personal cultivation
without addressing the reality of class struggle and of the struggle
of the proletariat for power. Therefore, in Mao’s view, the book rep-
resented “a form of idealism totally opposed to Marxism-Leninism.”
“Even Chiang Kai-shek,” Mao said, “and even the bourgeoisie of
the world, could accept the kind of personal cultivation discussed in
the book. What individual? What personal cultivation? Everyone is
a class person; there is no such a thing as a person standing alone, a
person in the abstract. What he talks about is the way of Confucius
and Mencius, acceptable to both feudal landlords and capitalists.”
On 8 May 1967, the People’s Daily and the Red Flag carried a joint
editorial entitled “The Critical Point of Cultivation Is Betrayal of the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The publication of this article was
authorized by the Politburo with the approval of Mao. On 11 May,
the CCP Central Committee (CC) issued a circular on criticizing Liu
Shaogqi’s Cultivation, in which Liu is referred to as the “biggest capi-
talist-roader within the party.” The nationwide criticism of The Cul-
tivation of a Communist was thus launched. The book that had enjoyed
so much prestige in the CCP was now labeled “black cultivation” and
a “big anti-Marxist-Leninist and anti-Mao Zedong Thought poison-
ous weed.” On 29 February 1980, the CC rehabilitated Liu Shaoqi.
The Cultivation of a Communist was reprinted in the same year.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION COMMITTEE (wenhua geming
weiyuanhui). This was the name of the temporary power organ in a
64 © CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP
given institution formed in the beginning stage of the Cultural Revo-
lution for the purpose of directing the ongoing political movement.
In some institutions, it was called the Cultural Revolution Prepara-
tion Committee (meaning a preparatory committee for setting up the
Cultural Revolution Committee). It should be distinguished from the
organ of power “revolutionary committee” established at various
levels as a result of the power seizure movement in 1967. Cultural
Revolution Committees were first created in educational and gov-
ernmental institutions in early summer 1966 and often consisted of
party officials and the representatives of the masses. When the party
authority in an institution fell, the committee often became the ad hoc
authority of the institution. In Beijing, where work groups were sent
to educational institutions in June and July, many such committees
were established under the auspices of the work groups.
When Chairman Mao Zedong ordered in late July that work
groups be withdrawn, the Cultural Revolution Committees of these
institutions, then, took over. The “Sixteen Articles,’ a programmatic
document for the Cultural Revolution adopted at the Eleventh Ple-
num of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (1-12 August 1966),
endorses the Cultural Revolution Committee as a temporary organ of
power not only suitable for educational and governmental institutions
but also adaptable for factories, enterprises, and urban and rural com-
munities. Soon Cultural Revolution Committees were established in
all kinds of institutions at the local level across China. Before long,
however, many such committees were accused of having followed the
bourgeois reactionary line of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in
supporting traditional party authorities and suppressing the rebellion
of the revolutionary masses. As a result, most of these committees
either were forced to stay on the sidelines or were replaced by various
newly established mass organizations in late 1966.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP. See CENTRAL
CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP.
_D-
DAILY READING (tiantiandu). The phrase refers to a government-
endorsed practice of studying Mao Zedong’s writing for an hour
DAO COUNTY MASSACRE ® 65
every day, which contributed much to the popularization of Mao
Zedong Thought and the personality cult of Mao during the Cul-
tural Revolution. The practice originated in the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA), and, with Lin Biao’s enthusiastic endorsement, the
daily reading hour was so firmly set as to become “‘thunder-proof,”
as army soldiers put it. With much urging and support from the cen-
tral leadership, the civilian authorities at the grassroots—in schools,
in factories, and in government institutions—also implemented the
daily reading program as a routine (such as the first class hour in
school and the first work hour in a government agency) in the first
few years of the Cultural Revolution. Mass meetings were often held
at which activists would talk about ways they studied Mao’s works
and applied Mao’s ideas in their daily lives. The practice of daily
reading continued until after the downfall of Lin Biao.
DAO COUNTY MASSACRE (1967). This was a brutal slaughter
of thousands of innocent people under the irrational, chaotic, and
lawless mass dictatorship involving not only mass organizations but
also local CCP officials and militia personnel. During the summer of
1967, a rumor was circulating in Dao County, Hunan Province, that
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops were going to attack mainland
China and that class enemies on the mainland, especially people of
the “Black Five Categories” (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevo-
lutionaries, “bad elements,’ and Rightists), would rise in rebellion
in cooperation with Chiang’s battle plan and kill all party members,
cadres, and poor and lower-middle-class peasant leaders. On 5 August
1967, the county leadership met and confirmed the story. In the
meantime, factional violence escalated in the county: on 8 August,
the “Revolutionary Alliance,” a rebel organization that dominated the
downtown area, stormed the county militia headquarters, confiscated
all of its weapons, and forced its rival the “Red Alliance,” a politi-
cally more conservative mass organization, to retreat to its base in
the countryside; on 13 August, a violent confrontation occurred in the
downtown area, which ended with the defeat of the “Red Alliance.”
To demonstrate their acute “class consciousness,” and perhaps also
to vent their frustrations, members of the “Red Alliance” (many of
them local officials) and their supporters in the local militia began to
slaughter those of the “Black Five Categories” and their children in
the countryside. Some poor and lower-middle peasants also set up a
66 © DENGTUO
court to sentence to death whomever they considered to be a threat.
Execution was swift, and the methods used were among the cruelest.
From 13 August to 17 October, more than 4,000 people were killed,
more than 300 committed suicide, and 117 entire households were
wiped out. Among those killed were old people in their seventies,
babies (the youngest being 10 days old), and pregnant women. The
total number of deaths amounted to 1.2% of the county’s popula-
tion. The county authorities were at a loss about what to do, while
local officials in more than half of the county’s rural districts and
communes were involved in the planning and the execution of the
massacre. The brutality of the Dao County massacre also spread to
the neighboring counties. Informed of the grave situation, Premier
Zhou Enlai looked into the matter himself and sent out five urgent
telegrams. An end was finally put to the massacre by the PLA troops
from the Hunan Provincial Military District.
DENG TUO (1912-1966). Writer, journalist, veteran revolutionary on
the CCP Beijing municipal committee, and author of the popular
newspaper column Evening Chats at Yanshan under the penname of
Ma Nancun, Deng was an early victim of the campaign Mao Zedong
launched in the Beijing cultural circles at the preparation stage of the
Cultural Revolution.
Born in Minhou, Fujian Province, as Deng Zijian, Deng Tuo
joined the CCP in 1930. During the war of resistance against Japan
(1937-1945), Deng served, among other important positions related
to the party’s propaganda work, as head of the Jin-Cha-Ji branch of
the Xinhua News Agency. In 1944, he was put in charge of the initial
compilation and publication of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.
After the communists took over Beijing in 1949, Deng was appointed
director of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Beijing Munici-
pal Committee as well as editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily, the
official newspaper of the CCP. In 1956, he led a reform to make the
People’s Daily “not only the party’s paper but also people’s paper.”
Mao Zedong was not pleased and criticized the newspaper as “being
run by bookworms and dead people” after he noticed the rather cau-
tious response of the People’s Daily to his call for criticism of the
CCP preceding the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign. Deng was conse-
quently removed from the position of editor-in-chief but remained as
director of the newspaper, from which he later resigned.
DENG XIAOPING ® 67
In 1958, Deng was appointed culture and education secretary of the
CCP Beijing Municipal Committee and editor-in-chief of Frontline,
the official journal of the Beijing party committee. In 1960, he became
an alternate secretary of the CCP North China Bureau. In 1961, Deng,
upon invitation, started a column entitled “Evening Chats at Yanshan”
(yanshan yehua) for the popular newspaper Beijing Evening. A few
months later, he also began to co-author with Wu Han and Liao
Mosha the column “Notes from a Three-Family Village” (sanjiacun
zhaji) in the Frontline. An erudite and brilliant essayist, Deng wove
history, philosophy, and popular culture into his entertaining and yet
politically sensitive pieces, which were often subtly evocative and
satirical, reminiscent of a long Chinese tradition of history writing and
criticism in carefully guarded language of allusions and understate-
ment. In the years between 1961 and 1964, Deng wrote more than
170 essays for the two columns. They were immensely popular among
readers of all tastes.
In late 1965 and early 1966, following Yao Wenyuan’s attack on
Wu Han, the author of the historical play Hairui Dismissed from
Office and a co-author of the “Notes from a Three-Family Village, ”
a political campaign was spreading across China criticizing the
so-called bourgeois counterrevolutionary academic authorities. In
April and early May 1966, Deng was openly criticized for his essays
published in the Beijing Evening and Frontline. Named the head of
a “Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique,’ Deng was accused of
conspiring with Wu Han and Liao Mosha in attacking the party and
its policies with historical allusions and by innuendo. On 16 May, an
article by Qi Benyu further humiliated Deng by calling him a traitor.
On 17 May, he spent the entire night completing a long letter to the
CCP Beijing Municipal Committee refuting all the accusations. He
then wrote a short and final note to his wife before taking an overdose
of sleeping pills and ending his life in the early hours of 18 May.
Deng was the first ranking official to die in the Cultural Revolution.
He was officially rehabilitated in 1979.
DENG XIAOPING (1904-1997). General secretary of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) since 1956, Deng was denounced as China’s
number two capitalist-roader in the early stages of the Cultural Rev-
olution. He came back to the central leadership in 1973 to succeed
Zhou Enlai as the nation’s chief administrator, only to be criticized
68 © DENG XIAOPING
and dismissed again in late 1975 and early 1976 for his opposition
to the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership. Eventually, Deng
returned a second time in July 1977 to lead the CCP’s critical evalua-
tion of the Cultural Revolution and China’s economic reform.
A native of Guang’an, Sichuan Province, Deng studied both in
France (1921-1925) and in the Soviet Union (1926). He joined the
CCP while in France, returned to China in 1927, and soon became an
important political leader in the Jiangxi Soviet established by Mao
Zedong. Deng participated in the Long March (1934-1935). During
the war of resistance against Japan, he served as deputy director of
the Eighth Route Army’s political department. He was appointed a
secretary of the CCP Central Committee (CC) in 1945 and served as
chief political commissar of the Second Field Army of the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) during the civil war of the late 1940s. After
the communist takeover of China in 1949, Deng became first secre-
tary of the CCP Southwest Bureau. He was transferred to Beijing in
1952 and entered the ruling Politburo in 1955.
In 1956, at the First Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Commit-
tee, Deng was elected to the Standing Committee of the Politburo
and became general secretary of the CCP. As a member of the CCP
core leadership, Deng was a close assistant of Mao, politically and
ideologically, in leading the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 against
intellectuals and in taking a tough line against the chauvinistic leader-
ship of the Soviet Union, especially during his several official visits
to Moscow. On the other hand, Deng was known for his pragmatism
in domestic economic policies, which was to be characterized during
the Cultural Revolution as a “cat theory” based on his own words:
“Black or white, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” In this aspect,
especially considering his critical assessment of the radical and irra-
tional policies of the Great Leap Forward of 1958, Deng was seen by
Mao as a close ally of Liu Shaoqi.
In June 1966, when the Cultural Revolution had just broken out
while Mao kept himself away from Beijing, Deng Xiaoping joined
President Liu Shaoqi, Premier Zhou Enlai, and other members of the
Politburo Standing Committee in deciding, with Mao’s approval, to
dispatch work groups to schools to provide instruction and guidance
for the masses participating in the revolution. Mao, however, with-
drew his support for the decision on work groups after he came back
from the south in July. When Mao attacked the work group policy as
DENG XIAOPING ® 69
a bourgeois reactionary line and Liu Shaoqi as the commander of
the bourgeois headquarters, Deng fell from power along with Liu.
Deng was denounced as the second leading capitalist-roader within
the CCP. As Liu was dying of abuse and illness in Kaifeng, Henan,
in October 1969, Deng was exiled to a factory of tractor parts in a
suburb of Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, to work and reform himself.
In early 1973, at Mao’s suggestion and with strong support from
Zhou Enlai, Deng came back to Beijing and was reinstated as vice-
premier. At the enlarged sessions of the Politburo held in Beijing in
November and December 1973 concerning what Mao saw as Zhou
Enlai’s “capitulationism” and “revisionism” in dealing with the United
States, Deng followed Mao’s line and criticized Zhou—apparently a
necessary step to take on his way back to power. In April 1974, Deng,
rather than Zhou, represented the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
for the first time at the General Assembly of the United Nations. In
January 1975, at Mao’s suggestion, Deng became vice-chairman of
the CCP, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, chief of
the general staff of the PLA, and first vice-premier of the State Coun-
cil. He was thus entrusted with the power to preside over the daily
affairs of the party, the army, and the state while Zhou Enlai was hos-
pitalized for cancer treatment. In late February 1975, Deng launched
his overall rectification program, which virtually reversed the course
of the Cultural Revolution. Late that year, Mao interfered and began a
nationwide campaign to criticize Deng and counterattack the right-
deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend. When the April 5 Move-
ment broke out in 1976 commemorating the late Premier Zhou Enlai
and protesting against the ultraleftist Jiang Qing group, Deng was
stripped of all his official duties for allegedly being both the backer
and the hope of all the “counterrevolutionaries” gathering in Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in the country.
In July 1977, within a year of the death of Mao and the fall of the
ultraleftist Gang of Four, Deng was reinstated again. By the time of
the Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee (December
1978), he had already become the virtual center of the CCP leader-
ship. He challenged the dogmatism of Mao’s successor Hua Guofeng
who insisted on continuing with “whatever” decisions Mao had made,
and Deng won broad support for replacing Hua with the more reform-
minded Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. Deng played a decisive role
in the CCP’s critical assessment of the Cultural Revolution, which
70 © DESTROY THE FOUR OLDS
culminated in the passage of the Resolution on Certain Questions
in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s
Republic of China in 1981 at the Six Plenum of the CCP Eleventh
Central Committee. Deng also put himself behind the “liberation of
thinking” movement and made his own words the slogan of the nation:
“Facts are the only test for truth.” In the meantime, Deng advocated
“socialism with Chinese characteristics” and engineered economic
reforms creating special economic zones, adopting certain aspects of
a market economy, and freeing enterprises from state control, which
eventually ended China’s centralized economy based largely on a
Soviet model. The political aspect of Deng’s liberalization program
was not so radical, though; it reached its limit during the June 4
democracy movement of 1989 when, with Deng’s approval, the army
was brought in to crack down on unarmed civilians protesting in
Tiananmen Square.
In 1987, Deng began to retire from various high positions he had
been holding in the party, the military, and the state, setting an exam-
ple for other CCP veteran leaders, including those skeptical of Deng’s
reform. On 19 February 1997, Deng Xiaoping died in Beijing. See
also POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4-7 APRIL 1976; SS FENGQING
INCIDENT.
DESTROY THE FOUR OLDS (po sijiu). This campaign was initi-
ated by Red Guards in August 1966 aiming to sweep away all “old
ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” (hence “Four Olds”)
in Chinese society. Endorsed by the Cultural Revolution faction of
the central leadership, the campaign resulted in unprecedented dam-
age to the nation’s historical landmarks, valuable artifacts, and other
material witnesses of culture and civilization and claimed thousands
of innocent lives nationwide—1,772 in the city of Beijing alone.
The phrase “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” as
a pejorative reference to all traditions—Chinese or foreign—that were
deemed nonproletarian from the viewpoint of the Culture Revolu-
tion ideology first appeared in a 1 June 1966 People’s Daily editorial
entitled “Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits:’ Lin
Biao used the phrase in his speech at the mass rally of 18 August and
called on Red Guards to wage war against the Four Olds. As a prelude
to Lin’s battle cry, an ultimatum had already been drafted by Red
Guards at Beijing No. 2 Middle School on the night of 17 August,
DESTROY THE FOUR OLDS œ% 71
declaring war on barbershops, tailor shops, photo studios, and used
book stores. On the day after the mass rally, Beijing’s Red Guards
took to the streets and started to smash street signs and name boards
for shops, restaurants, schools, factories, and hospitals and replace
them with new labels. Chang’an (meaning “eternal peace”) Avenue in
the center of the city, for instance, was renamed East-Is-Red Avenue,
and Beijing Union Hospital, which was established by the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1921, now became Anti-Imperialism Hospital. Red
Guards made speeches, distributed pamphlets, and put out posters on
the streets that dismissed various fashions in hair and dress, stylized
photos, pointed boots, and high-heeled shoes as evidence of bourgeois
lifestyle. They would stop passers-by whose appearance was unac-
ceptable and humiliate them by shaving their hair, cutting open their
trousers, or knocking off their shoe heels. The official endorsement
of such actions in two Peoples Daily editorials on 23 August helped
to spread the fire of the anti-Four Olds campaign across the country
and prompted Red Guards to move further to raid churches, temples,
theaters, libraries, and historic sites, causing irretrievable damage.
During the raid upon the historic Confucian Homestead, Confucian
Temple, and Confucian Cemetery, for instance, more than 1,000
tombs and stone tablets were destroyed or damaged, and more than
2,700 volumes of ancient books and 900 scrolls of calligraphy and
paintings were set afire. Across the country, countless books that were
deemed “old” were burned, especially those in school libraries.
During the campaign to destroy the Four Olds, violence against
innocent people escalated. On 23 August, a group of Beijing Red
Guards shepherded several dozen writers, artists, and government
officials from the Municipal Cultural Bureau to what used to be the
National Academy of imperial China, where a huge pile of theater
props and costumes, all deemed “old,” was burning. The Red Guards
ordered their victims to kneel down around the fire and beat them
so hard with belts and theatrical props that several victims lost con-
sciousness. Lao She, a well-known writer and one of the victims of
this notorious event, took his own life the next day. Such brutality
was widespread during the campaign, especially at the struggle
meetings that Red Guards held against their teachers, the so-called
black gang members, and the people of the “Black Five Catego-
ries.” It had become commonplace for Red Guards during the months
of August and September to ransack private homes and confiscate
72 © DING XUELEI
personal belongings of the alleged class enemies. Some homes were
raided several times by different groups of Red Guards. In Shanghai
alone, an estimated 150,000 homes were illegally searched. In the
name of sweeping away the Four Olds, the raiders took away not only
cultural artifacts that were considered “old,” but also currency, bank
notes, gold and silver bars, jewelry, and other valuables. At the height
of the Destroy the Four Olds campaign, Chairman Mao Zedong con-
tinued to hold inspections of millions of Red Guards in Beijing, while
Lin Biao, standing by Mao’s side at these inspections, continued to
praise the Red Guards’ attack on the old ways. In late 1966 and early
1967 when Red Guard organizations became more deeply involved
in factional conflicts and power-seizure struggles, the anti-Four Olds
campaign finally lost its impetus and came to an end. See also RED
AUGUST.
DING XUELEI. This penname was used by the Shanghai Municipal
Party Committee Writing Group, a writing team headed by Xu
Jingxian and remotely controlled by Zhang Chunqiao and Yao
Wenyuan. “Xuelei” suggests “following the example of Lei Feng,”
a PLA soldier and the most admired communist hero in the early
1960s for his determination to be a “rust-free screw on the revolu-
tionary machine.” During the Cultural Revolution, the writing group
produced numerous articles—many under this penname—to promote
the interest of the ultraleftist faction of the CCP central leadership
and attack its opponents.
DING ZUXIAO AND LI QISHUN. Labeled counterrevolutionaries,
these two women were executed in 1970 for criticizing the personal-
ity cult of Chairman Mao Zedong. Ding, of the Tujia ethnic minority,
was an educated youth in the countryside of Dayong County, Hunan
Province, since 1965. In a letter, dated 17 March 1969, to the Dayong
County Revolutionary Committee, Ding is sharply critical of the
vogue of the “three loyalties (loyal to Mao, Mao Zedong Thought,
and Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line).” “Our loyalty is,’ she
writes, “to the people, to the motherland, and to truth; it should not
go to a particular person. The loyalty promoted today is actually the
cult of the personality, a slavish mentality.” Ding associates this kind
of loyalty to the legacy of feudalism in which “Chairman Mao,” she
writes, “is treated as an emperor, an object of daily worship.” On 21
April 1969, having received no response from the authorities to her
ECONOMISM *® 73
request that her letter be published in a local newspaper, Ding distrib-
uted in downtown Dayong more than a dozen leaflets in which she,
again, criticizes the Mao cult: “an unprecedented personality cult in
the nation’s history” is her way of characterizing the “three loyal-
ties.” Ding was arrested on 5 July 1969 on charges of an attack on the
proletarian headquarters and slander on the mass movement to study
Mao Zedong Thought. Also arrested was her sister Zuxia, who had
been involved in both the writing and the distributing of the letter.
On 27 September 1969, Li Qishun distributed in downtown Day-
ong more than 20 copies of the letter “To the Revolutionary People,”
which she had written in support of her former classmate and friend
Ding Zuxiao. In the letter she calls Ding a hero deserving the name of
a revolutionary vanguard. Li also sent a copy of the letter to the Red
Flag editorial department in Beijing. She was soon arrested along with
her sister Qicai, who had helped distributing Qishun’s letter. Some of
her former classmates were also arrested as members of the so-called
Ding Zuxiao and Li Qishun Counterrevolutionary Clique. On 8 May
1970, Ding Zuxiao, age 24, and Li Qishun, age 23, were executed.
In 1980, the Dayong County party committee redressed this case and
named Ding Zuxiao and Li Qishun “heroes of the people.”
_E-
ECONOMISM (jingji zhuyi). Also known as the “evil wind of
economism,” this is an official reference to both the demands made
by organized contract and temporary workers for job security and
job benefits and the way government officials responded to such
demands in late 1966 and the beginning of 1967. On 8 November
1966, during the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary
line, contract and temporary workers formed their own organization,
the National Red Workers Rebel Corps. Soon they envisioned the
possibilities of economic gains as a result of their political activities:
as they were denouncing the unfair double-tiered class system within
the working class, they demanded promotion, raise, and change of
status to regular state employees.
Jiang Qing and some other members of the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) expressed sympathy and sup-
port on several occasions. At a reception the CCRSG held for the
representatives of the Rebel Corps on 26 December 1966, Jiang
74 © EDUCATED YOUTHS
spoke of the way temporary and contract workers were treated as the
way workers in general were treated by capitalists. She reproached
the officials from the Ministry of Labor and the All China Work-
ers Union and called upon temporary and contract workers to rebel
against these two government agencies. The Rebel Corps distributed
Jiang’s speech (with comments from other members of the CCRSG
as well) across China and forced the Ministry of Labor and the All
China Workers Union to accede to their demands. Jiang’s speech and
the Rebel Corps’s success also inspired regular state employees to
seek economic gains by political means. Under pressure from below
and from above and under attack during the Criticize the Bourgeois
Reactionary Line campaign, government officials began to give in to
workers’ demands for pay raises, bonuses, traveling expenses, and
so on, which led to a sudden depletion of operational budget and a
financial crisis in a number of cities in January 1967.
In the meantime, some mass organizations in Shanghai launched
an offensive against this kind of materialistically motivated political
activities. They wrote and distributed two articles: “Grasp Revolu-
tion, Promote Production, and Defeat the Counteroffensive of the
Bourgeois Reactionary Line: To the People of Shanghai” (4 January
1967) and “Urgent Announcement” (9 January 1967); both were
also carried in Shanghai’s newspapers Wenhui Daily and Liberation
Daily and later broadcast nationwide. Upon Mao Zedong’s endorse-
ment of the first article as “another Marxist-Leninist big-character
poster,’ the CCRSG began to accuse government officials, or
capitalist-roaders, of bribing and corrupting the masses with econ-
omism—a charge detailed in an article that appeared on 12 Janu-
ary 1967 in the People’s Daily as well as the Red Flag. An official
announcement was issued on 24 February 1967 to ban the National
Red Workers Rebel Corps as a mass organization. Its leaders were
arrested.
EDUCATED YOUTHS (zhishi qingnian or zhiging). Although col-
lege graduates were also included in its original definition, this term,
as commonly understood today, refers mainly to urban and suburban
middle-school and high-school graduates during the Cultural Revolu-
tion who went to the countryside to work, to settle down, and to be
“reeducated” by the farmers there. See also REEDUCATION; UP TO
THE MOUNTAINS AND DOWN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE.
EIGHT MODEL DRAMAS @® 75
EIGHT BLACK THEORIES (heibalun). This is a common reference
to Jiang Qing’s summary of the “‘anti-party” and “anti-socialist,” and
therefore “black,” literary theories that she considered to have been
dictating the production of literature and arts in the People’s Republic
of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1966. The eight theories are “theory
of depicting things as they are” (“black” because truthfulness means
focusing on the dark side of socialism), “theory of the broad path of
realism” (broadness implies that it is too narrow for literature just to
be a servant to proletarian politics), “theory of deepening realism”
(deepening implies that socialist realism lacks depths of real life),
“theory of antithesis to thematic determination” (it betrays an aversion
to contemporary proletarian themes), “theory of middle characters”
(the “middle” implies a focus on problematic characters rather than
revolutionary heroes), “theory of aversion to gunpowder smell” (it
prefers humor and light-heartedness to the revolutionary spirit of war),
“theory of converging elements as the spirit of the times” (it denies
the revolutionary spirit as the defining spirit of the times) and “theory
of departure from the scripture and rebellion against orthodoxy” (it
shows discontent with revolutionary literature). See also SUMMARY
OF THE SYMPOSIUM CONVENED BY COMRADE JIANG
QING AT THE BEHEST OF COMRADE LIN BIAO ON THE
WORK OF LITERATURE AND ARTS IN ARMED FORCES.
8-18. See MASS RALLY OF 18 AUGUST 1966.
EIGHT MODEL DRAMAS. The term refers to the eight pieces
of performing art and music promoted by Jiang Qing and her
supporters as revolutionary models for all art and literary works
during the Cultural Revolution. The eight models include five
Peking operas: Shajia Creek (Shajiabang), Taking Tiger Mountain
by Stratagem (zhiqu weihushan), Raid on the White Tiger Regi-
ment (qixi baihutuan), The Red Lantern (hongdeng ji), and On the
Dock (haigang); two ballets: The White-Haired Girl (baimaonii)
and The Red Detachment of Women (hongse niangzijun); and one
symphony: Shajia Creek (jiaoxiang yinyue Shajiabang). The term
“model opera” (yangban xi) appeared in the 6 March 1965 issue of
the Shanghai newspaper Liberation Daily as a reference to The Red
Lantern. The entire repertoire was listed for the first time as “eight
model dramas” in a well-known editorial entitled “Excellent Models
76 © EIGHT MODEL DRAMAS
for Revolutionary Art and Literature” in the 31 May 1967 issue of
the People’s Daily.
Despite Jiang Qing’s claims of originality and guidance in mak-
ing the entire repertoire, most of the model dramas originated from
theatrical pieces that had been created in the early 1960s during
the Peking opera reform, in which other local forms of drama par-
ticipated as well. Shajia Creek was originally a Shanghai local opera
(huju) entitled Sparks in the Reeds (ludang huozhong). On the Dock
was based on a local opera of Jiangsu province called Morning at
the Harbor (haigang de zaochen) and was adapted to Peking opera
in spring 1965 by the Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe. Taking Tiger
Mountain by Stratagem, Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, and The
Red Lantern were first produced at a national modern Peking opera
festival—a joint performance by a number of troupes for the purpose
of discussion and emulation—in 1964. The White-Haired Girl was
adapted by the Shanghai Dance Academy from a popular revolution-
ary story with the same title.
Taking advantage of considerable success already achieved in
drama reform, Jiang Qing tempered these pieces with what she con-
sidered to be elements of revolutionary art, such as the concept of
“three prominences” and the idea of class struggle. Also under her
direction, the China Ballet Troupe adapted the film The Red Detach-
ment of Women to a ballet, and the Central Philharmonic Orchestra
composed the symphony Shajia Creek. Then, the eight revolution-
ary model dramas became her personal achievements and, for quite
some time during the Cultural Revolution, the only works deemed
completely revolutionary and allowed on stage; as a popular Chinese
saying had it: “Only eight plays for 800 million people.’ During the
Cultural Revolution, some of the artists initially involved in the mak-
ing of these plays were persecuted, and even imprisoned, because
their aesthetic judgment was different from Jiang Qing’s. In fact,
these model dramas eventually became icons so sacred that any criti-
cism or any attempt to adapt them to other forms might be considered
evidence of a crime called “damaging the model dramas.” The iconic
status of these pieces, as well as the dictatorial and repressive poli-
cies imposed by Jiang Qing and her supporters in artistic circles, was
largely responsible for the paleness of Chinese art during the Cultural
Revolution.
ELEVENTH PLENUM OF THE CCP EIGHTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE ® 77
ELEVENTH PLENUM OF THE CCP EIGHTH CENTRAL
COMMITTEE (1-12 August 1966). A landmark in the course of
the Cultural Revolution, this was a meeting organized and presided
over by Chairman Mao Zedong to rally support within the top lead-
ership, to wage war against what he considered to be the “bourgeois
headquarters,” and to launch the Cultural Revolution nationwide for
the second time. The reorganization of the Politburo at the plenum
strengthened Mao’s power, while the passage of the “Resolution
of the CCP Central Committee Concerning the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution,’ commonly known as the “Sixteen Articles,”
provided another “programmatic document” defining the objectives
and the party policies for the Cultural Revolution after the adoption
of the “May 16 Circular” at an earlier meeting.
Mao’s decision to call the meeting in Beijing in late July 1966,
shortly after his eight-month tour in the provinces, was based on his
perception that the Cultural Revolution had encountered much resis-
tance from above since it was first launched at the enlarged Polit-
buro sessions, 4-26 May 1966. The resistance took the peculiar form
of work groups that the central leadership dispatched to colleges and
middle and high schools to cope with turmoil and violence and to
guide the course of the Revolution under party leadership. Mao’s call
was urgent. On 27 July, three days after the announcement and with
little preparation, the preliminary session began. The plenum offi-
cially started on 1 August. Among those attending the meeting were
nonvoting delegates from the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group (CCRSG) and student and teacher representatives from col-
lege campuses. At the opening session, President Liu Shaoqi deliv-
ered a speech, reporting to the Central Committee (CC) on the state
of the party since the last plenum and also assuming responsibility for
what Mao saw as the problems of the work groups. Mao interrupted
the speech and accused the work groups of taking the bourgeois stand
against the proletarian revolution. On the same day, Mao’s reply to
the letters from the Tsinghua University Middle School Red Guards
in support of their rebellion was distributed among delegates.
Originally on the plenum agenda were the meeting of all delegates
to discuss the “Sixteen Articles” on 4 August and the adjournment of
the plenum on 5 August. But this schedule was changed due to the
resistance of many delegates to Mao’s radical vision of the Cultural
78 © ELEVENTH PLENUM OF THE CCP EIGHTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE
Revolution: in discussion sessions on 2—3 August, they acknowledged
their “lack of comprehension” and criticized themselves for “not hav-
ing been able to keep in step with Chairman Mao.” At an enlarged ses-
sion of the Politburo Standing Committee on 4 August, Mao accused
the work groups of repressing the student movement and pointed to
the CC as the source of a “White Terror.’ His speech included the
alarming words, “Cow-demons and snake-spirits are among those
present.” On 5 August, Mao wrote a 205-word big-character poster
entitled “Bombarding the Headquarters,” accusing “certain cen-
tral and regional leader-comrades” (implicitly Liu Shaoqi and those
under his leadership) of exercising a bourgeois dictatorship, practic-
ing white terror, and suppressing the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Two days later, Mao’s poster was circulated among the delegates. On
8 August, after the “Sixteen Articles” was passed, Lin Biao made a
long speech during his meeting with the CCRSG, highlighting the
significance of Mao’s attack on what was soon to be known as the
“bourgeois headquarters headed by Liu Shaoqi”: “Chairman Mao is
the supreme commander of this Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao
has turned the situation around; otherwise, the Cultural Revolution
would have been stillborn or interrupted. The bourgeoisie would have
gained the upper hand, and we would have been defeated.”
On 12 August, at Mao’s suggestion, the Central Committee voted
to reshuffle the Politburo and its standing committee. The members
of the reorganized standing committee were listed in the following
order: Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Tao Zhu, Chen Boda,
Deng Xiaoping, Kang Sheng, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Li Fuchun, and
Chen Yun. Liu Shaoqi dropped from the original number two posi-
tion to number eight. Chen Boda and Kang Sheng, both key members
of the CCRSG, were promoted to the standing committee and given
prominent positions. The plenum did not re-elect chairman and vice-
chairmen. But from this point on, Lin Biao alone was referred to as
vice-chairman of the CCP, while Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De,
and Chen Yun were never mentioned again in association with that
title. With these readjustments, the comparatively more pragmatic
and moderate “first line” of leadership established in the early 1960s
to take charge of daily affairs of the party and the state was virtually
eliminated, and Mao’s power in the CC consolidated. And, partially
repeating the words of Lin Biao’s speech at the Tenth Plenum of
the CCP Eighth Central Committee (24—27 September 1962), the
ELIMINATING THE OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL PRESIDENT ° 79
“Communiqué of the Eleventh Plenum” included a statement about
the supreme status of Mao and his ideas. This quotation signals the
official sanction of the personality cult and the hegemony of Mao
Zedong Thought.
ELIMINATING THE OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL PRESIDENT
(bushe guojia zhuxi). On several occasions between March and
August 1970, Mao Zedong proposed that the office of president of
state be eliminated. Mao also made it clear that he himself did not
want to be president. The majority of the Politburo and of the CCP
Central Committee (CC), including Lin Biao, on the other hand, con-
sidered it appropriate for a state to have a president and insisted that
Mao serve in that position. After the September 13 Incident of 1971,
however, the proposal to install a national president was attributed to
Lin Biao alone, and Mao called the proposal the “political program”
in Lin’s plan to seize power.
Mao expressed for the first time his wish to eliminate the position
of the state president on 7 March 1970, after the issue was raised by
Zhou Enlai concerning the revision of the PRC Constitution. “Don’t
write the chapter on president of state in the Constitution,’ Mao
said to his security chief Wang Dongxing. “And I’m not to serve as
president, either.” Most members of the Politburo and of the CC took
Mao’s words as a directive and did not differ until 12 April when the
Politburo met to discuss Lin Biao’s suggestion that Mao be president
of state as people desired, that the office of vice-president was not
significant, and that Lin himself was not fit even for the position of
vice-president. At the meeting, the majority of the Politburo, includ-
ing Zhou Enlai, supported Lin’s view. In late April, and again in
mid-June, Mao repeated his negative stand on the issue and pointed
out that having a president of state was a formality. Mao had the sup-
port of the majority for the second time on 18 July at a Constitution
revision meeting.
On 22 August 1970, the Standing Committee of the Politburo met
at Lushan to discuss the agenda of the Second Plenum of the CCP
Ninth Central Committee. Except Mao, who adhered to his earlier
views, all other members were of the opinion that there should be a
national president and that Mao should serve. Considering the pos-
sibility of Mao’s indifference to the ceremonial routine of foreign
affairs, Zhou Enlai suggested that a president could authorize others
80 © ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4-26 MAY 1966
to represent him or her on these occasions. On 23 August, at the
opening session of the plenum, Lin Biao made a concession in his
opening speech by using the term “head of the proletarian dictator-
ship” in place of “president of state.’ Kang Sheng, who spoke after
Lin, still insisted that all supported Mao as president. Two days later,
however, Mao’s angry words, “Never mention again the question of
state presidency. If you want me to die soon, then make me presi-
dent,” finally silenced all the voices in support of installing a national
president.
In official history, the opposition to Mao’s proposal to eliminate
the state presidency was mainly due to Lin Biao’s desire to be presi-
dent. This conclusion is now broadly challenged by historians. The
only “evidence” of Lin’s wish has been Wu Faxian’s confession that
Ye Qun wanted Lin Biao to be president, but there was no other wit-
ness to Ye Qun’s saying these words. On the other hand, there was
much circumstantial evidence from Lin’s subordinates that Lin, for
a variety of reasons, might not want to serve as president at all. It
is also significant, as some historians noted, that Lin Biao fled the
country and was killed in a plane crash two to three weeks after Mao
commented on the proposal to install the office of the national presi-
dent as a “political program” for usurpation and made the following
judgment: “Someone wanted to be president,” Mao said, “and to split
the party and couldn’t wait to take power.” Much of the dispute in
the beginning of the 1970s over the national presidency, like many
other issues concerning Lin Biao’s alleged conspiracy to seize power,
remains to be explained.
ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4-26 MAY 1966. Presided
over by Liu Shaoqi but dictated by the absentee Mao Zedong with
Kang Sheng as a mediating agent, this meeting signaled the offi-
cial launching of the Cultural Revolution. At the second session on
16 May, the Politburo approved “The Circular of the CCP Central
Committee,’ also known as the “May 16 Circular,’ which was
drafted by Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Wang Li, and a few others, and
meticulously revised by Mao before the meeting. The circular, along
with the “Sixteen Articles” adopted in August 1966 at the Eleventh
Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee, was designated as
a “programmatic document” that laid out guidelines for the Cultural
Revolution.
ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4-26 MAY 1966 ® 81
Also on the agenda was the criticism of Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing,
Lu Dingyi, and Yang Shangkun for their alleged anti-Party activi-
ties and their “revisionist line.” The accusations led to the Politburo’s
decision to suspend the four of their official duties and to investigate
the apparently isolated cases as evidence of a Peng-Luo-Lu- Yang
Anti-Party Clique. The denunciation and dismissal of Peng, Luo,
Lu, and Yang was interpreted at the time as the first major victory of
Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line over a bourgeois revisionist line
during the Cultural Revolution.
The meeting marked a quick ascent of ultraleftist forces in the party
leadership. Most key members of the soon-to-be-formed Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group—Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang
Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu—had
the privilege of attending this high-level meeting. The group was
established to replace the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small
Group led by Peng Zhen. The decision was announced two days
after the meeting. At the initial “forum” session, Kang Sheng gave a
lengthy report on Mao’s recent directives. Zhang Chungiao and Chen
Boda closely followed Kang to lead the attack on Peng, Luo, Lu, and
Yang, setting the tone for the rest of the meeting. Liu Shaoqi, Zhou
Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping expressed support for Mao’s move against
Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang and conducted self-criticism of their own
political insensitivity. In a long and militant speech delivered at the
third enlarged session on 18 May, Lin Biao accused Peng, Luo, Lu,
and Yang of conspiring to usurp the communist power and restore
capitalism. Lin’s aggressiveness apparently inspired so much fear that
all participants began to attack Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang relentlessly
while criticizing themselves. On 21 May, Zhou Enlai gave a speech in
support of Mao’s criticism of Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang in which Zhou
expressed his wish to maintain his revolutionary integrity in his later
years by following Mao closely. At an earlier group session as well as
the 23 May meeting, Marshal Zhu De was attacked by a number of
ranking leaders including Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, and Kang
Sheng, because he, having been in semiretirement for years and out
of touch with politics, was rather slow in responding both to the cam-
paign against Peng, Luo, Lu, and Yang, and to Lin Biao’s promotion
of Mao Zedong Thought at the expense of Marxism-Leninism.
Some executive and personnel decisions were also made at the
meeting that the Beijing party committee be reorganized with Li
82 © ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 25 NOVEMBER-5 DECEMBER 1973
Xuefeng replacing Peng Zhen as first secretary, that Tao Zhu be
transferred to Beijing and serve as executive secretary of the Secretar-
iat of the CCP Central Committee, and that Ye Jianying replace Luo
Ruiqing as secretary general of the Central Military Commission.
ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 25 NOVEMBER-5
DECEMBER 1973. Presided over by Wang Hongwen and remote-
controlled by Mao Zedong through his liaisons Tang Wensheng
and Wang Hairong, these Politburo sessions were held to criticize
Premier Zhou Enlai for carrying out a “right-wing capitulationist
line” in foreign affairs. Ye Jianying, who was involved in negotia-
tions with the United States on military exchange and cooperation,
was also implicated. An alternative label for them both was Zhou-Ye
revisionist line. Preceded by the high-level meetings in May and June
in which Zhou, following Mao’s order, criticized himself for commit-
ting “grave mistakes” in early parts of the CCP history, and followed
by a series of public political campaigns, including the Criticize Lin
and Criticize Confucius and Water Margin Appraisal campaigns,
in which Zhou was the unnamed target, the Politburo sessions in late
1973 were Mao’s most aggressive effort to humiliate and subdue the
premier for his moderate and pragmatic approach to state affairs that
Mao found inconsistent with his own radical policies.
The event that directly led to the Politburo sessions was Zhou’s
meeting on the evening of 13 November 1973, with Henry Kiss-
inger, the visiting U.S. secretary of state, whom Mao had received
the previous day. After the farewell banquet on the evening of 13
November, Kissinger proposed another round of talks with Zhou
alone on the question of Sino-U.S. military cooperation. Having no
time to consult with Mao, Zhou accepted the proposal, talked with
Kissinger (Tang Wensheng the interpreter on the Chinese side and
Winston Lord on the U.S. side were the only other persons present),
and promised to give him a response on the unresolved issues next
morning—that is, after Zhou had a chance to consult with the central
leadership. Having tried but failed to get in touch with Mao during
the night, Zhou proposed to Kissinger the following morning that
each side appoint an official to continue the dialogues on military
cooperation. After Kissinger’s departure, Tang Wensheng, follow-
ing Mao’s instruction, asked Zhou to approve the notes she took of
Zhou’s talks with Kissinger. Then, on November 17, Mao talked to
EVENING CHATS AT YANSHAN ® 83
a number of officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, calling for a
criticism of “revisionism” in foreign affairs.
A series of meetings followed that eventually led to the enlarged
Politburo sessions in late November and early December. These
sessions began with Tang Wensheng’s eight-hour report on foreign
affairs and on Mao’s critical comments. In Mao’s view, Zhou was so
afraid of the Soviet Union that once the Soviets invaded he would be
their “puppet emperor.” Therefore, Mao speculated, Zhou opted for
protection under the American nuclear umbrella. Mao’s view set the
tone for the meeting. The Politburo members and others attending
the meeting had to speak against the premier though most of them,
as they later confessed, did so against their own will. Jiang Qing
proposed, with Mao’s approval, to form a “help group” to criticize
Zhou. She also said that Zhou “couldn’t wait to replace the Chair-
man” and that the conflict between Mao and Zhou was the “eleventh
line struggle within the party,’ which put Zhou in parallel with Liu
Shaoqi (enemy of the ninth line struggle) and Lin Biao (the tenth).
Deng Xiaoping, attending the meeting at Mao’s request as a non-
member of the Politburo and, being obliged to speak, warned Zhou
not to go too far because he was so close to Mao that Mao’s power
was not beyond reach for him. Zhou Enlai listened, took notes, and
wrote a self-denouncement.
Eventually, Mao dismissed Jiang Qing’s notion of the “eleventh
line struggle” and claimed that Tang Wensheng and Wang Hairong’s
report on the Zhou-Kissinger talks was misleading. After the down-
fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, the records of these sessions were
destroyed upon request by Zhou Enlai’s widow Deng Yingchao and
Marshall Ye Jianying. The existing official version of the event men-
tions Mao’s having been mislead by the Tang-Wang report in criticiz-
ing the premier but covers up the enlarged Politburo sessions of late
1973 altogether.
EVENING CHATS AT YANSHAN (yanshan yehua). A major target
of criticism at the beginning stage of the Cultural Revolution, the
Evening Chats at Yanshan was originally a newspaper column by
Ma Nancun, which appeared in Beijing Evening from March 1961 to
September 1962. Ma Nancun was the penname of Deng Tuo, writer
and culture and education secretary of the CCP’s Beijing municipal
committee. “Yanshan,” or Mount Yan, is a reference to Beijing’s
84 © EVENING CHATS AT YANSHAN
western hills. The column pieces were also published in book form
by Beijing Press with the original column title—first as a five-volume
series (1961-1962) and then in one volume (1963).
As Deng Tuo writes in one of his essays, in “chatting” with his
readers at evening hours, he intended to entertain them with some
useful knowledge of the past and the present after their day of labor
so that they may find their spare time both interesting and meaning-
ful. Rich in history and wit, his essays address contemporary issues
and criticize ills of the times. They were so popular at the time that
every 30 pieces were reprinted in book form immediately after they
appeared in the newspaper column, and altogether, five volumes were
published in less than two years. But the popularity of his writing
only made him more vulnerable when the Beijing municipal party
committee, headed by Mayor Peng Zhen, became the first political
target of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Not long after the histori-
cal play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office by Wu Han, deputy mayor
of Beijing, was harshly criticized in official media, Evening Chats
at Yanshan and Notes from a Three-Family Village, coauthored by
Deng Tuo and two others associated with the municipal leadership of
Beijing, also came under attack, especially for these authors’ critical,
and sometimes satirical, comments on current politics rendered in
carefully guarded language of allusions and understatement.
Since Peng Zhen was denounced at the enlarged Politburo ses-
sions, 4-26 May 1966, the Evening Chats at Yanshan and Notes
from a Three-Family Village were publicly criticized by Jiang Qing’s
writing group (under the pseudonym Gao Ju) in the article “Opening
Fire at the Anti-Party and Anti-Socialist Black Line” published in
Liberation Army Daily on 8 May 1966. On the following day, Guang-
ming Daily carried He Ming’s “Open Your Eyes Wide and Tell Truth
from Falsehood.” On 10 May Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily and Libera-
tion Daily published Yao Wenyuan’s article “Criticizing the “Three-
Family Village’: the Reactionary Nature of Evening Chats at Yanshan
and Notes from a Three-Family Village.” All these articles denounced
the Evening Chats at Yanshan as “anti-party and anti-socialist talks of
the night.” On 18 May 1966, Deng Tuo took his own life.
On 2 March 1979, the Beijing party committee, with the approval
of the CCP Central Committee, rehabilitated Deng Tuo. Beijing Press
reprinted the book Evening Chats at Yanshan in the same year with a
foreword by Deng’s widow Ding Yilan.
EXTENDED CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP ROUTINE MEETINGS ° 85
EXTENDED CENTRAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL
GROUP ROUTINE MEETINGS (zhongyang wenge peng-
touhui). Much more than what meetings the name may suggest,
these were actually executive gatherings of the de facto CCP top
leadership after Chairman Mao Zedong, reacting furiously to the
anti-Cultural Revolution February Adverse Current (1967), side-
lined veteran vice-premiers in Zhou Enlai’s State Council (SC) and
old marshals in the Central Military Commission (CMC). With the
traditional, constitution-sanctioned top-level party, army, and state
apparatuses—namely, the Politburo, the CMC, and the SC—already
disabled after the downfall of Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Tao Zhu,
and Marshal He Long, Mao’s decision was a further step in reshuf-
fling the central leadership to make it serve his radical cause.
The first of the extended Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG) routine meetings took place in spring 1967. Fifteen mem-
bers served in this extended group—at least for some time—includ-
ing eight of the CCRSG members Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang
Qing, Zhang Chungiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Li, Guan Feng, Qi
Benyu, plus Zhou Enlai, Xie Fuzhi, Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian,
Wang Dongxing, Ye Qun, and Wen Yucheng. Premier Zhou Enlai
acted as head of the group. Mao’s move to establish this group as de
facto leading body of the CCP was a landmark victory of the ultra-
leftist faction led by Jiang Qing; it virtually canceled the operation
of the ad hoc “Politburo Standing Committee routine meetings” and
put the “extended CCRSG routine meetings,” dominated by the cul-
tural revolutionaries, in their place. The move also helped strengthen
Lin Biao’s power in the central leadership since three of his close fol-
lowers—Generals Huang Yongsheng and Wu Faxian and Lin’s wife
Ye Qun—were included in the group. But it was a major setback for
Zhou Enlai’s effort to prevent the CCRSG from interfering with the
state and military affairs of the SC and CMC. As the only one left
of the “old government,” Zhou had to renegotiate his position in this
new power circle dominated by cultural revolutionaries and manage
state affairs with more caution and more compromise in one of the
most difficult periods in his political career.
From then on, the extended CCRSG routine meetings were virtu-
ally the highest “cabinet” meetings at which the most important party
and state affairs were discussed. These meetings continued to be held
from time to time until the dissolution of the CCRSG itself and the
86 © FEBRUARY 12 PUBLIC NOTICE CONCERNING NATIONAL MASS ORGANIZATIONS
establishment of the new party apparatus in April 1969 at the Ninth
National Congress of the CCP, at which all CCRSG members
(except Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu, who had been ousted in
August 1967 and January 1968) and all of the three Lin associates in
the group became members of the new Politburo.
zF-
FEBRUARY 12 PUBLIC NOTICE CONCERNING NATIONAL
MASS ORGANIZATIONS (1967). Coded zhongfa [67] 47, this is
a public announcement jointly issued by the CCP Central Commit-
tee (CC) and the State Council (SC) to delegitimize and disband all
national mass organizations. The document begins with the percep-
tion of the CC and the SC that all mass organizations at the national
level (not necessarily in school or work units or at the city or provin-
cial level) were nondemocratic and that some were even put together
by reactionary elements of the Black Five Categories. The CC and
the SC therefore ordered that no national mass organization be rec-
ognized, that all existing ones be disbanded, that all public funds in
the possession of these organizations be returned, and that members
of these organizations report to agencies of public security in case
of counterrevolutionary activities. On 15 February, the PLA Military
Control Commission at the Beijing Bureau of Public Security pro-
nounced three national organizations, including the National Red
Workers Rebel Corps, reactionary and six others illegal. Leaders of
the first three organizations were arrested. From this point on until
the end of the Cultural Revolution, no national mass organization
appeared again anywhere in China.
FEBRUARY 23 INCIDENT (1967). Also known as the Zhao Yongfu
Incident, this term refers to the violent clash between a mass organi-
zation and armed troops on 23 February 1967, in Xining, the capital
city of Qinghai Province. Zhao Yongfu was deputy commander of the
PLA Qinghai provincial military district. He also served as deputy
director of the coordination office set up at the order of Beijing to lead
the troops in supporting the left. Following a directive from Beijing
authorizing the military control of newspapers and radio stations, the
coordination office sent troops to take over the provincial newspa-
FEBRUARY ADVERSE CURRENT ® 87
per Qinghai Daily from the hands of a mass organization called the
Xining August 18 Red Guard Battalion. After the Red Guards forced
the PLA out, the coordination office decided to take the newspaper
office building by force. Zhao Yongfu was entrusted with the com-
mand of the operation. On 23 February, as the armed troops moved
in, a violent encounter took place between them and the civilians,
who were not armed. The fighting ended with 169 civilians and four
soldiers dead and 178 civilians and 46 military men injured.
The role of the central leadership in this operation is still shrouded
in mystery. According to Zhao Yongfu, he telephoned the office of
Lin Biao for instructions ahead of the military operation, and Lin’s
office expressed support. According to Wang Li’s recollection, Lin
Biao congratulated Zhao on a successful military action but later
blamed Marshal Ye Jianying (who was then in charge of daily affairs
of the Central Military Commission) for the bloody incident. It is at
least clear that, some time after the event, Ye Qun spoke for Lin’s
office and denied any knowledge of Operation February 23, while
Lin Biao and Jiang Qing began to talk about the bloody event as
a local reflection of Beijing’s February Adverse Current. On 23
March, Zhou Enlai announced the decision of the central leadership
that Zhao Yongfu had conducted a military coup and suppressed the
masses and that he was to be taken into custody and under investi-
gation. Two other ranking officials were also implicated. In the Ten
Commands of the Central Military Commission dictated by Lin Biao
and approved by Mao on April 6, Zhao Yongfu was mentioned as a
“counterrevolutionary.”
After the Cultural Revolution, the CCP Central Committee and the
Central Military Commission reinvestigated the Zhao Yongfu case
and concluded that Zhao had made a mistake in an early stage of the
Cultural Revolution in the midst of the chaos caused by Lin Biao,
Jiang Qing, and their followers and that Zhao’s mistake did not go
beyond the “contradictions among the people.” For punishment, Zhao
was dismissed from all his posts but his administrative rank was to
remain intact.
FEBRUARY ADVERSE CURRENT (1967). This phrase refers to
the eruption of anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment by a number of
marshals and vice-premiers at two top-level meetings in January and
February 1967. The veteran leaders’ protest concerned what they
88 © FEBRUARY ADVERSE CURRENT
perceived as three major problems of the Cultural Revolution: the
persecution of the veteran cadres, the elimination of party leader-
ship, and the evolving chaos in the army. The subsequent campaign,
known as the “Retaliation against the February Adverse Current” that
took place from late February to the end of April 1967, virtually dis-
abled the CCP’s highest decision-making body the Politburo without
due process and left the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG) with power beyond the law.
The old government officials and military leaders let their opposi-
tion be felt on two occasions, known as the “two great disturbances”:
the Central Military Commission (CMC) meeting on 19-20 January
1967 and the CCP Central Committee (CC) briefing sessions on 11
and 16 February. On the first occasion, members of the CMC and the
leaders of all military regions met at Jingxi Guesthouse in Beijing
to discuss how the Cultural Revolution should be carried out in the
army. Chen Boda and Jiang Qing, of the CCRSG, who were invited
to the meeting, insisted that the “great democracy” be enforced
in the armed forces, as it was everywhere else, while marshals Ye
Jianying, Xu Xiangqian, and Nie Rongzhen strongly opposed the
idea on the grounds of national security and stability. At the meet-
ing, Chen and Jiang also attacked Xiao Hua, director of the Gen-
eral Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA),
accusing him of belittling the CCRSG in the matters of the Cultural
Revolution. They demanded that Xiao Hua appear at a mass rally of
a hundred thousand to conduct self-criticism. Upon Ye Jianying’s
timely report after the meeting, Mao’s office advised Xiao Hua to
ignore Chen and Jiang. The marshals and generals were encouraged
by Mao’s support for Xiao. As the meeting reconvened the next day,
they vented their rage, excoriating the CCRSG for persecuting army
officers and inciting the rebels against the armed forces. Ye Jianying
pounded the table so hard as he spoke that he fractured the bone in
his right hand.
The second “great disturbance” took place at Huairen Hall in the
Zhongnanhai compound where veteran leaders in charge of the daily
affairs of the Party, the government, and the army met members of
the CCRSG at briefing sessions chaired by Premier Zhou Enlai. At
the meeting on the afternoon of 11 February, Marshal Ye Jianying
reproached Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, and Zhang Chunqiao for turn-
ing the party, the government, factories, and farms upside down and
FEBRUARY ADVERSE CURRENT @ 89
for wanting now to stir up the military. He also asked them what they
really had in mind when they seized power in Shanghai and adopted
the name “Shanghai People’s Commune” without putting such
important affairs of state through proper procedures of discussion at
the Politburo. Marshal Xu Xiangqian slapped the table in anger and
asked if their uprooting the army was aimed to take away the army’s
proper role as the main support of the proletarian dictatorship. On
16 February, as the briefing session reconvened, Vice-Premier Tan
Zhenlin confronted Zhang Chungiao at the door, asking him why
Chen Pixian, the former first secretary of the Shanghai party commit-
tee, was not in Beijing, since Chen, at Zhou Enlai’s suggestion and
with Mao Zedong’s approval, was supposed to come to Beijing and
be shielded from the abuses of the Red Guards.
At the meeting, Tan once again raised the Chen Pixian question.
Joined by other vice-premiers, including Chen Yi, Yu Qiuli, and Li
Xiannian, Tan reproached Zhang Chunqiao and other members of
the CCRSG for aiming to get rid of all veteran cadres and eliminate
party leadership. Tan called the Cultural Revolution the cruelest
instance of struggle in party history, while Chen Yi named it the big-
gest bi-gong-xin (conviction by forced confession) in all of Chinese
history. Recalling the CCP rectification movement in Yan’an in the
1940s to make his criticism of China’s current situation suggestive
and prophetic, Chen Yi pointed out that the top-ranking leaders who
were being denounced, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping,
had previously been among Mao’s closest supporters. As Li Xiannian
blamed an editorial in the party organ Red Flag for initiating attacks
on veteran cadres, Zhou Enlai showed his alliance with the veterans
with a question to Kang Sheng: “Such an important matter, why
didn’t you let us read about it first?” Xie Fuzhi, vice-premier and
minister of public security, on the other hand, time and again sided
with members of the CCRSG.
Immediately after the meeting, on the night of 16 February, Zhang
Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Li prepared the minutes of the
briefing sessions. Jiang Qing arranged to have the sessions reported
to Mao on 17 February before Zhou Enlai had a chance to see Mao.
In the meantime, Chen Yi continued to criticize certain measures of
the Cultural Revolution in a long speech addressed to students on
the evening of 16 February, while Tan Zhenlin wrote Lin Biao a
letter on 17 February, denouncing the ultraleftists of the CCRSG in
90 © FEBRUARY ADVERSE CURRENT
the strongest possible language: “They are completely ruthless; one
word and a person’s political life is done. . . . Our party is smeared
beyond recognition.” Without mentioning her name, Tan spoke of
Jiang Qing as “more of a terror than Wu Zetian” (Empress of the
Tang Dynasty, who reigned 685-705). Lin Biao passed the letter to
Mao with a comment that Tan’s thinking had unexpectedly deterio-
rated into confusion.
Mao’s immediate reaction to the news of the briefing sessions was
fury. On the night of 18 February, Mao convened part of the Politburo
to a meeting, during which he sharply criticized the marshals and vice-
premiers. He considered the target of their protest to be himself and
accused them of siding with the “black headquarters” of Liu Shaoqi
and Deng Xiaoping and attempting to reverse the verdicts. Mao also
ordered Tan Zhenlin, Chen Yi, and Xu Xiangqian to be on leave to
conduct self-criticism. From 25 February to 18 March, seven party
cell meetings were held in Huairen Hall to criticize Tan, Chen and
others. At these meetings, members of the CCRSG accused the vet-
eran leaders of creating a February Adverse Current to oppose Mao’s
Cultural Revolution policies and protect a handful of capitalist-
roaders. Kang Sheng called the Huairen Hall “disturbance” “a
rehearsal for a kind of coup d’ état, a rehearsal for a capitalist revival.”
In the meantime, the CCRSG began to spread the news out of the
Zhongnanhai compound and initiate a nationwide mass movement
to criticize the February Adverse Current and to bring down the mar-
shals and vice-premiers.
Mao, on the other hand, did not want the condemnation of the
veterans to go that far. On 30 April, Mao invited the veterans to his
home for a “gathering for unity” and allowed them to watch fire-
works from Tiananmen on 1 May, the International Labor Day. As
these old cadres’ names were listed in all the newspapers on May
Day indicating Mao’s judgment, Jiang Qing and her supporters in
the CCRSG had to halt for the moment their Retaliation Against the
February Adverse Current campaign. They raised the issue again in
October 1968 at the Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central
Committee and in April 1969 at the Ninth National Congress of the
CCP, but, without much encouragement from Mao, they could not
carry the issue further. After Lin Biao’s downfall in September 1971,
Mao essentially reversed his critical attitude and spoke of the “great
disturbance at Huairen Hall” as an act against Lin Biao, Chen Boda,
FEBRUARY MUTINY © 91
and Wang-Guan-Qi (the alleged Anti-Party Clique). He suggested
that the February Adverse Current not be mentioned again.
In early 1979, the CCP Central Committee redressed the February
Adverse Current case. Since then the reactionary-sounding referent
has often been rephrased in official media as a “February resistance”
to indicate the righteousness in the veteran leaders’ clashes with the
ultraleftist forces within the CCP during the Cultural Revolution.
FEBRUARY MUTINY. This was a rumor used by Kang Sheng in
the early stages of the Cultural Revolution to persecute Peng Zhen
and He Long. In February 1966, as directed by the Central Military
Commission, the Beijing Military Region began organizing a regi-
ment in its Garrison Command to train militia and maintain security,
but a suitable barracks was not immediately available. Since some
college students were in the countryside participating in the Socialist
Education Movement at the time, the Garrison Command at first
negotiated with Peking University and the People’s University about
the possibility of quartering the troops temporarily in student dormi-
tories but then decided to give up the idea and seek shelter elsewhere.
By July 1966, Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing, was already denounced
as a “black gang” member and an “anti-Party element.’ Some stu-
dents at Peking University, in an information-exchange and brain-
storming session, recalled the negotiation and began to speculate on
a possible connection between the housing issue raised in February
and the February Outline that Peng Zhen had helped to produce.
Pure speculation soon led to the writing of a big-character poster
titled “The Mind-Boggling February Mutiny” in which the dormitory
negotiation was assumed to be preparation for a coup by Peng Zhen
and Deputy Mayor Liu Ren.
Speaking at a mass rally at Beijing Normal University on 27 July,
Kang Sheng charged Peng Zhen and other leaders of the Beijing
party committee with plotting a coup. In September 1966, Kang
began to incriminate Marshal He Long with sensational details about
the so-called February Mutiny: that He Long mustered troops and
built fortresses in Beijing suburbs, that people at the National Sports
Commission led by He Long were equipped with guns, and that can-
nons were set in Shichahai Park and were aimed at the Zhongnanhai
compound. In the capacity of adviser to the Central Cultural Revo-
lution Small Group, Kang Sheng’s charges were widely believed
92 © FEBRUARY OUTLINE
to have been based on credible evidence. On 29 June 1974, the CCP
Central Committee (CC) issued a formal notice rehabilitating He
Long which dismisses the February Mutiny as pure rumor. But Kang
Sheng’s role in this notorious persecution case was not mentioned
until 1980 when the CC formally concluded the investigation of the
February Mutiny case, denouncing Kang Sheng for his use of rumor
to bring down Peng Zhen and He Long.
FEBRUARY OUTLINE (1966). Officially titled “Five-Person Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group’s Outline Report Concerning the
Current Academic Discussion,” this CCP document was issued to
party organizations nationwide on 12 February 1966 as a guideline
for the ongoing political criticism of literary and academic writing.
The Politburo’s condemnation of this document three months later
marked the official beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
Since Yao Wenyuan’s critique of Wu Han’s historical play Hai Rui
Dismissed from Office was first carried in Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily on
10 November 1965, the fire of political criticism had been spreading
rapidly across China. Criticism was getting more militant and threat-
ened to implicate more well-known authors. In the meantime, Mao
Zedong’s comment that the “vital area” of Wu’s play is dismissal and
that Peng Dehuai (a minister of defense dismissed in 1959) is also
Hai Rui oriented the movement toward current politics. To provide
guidance for the ongoing political movement, Peng Zhen, mayor of
Beijing and head of the Five-Person Group, convened an enlarged
meeting of the group on 3 February 1966. The ideas discussed at the
meeting were summarized by deputy directors of the CCP Propaganda
Department Xu Liqun and Yao Zhen in the form of an outline report.
The outline was approved by the Politburo Standing Committee on
5 February and by Mao on 8 February. It was issued as an official doc-
ument on 12 February. The outline affirms the criticism of Wu Han
and the discussion and debate such criticism inspired. It defines the
current debate as a great struggle of the proletariat against bourgeois
ideas in ideological and academic spheres. On the other hand, it seems
also to try to retain as much liberal attitude as circumstances permit. It
demands that academic discussions “follow the principles of seeking
the truth and of everyone being equal in front of the truth, convince
others with reason, and not intimidate others with the arbitrariness
and the authority of a scholar-tyrant.” The outline also advises caution
in criticizing a person by name in a newspaper or magazine.
FIRST MARXIST-LENINIST BIG-CHARACTER POSTER ® 93
In late March, Mao, contradicting his initial support for the Febru-
ary Outline, called it erroneous and criticized the Five-Person Group,
the CCP Propaganda Department, and the CCP Beijing Municipal
Committee. At the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4-26 May 1966,
Peng Zhen was branded head of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party
Clique largely due to his attempt to limit the issues of a cultural
revolution to literary and academic matters. The May 16 Circular,
approved at the meeting and considered to be one of the programmatic
documents of the Cultural Revolution, was essentially an item-by-item
refutation of the February Outline. See also MAY 16 CIRCULAR.
FIRST MARXIST-LENINIST BIG-CHARACTER POSTER. This
was a common reference to the big-character poster “What Are
Song Shuo, Lu Ping, and Peng Peiyun Really Doing during the Cul-
tural Revolution?” by seven faculty members of the Department of
Philosophy at Peking University: Nie Yuanzi, Song Yixiu, Xia Jian-
zhi, Yang Keming, Zhao Zhengyi, Gao Yunpeng, and Li Xingchen.
Most of the coauthors participated in the discussion and revision of
the first, second, and third draft versions of the poster, which were
written, respectively, by Zhao, Song, and Yang, but, because of Nie’s
position as party secretary of the department and a senior faculty
member, her signature tops the others’ on the final version that was
mounted on the wall of a school dining hall on 25 May 1966. Having
this particular poster broadcast nationwide on 1 June was one of the
most decisive moves Chairman Mao Zedong made to mobilize the
masses and stir up the nation for the Cultural Revolution. The poster
became known as the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster”
when Mao called it such in early August in his “Bombarding the
Headquarters—My Own Big-Character Poster.”
The poster accuses Song Shuo, deputy director of the university
department of the Beijing municipal party committee, Lu Ping, presi-
dent of Peking University, and Peng Peiyun, deputy-party secretary
of the university, of conspiring with the Beijing municipal committee
in an attempt to suppress the revolutionary activities of the faculty,
staff and students in the name of “strengthening the leadership”
and contain the ongoing Cultural Revolution on campus in a theo-
retical and academic discussion. Their actions were, according to the
authors, revisionist and counterrevolutionary.
Despite its high-flown political rhetoric, the poster had much to
do with an internal political conflict during the Socialist Education
94 © [FIVE] “571 PROJECT” SUMMARY
Movement between Nie and her colleagues, on the one hand, and Lu
Ping and the university party committee, on the other: in 1964, Nie
and her colleagues had accused Lu and his party committee of car-
rying out a bourgeois line but eventually lost the political battle after
the Beijing municipal party committee led by Peng Zhen stepped in
to support Lu, discounting the accusations by Nie and her colleagues.
To assist Lu, the municipal committee appointed Song Shuo a lead-
ing member of the Peking University Socialist Education Movement
work team and made Peng Peiyun a deputy party secretary of the
university. The new political movement now provided an opportunity
for the comeback of Nie and her colleagues. They wrote the poster
also with the knowledge of the downfall of Peng Zhen, along with the
entire Beijing municipal committee, at the enlarged Politburo ses-
sions, 4-26 May 1966. Furthermore, according to Nie, as they were
drafting the poster, they gained moral support from Cao Yi’ ou, wife
of Kang Sheng and head of an investigation group sent to Peking
University by Kang on 14 May 1966.
Since more than a thousand big-character posters that appeared on
campus shortly after the poster of the Nie group demonstrated more
opposition than support, Yang Keming sought help from Cao Yi’ou.
Eventually, on 1 June, a copy of the poster reached Mao via Kang
Sheng, and Mao’s reaction was swift and positive. Closely following
Mao’s directive, the Central People’s Radio broadcast the poster at
8:30 p.m., and, on the following day, the People’s Daily published the
entire text of the poster under the banner headline “Seven Comrades at
Peking University Uncover Secret Plot.” The paper also carried a com-
mentary entitled “Hail the Big-Character Poster at Peking University.”
The unprecedented publicity for a short big-character poster ignited the
fire of a mass movement, especially on school campuses, across China
that challenged the CCP leadership at various levels. At the Eleventh
Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (1-12 August
1966), Mao called the poster the “declaration of the Paris Commune
of the 1960s—Beijing Commune” and the “first Marxist-Leninist big-
character poster in China,” which sent another shock wave across the
country, and this time the challenge was aimed squarely at what Mao
called the “bourgeois headquarters’”—-soon to be revealed as President
Liu Shaoqi and his supporters in the party leadership.
[FIVE] “571 PROJECT” SUMMARY (“571 gongcheng” jiyao). With
“571” (pronounced “wu-qi-yi’ in Chinese) homonymically suggestive
[FIVE] “571 PROJECT” SUMMARY ® 95
of “armed uprising” (wuzhuang qiyi), this is allegedly a plan for an
armed coup devised in March 1971 in Shanghai by Lin Liguo, son of
Lin Biao, and some young People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers
close to him, including Yu Xinye, who was said to have drafted the
Summary, Zhou Yuchi, and Li Weixin. The document was reportedly
discovered after the September 13 Incident in a red notebook left by
Lin Liguo and his associates at a secret depot at an air force academy
in Beijing. On 14 November 1971, the CCP Central Committee issued
nationwide a document that includes the 577 Project Summary as
evidence of the alleged armed coup by Lin Biao and his supporters,
though no evidence was given concerning Lin Biao’s involvement in
the making of the Summary.
The nine-part Summary claims that a power struggle is going on
and that the other side (the Jiang Qing group) is planning to replace
Lin Biao with someone else as Mao Zedong’s successor. Mao,
referred to by the code name “B-52” in the Summary, is perceived
as no longer trusting Lin Biao and his supporters in the army; as a
result, the power struggle is “going in a direction that will benefit
those working with pens but not those holding guns.” Therefore,
rather than waiting to be eliminated, “we’”—that is, Lin Biao and his
associates—shall launch a “violent revolution,” starting with a mili-
tary action followed by political control, to stop the current “‘counter-
revolution in the manner of peaceful evolution.” For this purpose, the
alleged designers of the Summary prefer to “round up all the high-
ranking cadres while they are at a meeting” and force Mao to give up
power, but “poison gas, bacterial weapons, bombing, 543 [a missile],
car accident, assassination, kidnapping, and urban guerrilla troops”
may also be employed if necessary.
Aside from details concerning the armed coup, the Summary con-
tains a series of diagnoses of China’s current political situation that
actually articulated the widespread, and yet very much self-censored,
discontents of the nation. Among such diagnoses are “the core rul-
ing clique is very unstable in their infighting among themselves for
power and profits,” “peasants lack food and clothing,” “‘educated
youths’ going up to the mountains and down to the countryside is
virtually forced labor in disguise,” “Red Guards were deceived and
used as cannon fodder at the outset (of the Cultural Revolution) and
were later put down as scapegoats,” “cadres’ going to May 7 Cadre
Schools is virtually job loss in disguise,” and “the freezing of work-
ers’ wages is nothing but exploitation.”
99 66
96 © “FIVE OLD PIECES”
The Summary was also known for its sharp criticism of Mao.
According to the Summary, Mao is not a real Marxist-Leninist; rather,
he has abused the trust of the Chinese people and become the “Qin-
shihuang (First Emperor of Qin, known for his despotism) of modern
China.” The Summary dismisses Chinese socialism as fascism and
Mao as a paranoid, a sadistic persecutor, and the “biggest feudal tyrant
in Chinese history.”
Ironically, when the Summary was distributed nationwide in late
1971 as evidence of Lin Biao’s crimes, many readers, though horri-
fied and disgusted by the alleged coup, nevertheless found its criti-
cism of Mao and the Cultural Revolution to be an echo of their own
judgment. Many considered the downfall of Lin Biao and the release
of the 571 Project Summary to be the beginning of their disillusion-
ment about Chinese politics and of their consciously critical judg-
ment of the Cultural Revolution.
“FIVE OLD PIECES”. This was a common reference to the five most
popular works of Mao Zedong endorsed by the central leadership
as core material for political studies during the Cultural Revolution.
As an expansion of the “Three Old Pieces” (“The Foolish Old Man
Who Removed the Mountains,” “In Memory of Norman Bethune,”
and “Serve the People”), already popular before the Cultural Revolu-
tion, the “Five Old Pieces” included two more essays: “On Rectifying
Wrong Ideas in the Party” (1929) and “Oppose Liberalism” (1939).
FIVE-PERSON CULTURAL REVOLUTION SMALL GROUP
(wenhua geming wuren xiaozu). This group was formed in early
July 1964 to lead a rectification movement in literature and art circles,
which turned out to be an immediate prelude of the Cultural Revolu-
tion. On 12 December 1963, and again, on 27 June 1964, Mao Zedong
harshly criticized the CCP leaders in literature and art circles for devi-
ating from socialist principles and promoting what he considered to
be feudalist and bourgeois art. In his judgment, the CCP leadership
in this area had been off course from the correct party policies since
1949. Based on Mao’s criticism and at Mao’s proposal, the CCP Cen-
tral Committee (CC) decided to conduct rectification in literature and
art circles and set up a five-person group to lead the movement. The
group consisted of Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Kang Sheng, Zhou Yang,
and Wu Lengxi. Peng, mayor and first party secretary of Beijing, was
FOUR FELLOWS ° 97
appointed head of the group, while Lu, director of the propaganda
department of the CC and a vice-premier of the State Council, served
as deputy head. After Yao Wenyuan published “On the New His-
torical Drama Hairui Dismissed from Office” in Shanghai’s Wenhui
Daily in November 1965 attacking Wu Han, a renowned historian and
a deputy mayor of Beijing, Peng ordered Beijing’s newspapers not to
reprint Yao’s article, without knowing Mao’s full support for Yao.
In February 1966, as the criticism of Wu Han continued, the five-
person group submitted to the CC a policy guideline entitled Outline
Report Concerning the Current Academic Discussion, also known
as February Outline. Initiated largely by Peng Zhen, the document
attempted to confine the criticism of Wu and a few other writers and
scholars to the realm of academia and prevent it from becoming a
high-pitched political condemnation campaign. With Mao’s approval,
the CC quickly distributed the document nationwide. In late March,
however, Mao began to criticize the February Outline and accused
the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group of suppressing
the Left and protecting the Right. At the enlarged Politburo ses-
sions, 4-26 May 1966, the central leadership announced decisions
to revoke the February Outline, to dissolve the Five-Person Cultural
Revolution Small Group, and to form a new Central Cultural Revo-
lution Small Group under the Politburo. And with the passage of the
May 16 Circular as a critique of the February Outline, the Cultural
Revolution was officially launched.
FOUR CLEANS (1962-1966). See SOCIALIST EDUCATION
MOVEMENT.
FOUR FELLOWS (si tiao hanzi). The modern Chinese writer Lu
Xun coined this pejorative term to refer to Tian Han, Zhou Yang, Xia
Yan, and Yang Hansheng in one of his polemics written in 1936. The
“Four Fellows” was used again during the Cultural Revolution and
publicized much more broadly by the critics of the four persons—all
of them now holding important positions in literary and artistic cir-
cles: Zhou was a deputy minister of culture and a deputy head of the
CCP Propaganda Department; Tian, president of the China Federation
of Literature and Art Circles and president and party secretary of the
Association of Chinese Dramatists; Xia, a deputy minister of culture
(until 1965) and president of the Association of Chinese Film Artists;
98 © FOUR GREATS
and Yang, party secretary of the China Federation of Literature and
Art Circles. With Lu Xun’s harsh remark already a liability, the four
writers and officials were accused of having carried out a “black line”
in the area of literature and art against Mao Zedong’s revolutionary
policies since 1949, and they were among the first to fall from power
during the Cultural Revolution.
FOUR GREATS (sige weida). This is a reference to Chairman Mao
Zedong’s honorific title “great teacher, great leader, great commander,
and great helmsman.” In a speech delivered at the mass rally of 18
August 1966, Chen Boda called Mao “the great leader, the great
teacher, and the great helmsman.” At the same event, Lin Biao spoke
of Mao as the “great commander” of the Cultural Revolution. Lin
used the four phrases together for the first time in a public speech on
31 August 1966. Lin’s handwritten slogan “Long live great teacher,
great leader, great commander, and great helmsman Chairman Mao”
turned out to be a most widely printed piece of calligraphy during the
Cultural Revolution.
FOUR NEVER-FORGETS. This is a common reference to “Never
forget class struggle, never forget proletarian dictatorship, never
forget stressing politics, and never forget holding high the great red
banner of Mao Zedong Thought,’ one of the most popular political
slogans used at mass rallies and struggle meetings during the Cul-
tural Revolution. See also LIN BIAO-MAY 18 SPEECH.
FOUR OLDS (sijiu). A short form for “old ideas, old culture, old cus-
toms, and old habits.” See DESTROY THE FOUR OLDS.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY
CLIQUE. Labeled by the government as counterrevolutionary, this
was a reading group active in the first half of the 1970s. The leader
of the group was Xu Xiao, an educated youth from Beijing. Xu
was inspired by her older friend Zhao Yifan’s book-reading salon
and organized a correspondent group of some 20 young workers and
PLA soldiers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shanxi Province in the early
1970s. The members of the group shared volumes from two internally
published book series known as grey books and yellow books. They
wrote to one another describing what they learned from the books
FOURTH NATIONAL PEOPLE'S CONGRESS ® 99
and discussed current politics in their letters without knowing that
their correspondence was being monitored by government censors.
All members of the group were arrested and imprisoned in late 1975
on the charges of circulating items of counterrevolutionary literature,
exchanging ideas against CCP leaders, and opposing the campaign
to criticize Lin and criticize Confucius. The label “Fourth Inter-
national” by which the government named the group was based on
an accusation that Xu Xiao and Zhao Yifan attempted to organize a
group to initiate a new stage of the international communist move-
ment. The members of the “Fourth International Counterrevolution-
ary Clique” were rehabilitated in 1978.
FOURTH NATIONAL PEOPLE’S CONGRESS (13-17 January
1975). The only National People’s Congress held during the Cultural
Revolution, the meeting opened in Beijing shortly after the Second
Plenum of the Tenth CCP Central Committee presided over by Premier
Zhou Enlai in which Deng Xiaoping was elected vice-chairman
of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo Standing
Committee. Three days before the plenum, Deng was also appointed
vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and chief of the
general staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In his “Report
on Government Work” delivered at the Fourth National People’s Con-
gress, Zhou reaffirmed the economic blueprint approved by the pre-
Cultural Revolution Third National People’s Congress (21 December
1964—4 January 1965) for accomplishing “four modernizations” (the
modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science
and technology) to make China a strong socialist country by the end
of the 20th century. With strong support from Zhou (who was then
suffering from cancer and ready to transfer his responsibilities to
Deng) and the approval of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Fourth Con-
gress appointed Deng Xiaoping first premier of the State Council.
The stage was set for Deng’s 1975 “overall rectification.”
On the political and ideological front, however, the Fourth Con-
gress upheld Mao’s radical policies. Both Zhou Enlai’s speech and
Zhang Chunqiao’s “Report on Revising the Constitution” affirmed
the party’s “basic line (of class existence and class struggle) for the
entire socialist period” and Mao’s theory of continuing revolution
under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In defining the revolu-
tionary committee at a local level as both the permanent organ of the
100 © FU CHONGBI
local People’s Congress and the local government body, the revised
constitution sanctified the power structure established during the
Cultural Revolution and granted it both legislative and administra-
tive authority. The 1975 constitution also became the first one to rule
officially that the power of a political party was superior to that of the
state: following Mao’s suggestion, it abolished the office of the presi-
dent of the nation; it stipulated that the National People’s Congress
was the highest institution of power under the leadership of the CCP
and that the chairman of the CCP was also commander-in-chief of all
the armed forces. With nonparty members constituting only 23.2% of
all delegates attending the Fourth Congress, the lowest nonparty rep-
resentation of any congress in the PRC history, and with the so-called
“democratic consultation” rather than grassroots election as the way
of selecting congressional delegates, the people’s congress became a
euphemism for party dominance.
FU CHONGBI (1916-2003). Named commanding officer of the Bei-
jing Garrison Command in 1966, General Fu was persecuted by Lin
Biao and Jiang Qing in 1968 as a member of the so-called Yang-
Yu-Fu Anti-Party Clique. Born in Tongjiang, Sichuan Province, Fu
joined the Red Army in 1932 and became a member of the CCP in
the following year. Due to his outstanding military service, Fu was
named major general in 1955 and became commander of 10th Bri-
gade of the North-China Military Region and then commander of the
People’s Liberation Army 19th Division. In addition to the position
of deputy commander of the Beijing Military Region that he had
held since 1965, Fu was made commanding officer of the Beijing
Garrison Command in 1966. In the early stages of the Cultural Revo-
lution when Mao-supported cultural revolutionaries in the central
leadership called upon mass organizations to attack a great number of
senior party and military officials, Fu Chongbi, in the capacity of the
Beijing Garrison Commander, followed instructions from Premier
Zhou Enlai and provided certain protection for some senior officials
to the displeasure of Jiang Qing and her followers in the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG).
In March 1968, when Lin Biao sought support from the Jiang Qing
group for the removal of Generals Yang Chengwu and Yu Lijin, Jiang
asked Lin to dismiss Fu as well. As a result of this political bargain,
Lin, with the approval of Mao Zedong, named the three generals a
Yang-Yu-Fu Anti-Party Clique in March 1968. The charge against Fu
GANG OF FOUR œ 101
was that he led solders to storm the office of the CCRSG, while the
truth was that Fu and three military officers were there for official busi-
ness with the permission of the CCRSG. Nevertheless, Fu was arrested
on this blatantly false charge and was imprisoned for more than six
years. After the downfall of Lin Biao and his associates in the army in
September 1971, Mao began to seek support from other military fac-
tions. He acknowledged some of his mistakes in December 1973, and
the CCP Central Committee (CC) dismissed the charges against Yang,
Yu, and Fu in July 1974. Fu was reappointed as deputy commander of
the Beijing Military Region in 1975 and commanding officer of the
Beijing Garrison Command in 1977. In March 1979, the CC officially
rehabilitated the case of the Yang- Yu-Fu Affair by publicizing its 1974
decision for the first time. Fu died on 17 January 2003.
FU LEI (1908-1966). A native of Shanghai, Fu Lei read Chinese
classics at an early age and was trained in literature and the arts in
Paris in his early twenties. Starting his career as a translator of for-
eign—mostly French—literature in the 1930s, Fu put into Chinese
major novels by Honoré de Balzac and Romain Rolland and tales
of Voltaire. His translated works totaling five million words, Fu Lei
was one of the few prolific, refined, and truly great translators in
China. He was also a highly respected literary and art critic and a
fine letter-writer in his own right. In 1957, Fu was denounced as a
Rightist during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. In the summer of 1966
when the Cultural Revolution broke out, Fu’s house was ransacked
by the Red Guards. He and his wife Zhu Meifu became targets of
the revolution, subject to public humiliation and physical abuse. In
the early hours of 3 September 1966, Fu Lei and Zhu Meifu hanged
themselves at home to protest the humiliation and torture they suf-
fered at struggle meetings. On 26 April 1979, the Shanghai litera-
ture and art circles held a memorial service for Fu and Zhu. At the
memorial service, an official announcement was made that naming
Fu Lei as a Rightist in 1957 was a mistake and that all accusations
against him in 1966 were groundless.
SG
GANG OF FOUR (sirenbang). A popular name for the group of
diehard cultural revolutionaries in the CCP leadership consisting of
102 © GANG OF FOUR
Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen,
the phrase “Gang of Four” was first used by Chairman Mao Zedong
in 1974 to criticize the factionalism of the four and was later adopted
by the CCP Central Committee (CC) in October 1976 as an alterna-
tive reference to the “Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing,
and Yao Wenyuan Anti-Party Clique.” The ordering of the names was
according to the rankings of the four in the CCP leadership at the time
when they were arrested. Later, the official reference to the group was
changed to the “Jiang Qing Counterrevolutionary Clique” since Jiang
was the real leader of the group.
The Gang of Four was an alliance of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing with
three ultraleftists originally based in Shanghai. In 1964 and 1965,
Jiang, who had no official position in the government, followed
Mao’s instructions and began to be active in the area of literature and
the arts. As her push for a revolution in art and literature met resis-
tance in Beijing, she went to Shanghai and received much support
from Zhang Chunqiao, a secretary of the CCP Shanghai municipal
committee. The two entrusted Yao Wenyuan, director of the art and
literature department of the newspaper Liberation Daily, with the
writing of a critique of Wu Han’s historical play Hai Rui Dismissed
from Office. The publication of Yao’s article in Wenhui Daily on 10
November 1965 was generally considered to be the “blasting fuse”
of the Cultural Revolution. In May 1966, when the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) was formed, Jiang became first
deputy head, Zhang deputy head, and Yao a member of the group.
In November 1966, Wang Hongwen, a cadre in the security section
of Shanghai No. 17 Textile Factory and commander of the mass
organization Shanghai Workers Command Post, became known for
his involvement in a railway blockade at Anting. In February 1967,
when the Shanghai revolutionary committee was formed, replacing
the old municipal government agencies, Zhang became chairman,
Yao and Wang vice-chairmen, though Zhang and Yao stayed most of
the time in Beijing for their duties in the CCRSG.
The four became more closely associated after Wang was assigned
work in Beijing in September 1972 at Mao’s suggestion, and espe-
cially after the Tenth National Congress of the CCP in August
1973 at which Wang delivered the report on the revising of the party
constitution and was made vice-chairman of the CC and a member of
the Politburo Standing Committee. Wang’s meteoric rise to the third
GANG OF FOUR ® 103
highest position (after Mao and Zhou Enlai) in the central leadership
indicated that Mao was making Wang his successor after the down-
fall of Lin Biao. Also at the CCP Tenth National Congress, Zhang
entered the Politburo Standing Committee, while both Jiang and Yao
continued to be members of the Politburo. At the enlarged Politburo
sessions of 25 November—5 December 1973, Jiang Qing, with Mao’s
approval, formed a “help group” to criticize Zhou Enlai. The group
included Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hong-
wen, Wang Dongxing, and Hua Guofeng. After a few meetings,
Wang Dongxing and Hua Guofeng withdrew, and Jiang, Zhang, Yao,
and Wang remained close as a group after the Politburo sessions. Fre-
quently meeting at Diaoyutai, they formed an alliance to undermine
the efforts of the State Council led by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping
to deradicalize government policies and to carry out a modernization
program. Following Mao’s instructions, Jiang, Zhang, Yao, and Wang
led such political campaigns as the Criticize Lin and Criticize Con-
fucius, Criticize Confucianism and Evaluate Legalism (piru pingfa;
see Confucianism vs. Legalism), and Water Margin Appraisal, all
aimed at attacking Zhou and Deng by insinuation.
In the last two years of his life, however, Mao criticized the four
on several occasions. The criticism did not concern their ideology,
which was closest to Mao’s; rather, Mao was warning them against
“factionalism’—the “little faction of four” was the phrase Mao used
first, and then the “Gang of Four’”—because, apparently, he was con-
cerned that his most trusted cultural revolutionaries, sticking together
and lacking political tactics, were isolated from the rest of the central
leadership. Eventually, the four had become so unpopular that Mao
made Hua Guofeng his successor.
On 6 October 1976, within a month of Mao’s death, Jiang, Zhang,
Yao, and Wang were arrested in Beijing on orders of Hua Guofeng,
Wang Dongxing, and Ye Jianying in the name of the central leader-
ship. The arrest of the Gang of Four marked the official end of the
Cultural Revolution. When the news was made public on 14 Octo-
ber, spontaneous celebrations took place across the nation. Between
December 1976 and September 1977, the CC issued three collections
of the criminal evidence against the Gang of Four, holding them
responsible for virtually all of the excesses of the Cultural Revolu-
tion. At the Third Plenum of the CCP Tenth Central Committee, held
in Beijing on 16-21 July 1977, a resolution was passed that Wang,
104 © GOLDEN ROAD
Zhang, Jiang, and Yao (names listed in this order) be dismissed from
their official posts and expelled from the party.
GOLDEN ROAD (jinguang dadao). This is a multivolume novel
written by Hao Ran and published by Beijing People’s Literature
Press in 1972 (volume one), 1975 (volume two), and 1994 (volumes
one to four). Focusing on the theme of class struggle and the conflict
between two “roads” (the capitalist and the socialist roads), in its
first two volumes the novel traces the collectivization of agriculture
that peasants at Fangcaodi Village undertook in the 1950s. Writing
the novel during the Cultural Revolution, Hao Ran took the eight
model dramas as the model and adopted artistic formulas promoted
by Jiang Qing, such as “three prominences” and “thematic prior-
ity”; he used these formulas so closely as to make the name of his
protagonist, Gao Daquan, echo Jiang’s creative principle for a posi-
tive heroic figure: “high” (gao), “large” (da), and “perfect” (quan;
literally “spring” but punning on “perfect’’). As a result, Hao Ran’s
work was well received by Jiang Qing and her followers in artistic
circles, and Hao Ran himself was accorded considerable political
privilege. In fact, for quite some time during the Cultural Revolution,
he and Lu Xun were the only fiction writers of note with works still
in print, so much so that Hao Ran was the “one author” in the novelist
Mao Dun’s dismissal of the artistically barren Cultural Revolution as
the age of “eight model dramas and one author.” After the Cultural
Revolution, Hao Ran remained productive, but his Golden Road was
criticized for embracing ultraleftist dogma and misrepresenting the
life of Chinese peasants.
GRAND FESTIVAL (Shengda de jieri). This film was under produc-
tion at Shanghai Film Studio in October 1976 when the Gang of
Four, its political supporters in Beijing, were arrested. The film,
therefore, was never finished. The story of Grand Festival is based
on the Anting Incident (1966), in which Wang Hongwen and
Zhang Chungqiao played leading roles challenging the authority
of the CCP Shanghai municipal committee. Similar roles are given
to the two high-minded heroes in the story—Tiegen, a rebel leader
at the Railway Bureau, and Jingfeng, deputy party secretary of the
Bureau—while two ranking officials representing the status quo are
referred to as diehard capitalist-roaders. The historical January
GREAT NETWORKING @® 105
Storm is also in the background of the story. Grand Festival was
first produced as a stage drama in Shanghai on 16 May 1976 to mark
the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the May 16 Circular. It was
adapted to a screenplay by order of the current municipal leadership
of Shanghai within the week of its stage production. The shooting of
the film started in mid-August but was stopped in mid-October after
the fall of the Gang of Four. The film was immediately denounced
as a key work of “conspiratorial literature” that served a blatantly
political purpose.
GREAT NETWORKING (da chuanlian). Participated in by tens of
millions of students and teachers, the “Great Networking” was a
nationwide traveling activity initiated by students and encouraged by
Mao Zedong as a way to mobilize the masses and spread the fire of
the Cultural Revolution from Beijing to other parts of the country.
The big-character poster by Nie Yuanzi and six others attacking the
party leadership of Peking University shook the country after it was
broadcast nationwide on 1 June 1966. Students and teachers began to
stream into Peking University and other college campuses in Beijing
to experience the revolution firsthand in order to wage battles against
the authorities of their own institutions—in Beijing and elsewhere.
Mutual exchanges of ideas and experiences took place as well. Many
students in other parts of the country who felt that the local authorities
were trying to put down their rebellion would also come to Beijing to
these campuses and to the reception office established by the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) to seek sympathy and
support. This was the beginning of the Great Networking.
By early August 1966, hundreds of thousands of visitors—many
now called themselves Red Guards—were in Beijing, and tens of
thousands continued to flood in every day. At the Mass Rally of 18
August 1966, Mao came out to receive and inspect an army of one
million Red Guards and revolutionary masses in Tiananmen Square.
Many of them were visitors. In order to have a glimpse of the Chair-
man in person, many more came to Beijing from all over the country.
In the meantime, Beijing students began to travel to other parts of
the country to support their comrades in their battles against local
authorities and help them keep up with the development in Beijing.
Some established provincial and city liaison offices for their orga-
nizations, while mass organizations from other parts of the country
106 © GREAT NETWORKING
also established their own liaison offices in Beijing. On 31 August
1966 when Mao received Red Guards the second time in Tiananmen
Square, Premier Zhou Enlai, representing the central leadership,
spoke in support of the Great Networking.
On 5 September, the CCP Central Committee (CC) and the State
Council (SC) issued a circular, approving travel for networking pur-
poses by students and teachers of colleges and middle schools and
granting free transportation and full accommodation to visitors in
Beijing. Though the grand fee waiver was supposed to be applicable
in the nation’s capital alone, this policy was actually carried out in
other places as well. Following orders from the central leadership,
municipal authorities of Beijing converted tens of thousands of
warehouses, auditoriums, and classrooms to reception centers to host
“Chairman Mao’s guests,” as the visitors were called at the time. The
municipal authorities also demanded that Beijing citizens donate
blankets, comforters, and pillows for the networkers to use. A similar
situation also occurred in other big cities and in such “revolutionary
holy lands” (geming shengdi) as Shaoshan (Mao’s hometown), Jing-
gangshan (where Mao established the first communist base), Zunyi
(the site of a party meeting at which Mao’s leadership was beginning
to be established), and Yan’an. Mao received Red Guards six more
times between September and November 1966, each time drawing at
least a million people to Beijing. Some students also formed Long
March Teams and traveled on foot for hundreds or even thousands
of miles to Beijing and other places.
The Great Networking that helped Mao to mobilize the masses and
build an army of rebels against old party authorities across China also
threw the country into chaos. During a four-month period, shipments
of millions of tons of goods were delayed so that trains carrying net-
workers might run, which was a heavy blow to the country’s economy
that had already slowed down considerably since the Cultural Revolu-
tion began in mid-1966. Many people took advantage of free travel,
roaming the country for sightseeing or to visit friends and relatives,
while the Cultural Revolution movement in their own institutions
halted. The country’s transportation system was so overburdened that
crowded buses, boats, and trains ran far beyond their capacity for
months and were utterly unable to keep to their regular schedules.
By the end of October, it had become clear to central leaders that the
Great Networking must stop. Since winter was approaching, the mat-
GREY BOOKS AND YELLOW BOOKS ® 107
ter became more urgent because hundreds of thousands of reception
centers in the country were not equipped for cold weather. In Novem-
ber and December, the CC and the SC issued a number of notices to
halt the Great Networking temporarily—auntil spring. However, many
networkers ignored orders and continued with their travels. On 19
March 1967, the CC announced that the Great Networking would not
resume. In the following months, orders were issued to close all of the
networker reception centers that had been set up by the government
and many liaison offices that had been established by mass organiza-
tions. With these concrete measures, the Great Networking eventually
came to an end.
GREY BOOKS AND YELLOW BOOKS (huipishu he huang-
pishu). Printed in the early and middle 1960s for restricted circulation,
these translated foreign books were passed around in private among
many unintended readers, especially students, during the Cultural Rev-
olution and contributed much to their questioning of official ideology.
Some 1,041 titles by well-known modern and contemporary writers
of Western countries and of the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc were
translated and published “internally” (neibu faxing) before the Cultural
Revolution. These books can be divided into two groups: the one group
with grey covers includes titles in a broad area of politics, law, and
culture; the other group with yellow covers consists mostly of literary
works. Among the most popular of the first group are William Lawrence
Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Ger-
many, Theja Gunawardhana’s Khrushchevism, Anna Louise Strong’s
The Stalin Era, Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed: What is the
Soviet Union and Where is it Going? and Stalin, An Appraisal of the
Man and His Influence, Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, An Analysis
of the Communist System, Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom,
Adam Schaff’s Structuralism and Marxism, Jules Michelet’s History of
the French Revolution, Nikita S. Khrushchev’s Conquest Without War,
and Edward Crankshaw’s Khrushchev: A Career. The most popular
“yellow books” include I. G. Erenburg’s People and Life: Memoirs of
1891-1917 and The Thaw, Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov’s trilogy
The Living and the Dead, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich, Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Albert Camus’ The
Outsider, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Samuel Beckett’s Wait-
ing for Godot, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye.
108 © GUAN FENG
Of particular and consistent interest to Chinese readers of the time
is what seemed to them distant echoes of their experience, such as
critical views of revolution by dissenting communists, the disillu-
sionment of former revolutionaries, the “revisionist” (Khrushchevist)
critique of Stalinism, and the sense of alienation and absurdity of
modern humanity. Perhaps, the most notable perception that began to
be formed during the Cultural Revolution and has caught the atten-
tion of more and more readers since then is the astonishing parallels
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution with both Stalin’s purge in the
Soviet Union and the Nazi movement in Germany in the 1930s. See
also UNDERGROUND READING MOVEMENT.
GUAN FENG (1918-2006). Mao’s radical theorist, deputy editor-
in-chief of the CCP official organ Red Flag, and a member of the
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), Guan was
dismissed from office in August 1967 as a member of the Wang-
Guan-Qi Anti-Party Clique.
Born in Dongging, Shandong Province and originally named Zhou
Yefeng, Guan joined the CCP in 1933. He was appointed president
of the Shandong Political Academy in 1952 and vice-president of the
Fourth Mid-Level Party School in 1955. When the CCP established
its official organ Red Flag in 1958, Guan was named head of the
journal’s philosophy group and a member of the editorial board and,
later, deputy editor-in-chief. Guan emerged as one of the CCP’s left-
ist intellectuals around 1962 when he published several radical pieces
in Chinese philosophy under the penname He Ming, which caught
the attention of Mao Zedong.
In April and May 1966, at the preparation stage of the Cultural
Revolution, Guan wrote several pieces attacking the so-called Three-
Family Village Anti-Party Clique and the CCP Beijing Municipal
Committee headed by Peng Zhen. An article he coauthored with Lin
Jie criticizing Wu Han (Red Flag, 5 April 1966) and his own piece
attacking two official publications of the Beijing party committee
(Guangming Daily, 9 May 1966), both reprinted in People’s Daily,
were quite influential. Guan was also involved in the drafting of the
May 16 Circular. With Mao’s approval, Guan became a member of
the newly formed CCRSG in May 1966. In the early stages of the
Cultural Revolution, Guan played a significant role in bringing down
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. During the campaign to criticize
HAI RUI DISMISSED FROM OFFICE ® 109
the bourgeois reactionary line in late 1966 and early 1967, Guan
and other CCRSG members pushed the rebel movement forward
against the old party establishment. With the support of Lin Biao and
Jiang Qing and with the approval of Mao, Guan Feng, Wang Li, Qi
Benyu, and some other members of the CCRSG began to press the
military to adopt Mao’s Cultural Revolution policies in 1967: in their
public speeches and in several articles they wrote for official media,
they called on the masses to “ferret out a small handful [of capitalist-
roaders] inside the army,” which met strong resistance from the rank
and file of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). They also began to
make similar radical moves in the area of foreign affairs.
Weighing revolutionary chaos against stability and order, Mao
decided to remove Guan and his close comrades to keep order and to
pacify the protesting PLA officials and senior party leaders soon after
he received an accusatory report from Premier Zhou Enlai. Guan
Feng was detained on 30 August 1967, and his long imprisonment
began on 26 January 1968. In 1980, a court in Beijing named Guan an
accomplice of the Lin Biao and the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary
cliques. He was officially expelled from the CCP at the same time.
See also WANG-GUAN-QI AFFAIR.
-H-
HAI RUI DISMISSED FROM OFFICE (1961). This is the title of a
historical play by Wu Han. The publication of Yao Wenyuan’s cri-
tique “On the New Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office”
in Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily on 10 November 1965 was generally
considered to be the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural Revolution.
At the Seventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (2-
5 April 1959), Mao Zedong spoke favorably of Hai Rui (1514-1587),
a legendary upright official of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Much
concerned with the widespread fear of speaking the truth about the
disastrous Great Leap Forward and the People’s Commune move-
ments, Mao advised that one should learn from Hai Rui’s unbend-
ing character and forthright courage to speak. Mao’s openness to
truth and criticism, however, was qualified by his own comment that
although Hai Rui criticized the emperor, he was after all loyal to him.
Three months later as the truth-talking Marshal Peng Dehuai was
110 © HAIRUI DISMISSED FROM OFFICE
criticized and denounced at the Lushan Conference (Enlarged Ses-
sions of the Politburo, 2 July—1 August 1959 and the Eighth Plenum
of the Eighth Central Committee, 2-16 August) as the leader of an
antiparty clique, Mao spoke of the “leftist” Hai Rui as the true Hai
Rui and the “rightist” Hai Rui as the false one.
Between these two meetings, Hu Qiaomu, of the CCP Propaganda
Department, suggested to Wu Han, a famed Ming historian and dep-
uty mayor of Beijing, that he write about Hai Rui in support of Mao’s
call for honesty and truthfulness. Wu soon published two articles
on Hai Rui. And, at the invitation by the Peking Opera Company of
Beijing, he labored on a play script for a year, went through seven
revisions while the company was rehearsing it, and finally, at the end
of 1960, completed it as Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The play was
first performed in Beijing in January 1961.
In 1962, Jiang Qing began to talk to Mao and those in cultural
circles about Hai Rui Dismissed from Office as a play with serious
problems. In 1964, Kang Sheng suggested to Mao that the play was
related to the Lushan Conference and to the Peng Dehuai question.
Jiang and Kang’s demand that the play be criticized was largely
ignored in Beijing. In early 1965, with the support of Ke Qingshi,
first secretary of the CCP Shanghai municipal committee, Jiang Qing
planned an attack with Zhang Chungiao, an alternate secretary
of the Shanghai municipal committee and head of its propaganda
department. They entrusted Yao Wenyuan with the task of writing a
critical piece. For about eight months while Yao was working on the
article, the writing was kept secret from top party leaders in Beijing
except Mao, who read the article three times before it was published
in Wenhui Daily on 10 November 1965. The article calls Wu Han’s
play a “poisonous weed” and accuses the author of disparaging the
present with a story of the past. In Yao’s view, the story of Hai Rui
forcing local despots to give the seized land back to the peasants was
used in the play as a historical echo of the “rightist” anticollectiviza-
tion policies such as “returning the land” (tuitian) and “going it alone”
(dan’gan), which temporarily reversed the radical principles of the
Great Leap Forward and the People’s Commune. Likewise, the story
of an upright official who is wronged echoed the cries of the early
1960s for a reversal of verdicts for the suppressed “class enemies.”
Yao’s far-fetched accusations and militant style shocked the aca-
demic world and inspired speculations on the background of the
HAI RUI DISMISSED FROM OFFICE ® 111
attack. There was much resistance in Beijing to reprinting the article
after quite a few provincial newspapers did. Mayor Peng Zhen, away
from Beijing at the time, specifically instructed that the article not
be reprinted until he came back. Upon hearing Jiang Qing’s report
about the resistance from Beijing, Mao was convinced that the CCP
Beijing municipal committee was an “impenetrable and watertight
independent kingdom.” He suggested to Yao Wenyuan that the article
be distributed nationwide in pamphlet form. The Beijing municipal
committee finally gave in: Yao’s article was reprinted in the Beijing
Daily on 29 November with an editor’s note stressing the importance
of telling truth from falsehood and of allowing dissenting views in the
discussion. On 30 November, the People’s Daily carried the article
in its academic research section. The editorial comment was added
following instructions from Premier Zhou Enlai and Mayor Peng
Zhen. It insists that the discussion follow the principles of “letting a
hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend”
(baihuagifang, baijiazhengming, as Mao famously put it), that there
should be freedom both to criticize and to rebut, and that one needs to
seek truth from facts and convince people with reasoned argument.
Mao, on the other hand, did not take such an academic approach.
In late December, he made a devastating comment concerning Wu
Han’s play that further politicized the issue. He said that Yao Wenyu-
an’s article was good but did not quite hit the vital part: “The vital
point is dismissal. Emperor Jiaqing dismissed Hai Rui. We, in 1959,
dismissed Peng Dehuai. Peng Dehuai is also Hai Rui.”
In the face of the heated debate over Hai Rui Dismissed, Peng Zhen,
as head of the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group, con-
vened an enlarged group meeting on 3 February 1966 to discuss the
Wu Han question. The meeting produced the “Outline Report Con-
cerning the Current Academic Discussion” (commonly known as the
February Outline), which was approved by the Standing Committee
of the Politburo on 12 February as guidelines for the ongoing debate.
Despite its leftist-sounding rhetoric, the February Outline was meant
to limit discussion and debate within the academic sphere.
In his conversations with Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, and Zhang
Chungiao in late March, however, Mao began to accuse the Five-
Person Group and its Outline of obscuring class lines and confusing
right and wrong and to blame the CCP Propaganda Department for
suppressing the voice of the left. As a result of Mao’s new directives,
112 © HAN AIJING
the next two months saw publication of major attacks on Wu Han by
Guan Feng and Qi Benyu (both soon to be made members of the
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group) and a host of militant
essays attacking a magazine column called “Notes from a Three-
Family Village” to which Wu Han had been a principal contributor.
In April, Peng Zhen was charged with “anti-Party crimes” at a top-
level meeting. On 16 May, an enlarged Politburo session passed the
“Circular of the CCP Central Committee” (which came to be known
as the May 16 Circular) that delegitimized the February Outline and
officially launched the Cultural Revolution. What originally appeared
to be a critique of a historical play had now evolved into a full-scale
nationwide political movement.
HAN AIJING (1946—- ). One of the well-known “five Red Guard
leaders” in Beijing, Han was head of the Red Flag Battalion at the
Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and a prominent leader of the Capital
College Red Guards’ Representative Assembly during the Cultural
Revolution.
A native of Lianshui, Jiangsu Province, Han organized the
nationally influential Red Flag Battalion at the Beijing Institute of
Aeronautics, a rebel student organization that the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) strongly supported for its battle
against the work group at the outset of the Cultural Revolution.
During the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line of
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, Chairman Mao Zedong and his
radical supporters relied heavily on the Han-led Battalion as one of
the ablest and most reliable mass organizations for attacking their
political opponents. Following instructions from Qi Benyu, a mem-
ber of the CCRSG, Han sent a team to Sichuan to kidnap Marshal
Peng Dehuai to Beijing in December 1966 and then subjected him
to brutal physical abuse in 1967 at two struggle meetings. Han was
named head of the Revolutionary Committee at the Beijing Insti-
tute of Aeronautics as well as a member of the Standing Committee
of Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee in 1967.
During their short political careers as Mao’s soldiers, Han and
other rebel student leaders developed their own ambitions, and their
organizations engaged in violent factional battles and sometimes
became such an intractable mass force for the central leadership that,
HELONG @ 113
in summer 1968, Mao finally decided to end the Red Guard move-
ment. During his meeting with the five Red Guard leaders on the
early morning of 28 July 1968, Mao sent a strong signal to Han and
others that they should exit China’s political stage. Soon a Workers
Propaganda Team and a PLA Propaganda Team were sent to the
Beijing Institute of Aeronautics to take over power from Han and
his fellow rebel students. Han was detained by the PLA Propaganda
Team at the institute in 1971 and remained in custody until 1975.
After the downfall of the Gang of Four, the authorities formally
arrested Han in 1978. Han was convicted as a counterrevolutionary
and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in March 1983. He was con-
victed of a variety of crimes including instigating attacks on party
and state officials and framing and persecuting innocent people. See
also MAO ZEDONG—MEETING WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD
LEADERS.
HAO LIANG. See QIAN HAOLIANG.
HE LONG (1896-1969). A top-ranking official of the People’s Libera-
tion Army (PLA) and one of the ten marshals of the People’s Repub-
lic of China (PRC), He Long was a vice-chairman of the Central
Military Commission (CMC), a vice-premier of the State Council,
and a member of the Politburo. He was a victim of Lin Biao’s power
takeover in the army during the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Hunan Province, He Long was a well-known left-
leaning general of the Northern Expedition. At the 1927 Nanchang
Uprising, he served as commander-in-chief in response to the
CCP’s call for military insurrection. One year later, He joined the
CCP. He participated in the Long March as commander of the Red
Army’s Second Front Army. He was commander of the 120th Divi-
sion of the Communist-led Eighth Route Army during the war of
resistance against Japan and a leader of the First Field Army of
the PLA during the civil war in the second half of the 1940s. He
continued to play an important role in both military and civil affairs
after the founding of the PRC. He was in charge of the nation’s
sports affairs as chairman of the State Physical Culture and Sports
Commission beginning in 1952 and a vice-premier from 1954. He
became a vice-chairman of the CMC in 1954 and began to take
114 © HU SHOUJUN CLIQUE
charge of the daily affairs of the CMC in 1964. He was elected to
the Politburo in 1956.
Leading a different faction of the army and having conflicts with
He Long that resulted from the long history of army politics, Lin Biao
began to plot against He Long at the beginning of the Cultural Revo-
lution in order to gain full control of the CMC. With the support of
the cultural revolutionaries, including Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng,
Lin and his close associates in the military lodged a false charge
against He, accusing him of having ambitions for military power and
of plotting a mutiny in February 1966. Mao Zedong resisted Lin’s
move at first, but, as the support of Lin and the Jiang Qing group for
his Cultural Revolution program became increasingly indispensable,
Mao finally approved their proposal to investigate He’s past in Sep-
tember 1967. Zhou Enlai, too, protected He Long initially and even
sheltered him in his own residence from the rebelling masses. But
Zhou eventually followed Mao’s decision and went along with the
radicals’ accusations against He.
Consequently, He Long was placed under house arrest and began
what was to be a hard life as a political prisoner; sometimes he was
not even given enough food and water. He faced ruthless interroga-
tions conducted by a special case group controlled by Lin Biao’s
associates, which forced him to confess his past “crimes” of “turn-
ing a traitor’ and “killing communists.” In the meantime, he was
deprived of proper medical treatment for the diabetes from which he
had been suffering for years. Mistreatment and grave illness eventu-
ally led to his death on 9 June 1969.
After the fall of Lin Biao in 1971, Mao began to blame Lin for
the persecution of He Long and other ranking leaders. In 1974, Mao
acknowledged that He was wronged. On 29 September 1974, the
CCP Central Committee issued a circular to redress He Long’s case.
HU SHOUJUN CLIQUE. This was an underground reading group
named counterrevolutionary by the government during the “One
Strike and Three Antis” campaign in 1970. Hu Shoujun, the best-
known member of the group, was the leader of a student rebel orga-
nization involved in two well-known protests—one in January 1967
and the other in April 1968—against Zhang Chungiao. In the late
1960s, after Hu and his friends at Shanghai’s Fudan University were
sent to the countryside, they organized a large underground reading
HUA GUOFENG @ 115
group. They read works of Marxism and Western philosophy as
well as a number of internally published “grey books and yellow
books,” including William Lawrence Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, whose descriptions of
Nazi Germany often shocked readers as a mirror image of the China
of the Cultural Revolution. They also recorded some of their read-
ing notes in an underground journal entitled Correspondence from
Comrades-in-Arms Afar. Some of the writing reflected the contribu-
tors’ questioning of the legitimacy of the proletarian dictatorship and
their longings for social legality and democracy in China’s political
system.
On 3 February 1970, following instructions from Zhang Chun-
qiao, Deputy Director of Shanghai Revolutionary Committee Xu
Jingxian ordered the Workers Propaganda Team and the PLA
Propaganda Team at Fudan University to detain Hu Shoujun and
ten others on campus. Hu and his friends were accused of forming a
counterrevolutionary clique and attacking leaders of Mao’s proletar-
ian headquarters. Later, more than a hundred people were detained
as members of the alleged Hu Shoujun Clique, including a number
of college professors as instigators and backstage supporters. The Hu
Clique became Shanghai’s number one counterrevolutionary case in
the “One Strike and Three Antis” campaign. The authorities printed
and distributed half a million copies of falsified material for mass criti-
cism and organized four mass rallies to struggle against Hu and his
comrades. In the meantime, the hunt for hidden clique members con-
tinued, falsely implicating over a thousand people. In May 1975, the
Shanghai Supreme Court sentenced Hu to 10 years in prison. Ten oth-
ers were labeled counterrevolutionaries and put under surveillance.
In 1978, the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee rehabilitated Hu
and his comrades and pronounced the charges against them wrongful.
See also BOMBARDING ZHANG CHUNQIAO.
HUA GUOFENG (1921- ). Mao Zedong’s successor, Hua played
a decisive role in bringing down the Gang of Four and putting an
end to the 10-year-old Cultural Revolution. But due to his refusal
to reverse any decision made by the CCP under Mao and to allow
reassessments of the Cultural Revolution as a whole, he was forced
to resign in the early 1980s from all of the top positions he had held
since 1976.
116 © HUA GUOFENG
A native of Jiaocheng, Shanxi Province, Hua Guofeng joined the
CCP in 1938. From 1949 to 1971, he held various positions in Hunan
Province, including party secretary of Mao’s hometown Xiangtan,
deputy governor of Hunan, acting chairman of Hunan revolutionary
committee, and first secretary of the CCP Hunan provincial commit-
tee. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, he supported the
rebel faction in Hunan. In 1969, Hua was elected to the CCP Ninth
Central Committee. In 1971, he was transferred to Beijing and began
to work at the State Council (SC). He entered the Politburo in August
1973 and became vice-premier and minister of public security in
January 1975.
In late 1975, as Mao was disappointed by Wang Hongwen on the
one hand and made wary by Deng Xiaoping’s critical stand toward
the Cultural Revolution on the other—both having been candidates to
become Mao’s successor—more attention was given to Hua Guofeng.
In early February 1976, within a month of Premier Zhou Enlai’s
death, Hua became acting premier of the SC. After the April 5
Movement was put down, Hua was appointed premier and first vice-
chairman of the CCP at Mao’s suggestion, while Deng Xiaoping was
ousted and denounced. In the last days of his life, Mao communicated
to Hua his trust: “I feel at ease with you in charge,’ Mao wrote. On
October 6, within a month of Mao’s death, Hua, along with Wang
Dongxing and Ye Jianying, ordered the arrest of Jiang Qing, Zhang
Chungqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. On 7 October, the
Politburo made Hua chairman of the CCP and chairman of the Cen-
tral Military Commission (CMC). Thus, the ultimate power of the
party, of the state, and of the military was all in Hua’s hands.
In the few years after the downfall of the Gang of Four, however,
Hua insisted on being literally faithful to whatever directives and
decisions Mao had made. He opposed any attempt to reassess the
Cultural Revolution. While leading a campaign against the Gang of
Four, Hua insisted on continuing the “Criticize Deng, Counterattack
the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend” campaign as
well. Hua also ignored the repeated calls from both the grassroots
and the central leadership to redress the Tiananmen Incident of
1976 and to rehabilitate its victims. Under pressure from the central
leadership, Hua resigned from the position of the premier in Septem-
ber 1980 and gave up his title as chairman of the CCP and chairman
of the CMC in June 1981. Remaining a member of the CC, Hua was
HUANG SHUAI INCIDENT © 117
assigned an advisory position at the State Agriculture Commission,
which marked the end of his political career.
HUANG SHUAI INCIDENT (1973). Initially a not-so-uncommon
incident of disagreements between a student and a teacher, the case
of Huang Shuai, a fifth grader at Zhongguancun No. | Elementary
School in Beijing’s Haidian District, eventually became, in official
propaganda, a story of a student’s rightful rebellion against an author-
itarian teacher. The official endorsement of Huang Shuai’s challenge
to her classroom teacher touched off a campaign in elementary and
secondary schools against the “resurgence of the revisionist line in
education” and against “‘teacher’s authority” (shi dao zunyan) and
brought further disruption and chaos to schools nationwide.
In some of her journals written between April and November 1973,
which her teacher also read and commented on, Huang Shuai noted
her discontent about her teacher’s criticisms. Huang also acknowl-
edged as her inspiration the story of middle school Red Guards in
Lanzhou correcting their teachers. Apparently, the conflict intensi-
fied when Huang’s parents interfered: they investigated the teacher
in private and wrote the teacher and the school authorities a long
letter, criticizing the teacher and celebrating the “revolutionary spirit
of going against the tide” that they identified as the inspiration for
their daughter’s rebellion against her teacher. A few days later, a
letter signed by Huang Shuai but containing some passages of her
parents’ earlier letter was sent to a number of newspapers in Beijing
and Shanghai.
Upon reading the letter carried in the internal publications of the
Beijing Daily, Chi Qun and Xie Jingyi, both close associates of
Jiang Qing at Tsinghua University, met with Huang Shuai. Follow-
ing their instruction, the Beijing Daily published the letter, a selection
of Huang Shuai’s journal entries and an editor’s note on 12 December
1973. The already highly selective journal entries were also edited in
favor of the author as a model of “going against the tide,” while the
editor’s note identified the “revisionist line in education” as the tide.
Toward the end of the month, the People’s Daily and other news-
papers in the country also carried the letter and the journal entries.
The 12-year-old Huang Shuai was invited to give speeches and to
contribute to newspapers. Similar stories of “going against the tide”
were then reported from various parts of the country. On the other
118 © HUANG YONGSHENG
hand, dissenting views were invariably suppressed. Identifying them-
selves with the joint penname “Wang Ya-Zhuo,” three authors wrote
Huang Shuai from Inner Mongolia criticizing her views. With the
approval of Jiang Qing and company, these authors were persecuted
as elements of the “bourgeois restoration.” Along with the Zhang
Tiesheng Incident, a case of a “blank examination paper” that also
occurred in the second half of 1973, the much-publicized Huang
Shuai story contributed to the worsening of the situation in schools
in the final three years of the Cultural Revolution.
HUANG YONGSHENG (1910-1983). A close associate of Lin Biao
and popularly known as one of Lin’s “four guardian warriors,” Huang
Yongsheng was chairman of the Guangdong revolutionary commit-
tee (1968) and, after he was transferred to Beijing, chief of the general
staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and head of the Central
Military Commission Administrative Group (1968-1971).
A native of Xianning, Hubei Province, Huang was a veteran revo-
lutionary who participated in the Autumn Harvest Uprising against
the Kuomintang in 1927 and joined the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) in the same year. He was a division commander in the Red
Army during the anti-encirclement struggle in the early 1930s before
the Long March. During both the war of resistance against Japan
and the civil war of the late 1940s, Huang was a ranking commander
under Lin Biao. In 1955, Huang was made full general and com-
mander of the Guangzhou military region.
During the first two years of the Cultural Revolution, Huang
remained in a top leadership position in Guangdong Province and
was responsible for cases of injustice such as the “Guangdong under-
ground party” and the Guangzhou troops “counterrevolutionary
clique,” the former case involving more than 7,000 people who were
falsely charged and causing 85 deaths. In February 1968, when the
Guangdong revolutionary committee was formally established, Huang
became chairman of the committee.
In March 1968, after the Yang- Yu-Fu Affair, Huang was appointed
chief of general staff of the PLA upon Lin Biao’s nomination. At the
Ninth National Congress of the CCP (1969), Huang was elected
to the Central Committee (CC) and the Politburo. In the same year,
Huang was appointed president of the PLA’s Military and Political
University and member of the Central Military Commission (CMC).
“| FEEL AT EASE WITH YOU IN CHARGE” è 119
After the Lushan Conference of 1970, at which Mao Zedong dis-
missed Lin Biao’s ally Chen Boda from office and told Lin’s other
supporters, including Huang, to criticize themselves, Huang was
slow and reluctant to carry out the subsequent Criticize Chen and
Conduct Rectification campaign and was thus reproached by Mao in
early 1971. In April 1971, the CC held a meeting reviewing the ongo-
ing campaign. Huang’s written self-criticism, along with those of Ye
Qun, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo, was discussed at
the meeting. In his summary report representing the view of the CC,
Premier Zhou Enlai chided Huang, Wu, Ye, Li, and Qiu for following
a wrong political line and practicing factionalism. In the meantime,
Mao began a southern tour, during which he continued to make harsh
comments on Lin Biao and his supporters. On 6 September, Huang
passed to Ye Qun Mao’s critical remarks on Lin Biao. Huang’s com-
munication allegedly helped Lin Biao and Ye Qun decide on a plan to
assassinate Mao (although Lin Biao’s role in the alleged conspiracy,
even his knowledge of it, remains a question).
After the September 13 Incident, Huang Yongsheng was taken
into custody, and his involvement in Lin’s alleged coup attempt was
under investigation. On 20 August 1973, the CC issued a resolution
concerning the “Lin Biao anti-Party clique.” As a member of the Lin
group, Huang Yongsheng was dismissed from all his official posi-
tions and expelled from the CCP. On 25 January 1981, Huang was
sentenced to 18 years in prison on the charges of organizing and
leading a counterrevolutionary clique, plotting to subvert the gov-
ernment, and bringing false charges against innocent people. On 26
April 1983, Huang Yongsheng died of illness in Qingdao, Shandong
Province.
“I FEEL AT EASE WITH YOU IN CHARGE” (ni banshi, wo
fangxin). A message Chairman Mao Zedong wrote down for Hua
Guofeng in a private meeting on 30 April 1976 which the post-Mao
CCP Central Committee (CC) quoted as evidence that Mao designated
Hua as his successor. Since Mao’s verbal expressions were becom-
ing increasingly difficult to understand as his health deteriorated, he
often wrote down key phrases or key sentences with an infirm hand
120 © INNER MONGOLIA PEOPLE'S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
for his listeners as he spoke. The two other messages Mao also put
down for Hua on the same occasion read “Take your time and don’t
worry,” and “Act according to previous policy.’ Hua soon related
these two messages to the Politburo but did not mention the other
message. These messages became important in the power struggle in
the CC after Mao’s death. When Jiang Qing and company launched
a propaganda campaign to push for their own political agenda in the
name of what they called Mao’s “deathbed wish” of “Follow the set
plan,’ Hua made a correction with the original “Act according to
previous policy” and produced the note “I feel at ease with you in
charge,” which gave Hua legitimacy as Mao’s heir apparent and lent
much force to Hua and his senior colleagues in the CC in their rebut-
tal of the claim of the Gang of Four to be true successors of Mao’s
political legacy. Qiao Guanhua was then minister of foreign affairs
with whom Hua shared Mao’s handwritten notes immediately after
his meeting with Mao. Years later, Qiao offered a different interpre-
tation of the message “I feel at ease with you in charge.” According
to Qiao’s recollection of what he learned from Hua, Mao’s comment
was not so much on Hua’s trustworthiness as Mao’s successor as on
a concrete plan that Hua had just proposed to resolve factionalism in
Guizhou and Sichuan Provinces.
INNER MONGOLIA PEOPLE’S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY.
Commonly known by its abbreviated name the “Inner People’s
Party” (nei ren dang), this political organization, formed in 1925,
was initially affiliated with the Internationale. It was essentially a
CCP-led united front consisting mostly of Mongolian farmers and
herdsmen. In the 1930s, some of its members withdrew, and some
others continued their revolutionary activities under the leadership
of the CCP. By then, the original “Inner People’s Party” had stopped
functioning as an independent organization. A new “Inner People’s
Party” formed in 1946 did not become a real political force either.
Soon after the Cultural Revolution began, the CCP North-China
Bureau held a long meeting (from 22 May to 25 July 1966) with
146 party officials from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to
criticize Ulanfu, first party secretary of Inner Mongolia since 1952.
At the 2 July session of this meeting, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping
denounced Ulanfu in harsh terms for his refusal to carry out the party’s
class struggle policies in Inner Mongolia and accused him of being an
INSIDE STORY OF THE QING COURT © 121
“ethnic splittist’” promoting “regional nationalism.” At the remaining
sessions of the meeting, Liu and Deng’s criticism served as a guideline
for the participants to expose and condemn Ulanfu’s alleged mistakes,
including Ulanfu’s reluctance to punish former members of the new
“Inner People’s Party,” now seen as a reactionary organization. In late
1967, with strong support from radical leaders in Beijing, especially
Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, and Xie Fuzhi, cultural revolutionaries in
Inner Mongolia began to invent and publicize a notorious story about
the Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party’s current underground
anti-CCP, anti-PRC activities and used the story against Ulanfu.
In early 1968, as the campaign to rectify the class ranks was well
under way nationwide, the Inner Mongolian Revolutionary Com-
mittee headed by Teng Haiqing set up a work group to investigate
the “Inner People’s Party” case and issued an order that all “Inner
People’s Party” members must report and register within three days.
Soon, special-case personnel, torture chambers, and illegal courts and
prisons appeared throughout Inner Mongolia. Having been a member
of the “Inner People’s Party” at any time in the past was automatically
a crime, while fabrication and forced confessions led to the persecu-
tion of a vast number of people as new members of the “Inner People’s
Party.” The cruelty of persecution—with more than a hundred methods
of torture—matched the cruelest in Chinese history. And persecution
was massive: some 346,220 people were framed and denounced, 75%
of them Mongols. Widespread humiliation and torture led to 16,222
deaths and 87,188 cases of severe injury, making the “Inner People’s
Party” case one of the gravest instances of the injustice perpetrated
during the Cultural Revolution.
On 9 March 1979, the CCP Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region
Committee finally pronounced the “Inner People’s Party” verdict
wrongful.
INSIDE STORY OF THE QING COURT (Qinggong Mishi). A dra-
matization of the fated love between the Guangxu emperor and his
concubine Zhen against a background of political conflict between
the reform-minded emperor and the conservative, dictatorial Dowager
Cixi, Inside Story of the Qing Court was a Hong Kong film first shown
on mainland China in March 1950 and criticized during the Cultural
Revolution as a “big poisonous weed.” However, the real target of its
most notorious critique, “Patriotism or Betrayal: On the Reactionary
122 © JANUARY STORM
Film Inside Story of the Qing Court,’ written by Qi Benyu with Mao
Zedong’s approval and published on 1 April 1967 in the People’s
Daily, was not the film itself; a classic example of the Cultural Revo-
lution-style political insinuation and slander, the article really aimed
at President Liu Shaoqi and called him for the first time in official
media the “biggest capitalist-roader within the party” without ever
mentioning his name. The title of the article derived from a remark
Mao made in the 1950s: “Inside Story of the Qing Court is a traitorous
film and ought to be criticized. . . . Some say Inside Story of the Qing
Court is patriotic, but I say it is traitorous, thoroughly traitorous.”
Qi Benyu quoted Mao and then identified Liu Shaoqi as one of
those talking about the film as a patriotic one, which Liu indignantly
denied. Other than this groundless accusation, Qi’s attack on Liu in
the article, such as calling him a “spokesman for imperialism, feudal-
ism, and reactionary bourgeoisie,” an “imperialist comprador,” and an
advocate of “national and class capitulationism,” had little to do with
the film. Toward the end, Qi listed eight “crimes” in the form of eight
rhetorical questions about Liu’s life from the 1930s to the beginning
of the Cultural Revolution. “There is only one answer,’ Qi concluded.
“You are not an ‘old revolutionary’; you are a fake revolutionary, an
opponent to revolution. You are simply a Khrushchev sleeping right
next to us.” Liu was so enraged that he wrote a response to the eight
questions and had it copied and posted as a big-character poster in
the Zhongnanhai compound, but in just a few hours the “revolutionary
rebels” in Zhongnanhai tore the poster to pieces. Qi’s eight questions
and his final condemnation soon became a program of the Liu criti-
cism and drastically escalated the campaign against Liu nationwide.
As the Liu Shaoqi case was redressed in late 1979 and early 1980,
articles refuting Qi Benyu appeared in newspapers and magazines.
Inside Story of the Qing Court was rehabilitated as well—as a “patri-
otic film.”
-jJ-
JANUARY STORM (1967). Also known as the January Revolution, the
phrase refers to a series of activities carried out by the self-claimed
revolutionary rebels in Shanghai, especially the Workers Command
Post that was supported, and virtually controlled, by Zhang Chun-
qiao and Yao Wenyuan, to take over power from the CCP municipal
JANUARY STORM e 123
committee and the city government in January 1967. To be sure, mass
organizations in some provinces seized power earlier than those in
Shanghai where the new apparatus of power was not established until
early February. And yet, largely due to Mao Zedong’s enthusiastic
support for rebels’ taking over the Shanghai newspapers Wenhui
Daily and Liberation Daily in early January, Shanghai became a
revolutionary model in a nationwide power seizure campaign.
On 6 January, Xu Jingxian, Wang Hongwen, and their support-
ers organized a mass rally of a million people at People’s Square.
First Secretary of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee Chen
Pixian, Mayor Cao Diqiu, and hundreds of ranking officials were
forced to appear at the rally as targets of criticism and denunciation.
A circular order was issued at the rally that Cao Diqiu no longer be
recognized as mayor, that Chen Pixian confess his “counterrevolu-
tionary crimes,” and that the Shanghai party committee be reorga-
nized. As a result, the entire municipal leadership was paralyzed, and
power was partially transferred to a number of newly established,
Zhang- and Yao-controlled organs. On 8 January, Mao commented on
the upheaval in Shanghai as a great revolution that gave hope to the
entire nation. Mao’s words were widely read as a call for a nation-
wide power seizure campaign.
On 5 February, after Zhang Chunqiao put down opposition mainly
from student organizations, the new unified power organ “Shanghai
People’s Commune” was officially established, with Zhang Chun-
qiao, Yao Wenyuan, Xu Jingxian, and Wang Hongwen holding the
top positions. The name of the organ came from Zhang Chunqiao
who, upon hearing Mao’s speculation on naming the municipal
leadership in the capital “Beijing People’s Commune,” suggested that
“People’s Commune” be the name for Shanghai’s new government.
But Mao eventually favored the example of the constitution in Shan-
dong Province with the “three-in-one presence of cadre, military, and
masses” in a “revolutionary committee.” Following Mao’s direc-
tive, the new power structure of Shanghai changed its name from the
Shanghai People’s Commune to the Shanghai Revolutionary Com-
mittee on 24 February.
The “January Storm” that in official records marked the beginning
of the power-seizure phase of the Cultural Revolution had boasted
at the time a comparison to the Russian October Revolution of 1917
and the French Paris Commune of 1871. Twelve years later, on 4
January 1979, the CCP Central Committee approved a report by the
124 © JET PLANE STYLE
Shanghai municipal party committee concerning the “question of the
‘January Revolution,” denouncing the event as a “carefully plotted
scheme by Lin Biao, Chen Boda, and the ‘Gang of Four.” See also
BOMBARDING ZHANG CHUNQIAO.
JET PLANE STYLE (pengqishi). The phrase refers to a most com-
mon form of physical abuse and humiliation used by Red Guards
at struggle meetings during the Cultural Revolution. The person
being denounced at the meeting was forced to stand or kneel down in
front of the crowd, usually on a raised platform. Two guards standing
behind the person would press his or her head down while holding
his or her arms and raising them up high, like the two wings of a jet
plane. The guards might hold their victim in this position for hours
while speeches of accusation were read and slogans shouted. Usually,
the victim was forced to hang a big sign board from his or her neck
with a criminal label written on it and with his or her name crossed
in red ink. And usually, a crowd of so-called class enemies were
struggled against at such rallies, and they would be forced to line up
on the platform, all jet plane style.
JI DENGKUI (1923-1988). A native of Wuxiang, Shanxi Province,
Ji was a member of the CCP from 1938 and a prefectural-level party
secretary in Henan Province when the Cultural Revolution began.
He became vice-chairman of the Henan Revolutionary Committee
in 1968 and a member of the CCP Ninth Central Committee and an
alternate member of the Politburo in 1969. Remembering his past
meetings with Ji during his trips to Henan, Mao Zedong was said
to have inquired about Ji in summer 1967 and received him as “my
old friend,” which accounted, at least partially, for Ji’s meteoric rise
during the Cultural Revolution. In June 1969, two months after the
Ninth National Congress of the CCP, Ji was transferred to Beijing
at Mao’s suggestion. In 1970, as he was entrusted with responsibili-
ties for the nation’s agricultural production, Ji drafted and advocated a
radical political program of building “Dazhai counties” to implement
Mao’s instruction, “In agriculture, learn from the Dazhai (production
brigade).” After the Lushan Conference of 1970, Mao, enforcing
what he called the strategy of “adding sand to the mix,” placed Ji in the
Central Military Commission Administrative Group to undermine
Lin Biao’s control in the military. Ji was also assigned the important
JIAN BOZAN @ 125
position of political commissar of the Beijing Military Region, replac-
ing Li Xuefeng, whom Mao suspected to be associated with Lin Biao.
Ji was elected to the Politburo of both the CCP Tenth and Eleventh
Central Committees. In January 1975, he was made vice-premier of
the State Council at the PRC Fourth National People’s Congress.
At the Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee
(December 1978), however, Ji was criticized for his ultraleftist ten-
dencies and for his association with the Jiang Qing group. In 1980,
Ji resigned, under pressure, from all of his ranking positions. In
1983, he was assigned a researcher’s position at the State Council’s
Research Center for Rural Area Development. Ji died of heart failure
in June 1988.
JIAN BOZAN (1898-1968). A well-known historian and professor at
Peking University, Jian Bozan, along with Wu Han, was denounced
during the Cultural Revolution as a chief “bourgeois reactionary
academic authority.”
Born in Taoyuan, Hunan Province, of an ethnic Uygur family, Jian
Bozan was trained in law and economics in his early years, includ-
ing two years in the United States, before he turned to Marxism as a
guide in his historical studies. A veteran of the Northern Expedition
and briefly associated with the Kuomintang, Jian joined the CCP in
1937, published A Course in the Philosophy of History in 1938, and
began to work on the long Outline of Chinese History in 1942. After
1949, Jian continued with his teaching and research in history while
holding a number of political and administrative positions including
vice-president of Peking University. He became the champion of the
new Marxist historiography in China.
In late 1965, Jian Bozan came to the defense of writer and historian
Wu Han by expressing reservations about Yao Wenyuan’s article on
the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, an article attacking Wu Han
that would turn out to be the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural Revolution.
In the meantime, Qi Benyu published the article “Studying History
for the Revolution” in the CCP theoretical organ Red Flag in Decem-
ber 1965, attacking Jian Bozan without mentioning his name. On 21
December 1965, Mao Zedong had a conversation with Chen Boda in
Hangzhou, in which Mao singled out Wu and Jian as “those intellectu-
als going from bad to worse,” dismissed as groundless Jian’s view on
the “concession policies” of the landlord class toward peasants, and
126 © JIANG QING
praised Qi Benyu’s article—‘“all but one defect that the target is not
named.” On 20 March 1966, speaking at an enlarged session of the
CCP Politburo, Mao named Wu and Jian as “Communist Party mem-
bers opposing the Communist Party.’ Following Mao’s condemnation,
an article coauthored by Qi Benyu and two others attacking Jian came
out in the People’s Daily on 25 March, and when the mass movements
were launched during the Cultural Revolution, Jian was not only ver-
bally denounced as an anticommunist but also physically abused—so
brutally and continuously that on the night of 18 December 1968, Jian
Bozan and his wife Dai Shuwan committed suicide. Jian’s name was
cleared by the authorities of Peking University in September 1978.
JIANG QING (1913-1991). Mao Zedong’s wife, first deputy head
of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), and a
member of the Politburo from 1969 to 1976, Jiang was named by the
post-Mao Central Committee (CC) of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) as the leader of the Jiang Qing Counterrevolutionary Clique,
also known as the Gang of Four.
Born as Li Yunhe, Jiang was a native of Zhucheng, Shangdong
Province. She joined the CCP in 1933. In the following year, she
became a film actress in Shanghai, with Lan Ping as her stage name.
There she also worked underground for the CCP. Jiang was arrested
by the Kuomintang government in 1934 but was soon released. After
divorcing her first husband Tang Na, Jiang went to Yan’an where she
met Mao Zedong. Despite the strong reservations of the members of
the CC because of Jiang’s obscure personal history, Mao married her
in 1938 after assuring the CC that Jiang would not be involved in
any work of the CCP leadership in the future. Jiang served as Mao’s
personal secretary in the 1940s and was head of the film section in
the CCP Propaganda Department in the 1950s. During this period,
her role in the party’s political and cultural affairs was minor, and her
poor health kept her at home much of the time.
In the first half of the 1960s when conflicts between Mao and Pres-
ident Liu Shaoqi gradually intensified, Mao began to assign Jiang
an increasingly important role in what turned out to be a preparation
for the Cultural Revolution. As part of Mao’s initial move against the
CCP’s cultural and literary establishments allegedly controlled by
Liu’s supporters, Jiang turned the ongoing reform in Peking Opera,
of which she had been an active participant, into a political movement
JIANG QING © 127
called the revolution in Peking opera. With this movement, Jiang
expanded her influence in cultural circles and established herself as
a “standard-bearer of the revolution in art and literature.’ In 1965,
Mao sent Jiang to Shanghai to organize an attack on Wu Han, deputy
mayor of Beijing and the author of the play Hai Rui Dismissed from
Office, which would pave the way for Mao’s major offensive against
the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee.
In Shanghai, Jiang met her two loyal allies, Zhang Chunqiao and
Yao Wenyuan. They worked together to ignite the “blasting fuse”
of the Cultural Revolution by publishing Yao’s article “On the New
Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.” Lin Biao also
supported Jiang’s activities by granting her the title of consultant to the
People’s Liberation Army in the area of arts and literature. With the
approval of Lin Biao, Jiang Qing invited several ranking military offi-
cers in charge of literature and art works in the armed forces to a sym-
posium in February 1966. The outline of the meeting was entitled the
Summary of the Symposium Convened by Comrade Jiang Qing at
the Behest of Comrade Lin Biao on the Work of Literature and the
Arts in the Armed Forces, which was partially edited by Mao himself
and issued as a CC circular nationwide. It turned out to be another
important document in preparation for the Cultural Revolution.
When the Cultural Revolution was launched in May 1966, Jiang
assumed a key position as first deputy head of the CCRSG and
became the mouthpiece of Mao to lead the radical group. In the early
years of the Cultural Revolution, Jiang, as the most powerful woman
in China, manipulated the rebel movement closely following Mao’s
strategic steps, instigated the masses to attack the noncultural revolu-
tionaries in the leadership of the party and the army, and played the
most active role in implementing Mao’s decision to purge Liu Shaoqi
and his alleged followers. She also directed artists in creating a reper-
toire of revolutionary operas, ballets, films, and plays and was largely
responsible for restricting all arts to the rigid molds of the so-called
eight model dramas. In 1970, Jiang began to be involved, and even
exert certain influence, in Mao’s strategic move against Lin Biao and
his faction. Jiang attained her seat in the powerful Politburo in April
1969 at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP and remained in
that position until her downfall in 1976.
In 1973, Jiang, with Mao’s consent, began to lead her associates
in waging a dubious battle against the moderate and pragmatic party
128 © JINGGANG MOUNTAIN
veterans Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping in a series of political
campaigns, including the movements to criticize Lin and criticize
Confucius, to appraise Water Margin, and to counterattack the
Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend. In the meantime,
Jiang formed a clique of radical Maoists with Wang Hongwen, Zhang
Chungiao, and Yao Wenyuan. Though Jiang’s aggressiveness, unpopu-
larity, and lack of tact prompted Mao’s reference to her group as a Gang
of Four, Mao essentially endorsed Jiang and her comrades as the most
loyal adherents to his own radicalism, while regarding Zhou and Deng
as ideologically unreliable and yet administratively indispensable.
On 6 October 1976, four weeks after the death of Mao, Hua
Guofeng and Ye Jianying ordered the arrest of Jiang and her associ-
ates. Jiang was charged with a variety of crimes and was held respon-
sible for virtually all of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The
term “Gang of Four” eventually turned into the official “Jiang Qing
counterrevolutionary clique.’ On 23 January 1981, a special court
of the Supreme People’s Court of the PRC sentenced Jiang Qing
to death with a two-year reprieve on charges of leading a counter-
revolutionary clique, plotting to overturn the government, engaging
in counterrevolutionary propaganda and instigation, and framing and
persecuting innocent people. Jiang was unrepentant, however, and
she challenged the court during the trial with what she believed to be
Mao’s ideas. In 1983, her sentence was commuted to life imprison-
ment. On 14 May 1991, Jiang committed suicide in Beijing. See also
COMRADE CHIANG CHING.
JINGGANG MOUNTAIN (jinggangshan). A major Red Guard news-
paper, the Jinggang Mountain was the publication of the Tsinghua
University Jinggang Mountain Regiment from 1 December 1966 to
19 August 1968, totaling about 190 issues (including special issues).
Since the Jinggang Mountain Regiment was a major rebel mass orga-
nization, the paper initially focused on the campaign to criticize the
bourgeois reactionary line, carrying a number of articles and reports
about the organization’s successfully executed plots against President
Liu Shaoqi and his wife Wang Guangmei, who was deeply involved
in the activities of the work group at Tsinghua University in the early
stages of the Cultural Revolution. From late 1966 on, the Jinggang
Mountain Regiment sent its members to many parts of the country, first
to stir up the masses for revolution in the provinces and then to engage
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE SCHOOL CULTURAL REVOLUTION © 129
in provincial factional fighting. Its provincial liaison offices sometimes
published joint issues with local mass organizations. In 1967, the Jing-
gang Mountain Regiment was split into two factions: the general head-
quarters and the 4-14 headquarters. The latter began to publish its own
newspaper, Jinggang Mountain News (Jinggangshan Bao), on 18 June
1967 and continued until April 1968. During this period, both papers
mainly focused on factional battles at Tsinghua. On 27 July 1968, the
workers propaganda team and the PLA propaganda team were
dispatched to Tsinghua University at the instruction of Chairman Mao
Zedong to halt factional violence and take control of the university.
Within a month the Jinggang Mountain stopped publication.
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE SCHOOL CULTURAL REVOLUTION
(Zhongxue wenge bao). This was a mass organization publication
that carried Yu Luoke’s critiques of the blood lineage theory dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution. The journal was founded in early 1967
when Mou Zhijing and Wang Jianfu, both students at Beijing No. 4
Middle School and both inspired by Yu Luoke’s pamphlet “On Fam-
ily Background,” decided to create an outlet for this kind of writ-
ing. They named the publication “journal of middle school Cultural
Revolution” and registered it in the name of a “Revolutionary Rebel-
ling Headquarters of Capital Middle School Students” with Mou as
editor-in-chief. They also had the support of Yu Luowen, a student
at Beijing No. 65 Middle School and brother of Yu Luoke, as a co-
founder and of Yu Luoke himself as the journal’s main contributor.
The inaugural issue of the journal came out on 18 January 1967,
carrying a revised version of “On Family Background.” Yu Luoke
wrote for each of the remaining five issues of this journal. The
well-known pieces include “On ‘Purity’” (second issue, 2 February
1967), “What Does the Disturbance of the ‘United Action Commit-
tee’ Reveal?—Also a Critique of the Criticism of ‘On Family Back-
ground’ by the Tsinghua University Middle School Red Guards”
(third issue, 10 February), and “A New Counter-Offensive of the
Reactionary Theory of Blood Lineage: A Rebuttal of ‘The Big Poi-
sonous Weed “On Family Background” Must Be Torn Up by the
Roots’” (fifth issue, 6 March). The contributions from Yu Luoke,
who upholds “equal rights”—a taboo at the time—against the big-
otry of a new privileged class, take up three-fourths of the journal’s
published pages. Aside from Yu Luoke’s writing, the journal also
130 © JULY 3 PUBLIC NOTICE
carries critical commentaries on, and debates about, the blood lin-
eage theory.
The journal became quite popular, with a circulation of 30,000 to
60,000 copies per issue. According to a number of Cultural Revolu-
tion memoirs, the editorial board of the journal received thousands
of letters from readers per day, most of them supporting the journal’s
position against the theory of blood lineage. For the same reason, the
office of the journal was attacked several times by some Old Red
Guards and members of the United Action Committee that consisted
mostly of the children of ranking officials. Despite the effort of the
journal’s editorial board to seek support from the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), Qi Benyu denounced the arti-
cle “On Family Background” in a speech on 13 April 1967. With such
pressure from the CCRSG, the journal, already facing much hostility
from Old Red Guards, was forced to close.
JULY 3 PUBLIC NOTICE (1968). Coded zhongfa [68] 103, this is
a public announcement issued by the CCP Central Committee, the
State Council, the Central Military Commission, and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) with the approval of
Chairman Mao Zedong regarding the escalating violence and chaos
in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The nationwide issuance of
this document, along with that of the July 24 Public Notice (1968)
regarding the large-scale violence in Shaanxi, is generally considered
to be the first clear indication that Mao and the central leadership had
finally decided to put to an end nationwide violence and chaos and
restore order, which makes summer 1968 an important turning point
of the Cultural Revolution.
The chaos resulted from the fierce factional fighting between two
mass organizations: the Joint Headquarters was supported by the
Guangxi Military District and Wei Guogqing, first party secretary of
the autonomous region, while the 4-22 rebel faction initially enjoyed
much sympathy from the CCRSG. In May 1968, members of the
4-22 faction began to break into People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
warehouses for military weapons and clash with PLA soldiers. They
also stopped cargo trains and seized military and other supplies that
were being transported to Vietnam. As a result, the large-scale armed
conflict between the two organizations turned more violent.
Without mentioning either organization by name but aiming appar-
ently more at the 4-22 faction, the July 3 Public Notice denounces the
JULY 20 INCIDENT ° 131
violent and destructive activities as “counterrevolutionary crimes”
committed by “a small handful of class enemies.” To resolve the cha-
otic situation, the author of the notice demands that armed struggle
end immediately, that railway transportation be back to normal soon,
that the looted army supplies and goods for Vietnam be returned
without condition, and that those proven guilty of murder and arson,
of jeopardizing transportation and communication, storming prisons,
stealing state secrets, and setting up unauthorized radio stations be
severely punished by law.
The repeated mention of the July 3 Public Notice by top CCP lead-
ers, including Mao himself (who told Red Guard leaders at a recep-
tion that the document applies as well to places other than Guangxi),
called the public’s attention to it. Its effect on the national scene was
beginning to be visible in late July. In the case of Guangxi, however,
the issuance of the July 3 Public Notice was followed by another
wave of brutal factional fighting to the disadvantage of the 4-22 reb-
els before violence finally began to subside in August 1968.
JULY 20 INCIDENT (1967). In reaction to the instigation of fac-
tionalism by the delegates of the CCP Central Committee (CC),
the mass organization Million-Strong Mighty Army, of Wuhan,
Hubei Province, took Wang Li, a chief delegate and a member of
the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), by force
and interrogated him at a mass rally on 20 July 1967. From 20 to 23
July, this organization also held a massive demonstration and protest,
participated in by both the military and the civilian population of
Wuhan, against Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi, another leading member of
the CC delegation. Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and their associates called
the event a “counterrevolutionary rebellion,” a “mutiny” conducted
by Chen Zaidao, commander of the Wuhan Military Region. Such
charges led to the interrogation and persecution of more than a million
people and to the downfall of one of China’s most decorated veteran
soldiers from the Red Army days; Chen Zaidao’s name came to rep-
resent “that small handful (of capitalist-roaders) within the armed
forces,” and he became known internationally as a general who dared
to “remonstrate with force” against the Cultural Revolution.
During the early stages of factional conflicts in Wuhan and sur-
rounding areas, the left-supporting troops from the Wuhan Military
Region sided with the Million-Strong Mighty Army and opposed its
rival, a rebel faction called the Workers Headquarters. In March 1967,
132 © JULY 20 INCIDENT
the troops and the public security authorities arrested several rebel
leaders and ordered the dissolution of the Workers Headquarters and
its affiliates. This move was not well received in Beijing. On 2 April
1967, the People’s Daily carried an editorial entitled “Treating Prop-
erly the Little Revolutionary Soldiers” which alluded to the Wuhan
situation as one of repression. On 6 April, the “Ten Commands of the
Central Military Commission,” dictated by Lin Biao, was issued that
forbade the troops on a mission to support the left to dissolve any
mass organization. On 16 April, Jiang Qing spoke of Wuhan as one
of the country’s serious problem areas. These signals from Beijing
triggered a drastic change in Wuhan. Violent battles between the two
mass factions intensified. The city was thrown into chaos.
In the meantime, Mao Zedong started an inspection tour to the
south on 9 July and arrived in Wuhan on 15 July. Zhou Enlai was
there with him. Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi came up from Chongqing,
Sichuan Province, leading the delegation sent by the CC to inspect
and resolve local conflicts. On 15 and 16 July, Mao called meetings
to hear reports on several provinces and to resolve the conflict in
Wuhan. He instructed that the case of the Workers Headquarters be
reversed and its leaders released. He also asked the Wuhan Military
Command to support both factions, since both were mass organiza-
tions after all. On 18 July, just before he left for Beijing, Zhou Enlai
accompanied Commander Chen Zaidao and Political Commissar
Zhong Hanhua to see Mao. Upon Mao’s admonition, Chen acknowl-
edged his “directional mistake” of siding with one faction, while Mao
assured Chen of his trust and support.
Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi, on the other hand, ignored Mao’s appar-
ently broadminded approach to factionalism and Zhou’s specific
demands that they not make public appearances for the moment and
not express any biased views. They talked to the students of the rebel
faction and made themselves known. Upon Zhou’s departure, Xie
and Wang went to the Wuhan Hydroelectric Institute Rebels Head-
quarters, received the organization’s armbands, and expressed their
support for the rebel faction. The next day, the Workers Headquarters
broadcast Wang and Xie’s comments, especially Wang’s “four direc-
tives”: the Wuhan Military Command’s left-supporting direction was
wrong; the case against the Workers Headquarters must be reversed;
the rebels were the revolutionary left; and the Million-Strong Mighty
Army was a conservative organization. The members of the Million-
JULY 20 INCIDENT ° 133
Strong Mighty Army, on the other hand, began to vent their indigna-
tion and rage with anti-Wang posters and slogans.
On 20 July, more than 2,000 Million-Strong Mighty Army members
and PLA soldiers demonstrated in front of the Donghu Guesthouse
where Wang and Xie were staying. The demonstrators demanded a
debate with Wang Li without knowing that Mao was also in Wuhan
and that he was actually staying at Donghu. Wang was taken by force
to a mass rally on the premises of the Wuhan Military Command for
questioning. At Mao’s order, officers of the Wuhan Military Com-
mand reasoned with the crowd at the rally and managed to have Wang
Li released. In the meantime, four days of mass demonstration began.
Slogans posted on the streets were not only against Wang Li and Xie
Fuzhi but also against Jiang Qing and Zhang Chungqiao.
Lin Biao saw the opportunity of replacing Chen Zaidao with his
ally in Wuhan. On the morning of 20 July, Lin drafted a letter to Mao
depicting the crisis in Wuhan as a mutiny and urging Mao to leave.
The letter was revised by Chen Boda, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu,
signed by both Lin Biao and Jiang Qing, and secretly carried to Mao
by General Qiu Huizuo. On the early morning of 21 July, at two
o’clock, Mao left Wuhan for Shanghai, though unsure of the story as
told by Lin and Jiang. On the night of Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi’s return
to Beijing, a briefing session was called by Lin Biao at which a deci-
sion was made to designate the July 20 Incident as a “counterrevolu-
tionary riot.” On 23 July, the CCRSG issued nationwide an emergency
notice requiring the civilian population and army troops all over the
country to hold armed marches and denounce the July 20 Incident. On
25 July, Lin and Jiang appeared at a rally of over a million people at
Tiananmen Square to welcome home Xie and Wang and to support the
rebel faction in Wuhan. The meeting ended with cries of “Down with
Chen Zaidao!” and “Down with that small handful within the armed
forces!” On 27 July, Lin Biao dismissed Chen Zaidao and Zhong Han-
hua from their military posts. The “Chen Zaidao types” were hunted
everywhere in the military establishment. In Wuhan and surrounding
areas, persecution of both civilians and troops who opposed the Work-
ers Headquarters began. In the city of Wuhan alone, more than 600
were beaten to death, and about 66,000 were injured.
On 26 November 1978, the CCP Central Committee issued a
notice to redress the July 20 Incident. The document accused Lin
Biao and the “Gang of Four” of creating an incident for the purpose
134 © JULY 21 UNIVERSITY
of usurping power within the party. It also announced the rehabilita-
tion of all the victims of the event.
JULY 21 UNIVERSITY. This term refers to a type of school that was
established following the comments Mao Zedong wrote on 21 July
1968 upon reading a case study entitled “Shanghai Machine Tool
Factory’s Way of Training Technicians and Engineers.” The study,
made by correspondents of the Wenhui Daily and the Xinhua News
Agency, reports on the experience of the training school of Shanghai
Machine Tool Factory in recruiting students from young workers of
their own factory and training them into technicians and engineers.
The study compares the factory-trained technicians and engineers
with those trained in universities and comes to the conclusion that the
factory-trained ones are far more diligent, creative, and productive in
conducting work-related research and innovations than the univer-
sity-trained. Mao wrote after reading the case study, “We still need
to have universities; I mean science and engineering universities. But
we must shorten the period of schooling, make education reforms,
put proletarian politics in command, and take the path of Shanghai
Machine Tool Factory to turn factory workers into technicians and
engineers. [Universities] should select their students from workers
and peasants. After a few years of study, students should return to
their fields of practice.’ Mao’s comments as well as the case study
were made public by the Peoples Daily on 22 July.
Mao’s comments led to the establishment of more than 10,000 July
21 universities in the later years of the Cultural Revolution. They also
had considerable impact on education reforms in traditional colleges
and universities. In 1970, when China’s universities finally began
admitting new students after a long halt of four years, they abandoned
the tradition of selecting students via national examinations but took
new students from workers, peasants, and soldiers recommended by
local authorities. In the later years of the Cultural Revolution, the
growth of July 21 universities was phenomenal. In 1972, there were
68 such schools in the country with a total of 4,000 students. By July
1976, however, the number of July 21 universities had jumped to
15,000, with 780,000 registered students. Some of these schools were
converted from various “spare time schools” affiliated to factories and
other enterprises. Most were newly established in response to Mao’s
call. Some of these schools had full-day classes; others offered only
JUNE 6 CIRCULAR ORDER ° 135
half-day or evening classes. Yet many provided merely short training
programs. Students were often young workers with work experience
but with limited—even just elementary school—education. Most
students at July 21 universities learned some practical knowledge and
skills for their jobs but rarely received a balanced college education.
The July 21 universities generally lacked qualified faculty, necessary
equipment, and systematic curricula. Their graduates did not meet
the basic standards of traditional higher education. After the Cultural
Revolution ended, and after China’s college system returned to nor-
mal, July 21universities became history.
JULY 24 PUBLIC NOTICE (1968). Coded zhongfa [68] 113, this is
a public announcement issued by the CCP Central Committee, the
State Council, the Central Military Commission, and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group regarding violence and chaos in
some areas of Shaanxi Province. According to the public notice, some
professional teams of armed struggle had been organized in Shaanxi
to loot state banks; set fire and use explosives on stores, warehouses,
public buildings, and private residences; disrupt public transporta-
tion, communication, and postal services; and even storm military
facilities and clash with military personnel. To stop the escalating
mass violence in Shaanxi, the public notice issued six rules, repeat-
ing much of the July 3 Public Notice (concerning the problem of
violence in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region) and commanding
the masses to follow obediently the measures prescribed in the earlier
document. Both documents were region-specific but were distributed
nationally; their issuance was considered to be a decisive step by
Mao Zedong to end the situation of a civil war across China.
JUNE 6 CIRCULAR ORDER (1967). A central document (zhongfa
[67] 178) issued on 6 June 1967 by the CCP Central Committee (CC),
the State Council, the Central Military Commission, and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) and posted across
China, the circular order was the attempt of Mao Zedong and the CC
to put under control the nationwide violence and chaos that had been
escalating since the summer of 1966. Against what it specifies as a
widespread “evil wind of beating, smashing, robbing, confiscating,
and arresting” (da za giang chao zhua), the circular order prescribed
seven rules forbidding such common practices of mass organizations
136 © KANGPING AVENUE INCIDENT
as detaining and interrogating citizens without court procedure; seiz-
ing and abusing official files, records, and seals; seizing and abusing
state and collective property; engaging in armed struggle and physi-
cally abusing people; and searching private homes and confiscating
personal belongings. The circular order gave the People’s Liberation
Army the authority to implement the rules and urged all mass orga-
nizations to comply. The effect of the circular order turned out to be
very limited, which may have to do with the fact that all of the activi-
ties that the circular order forbade had been encouraged or tacitly
consented to by Mao and the cultural revolutionaries in the central
leadership, especially members of the CCRSG, since the beginning of
the Cultural Revolution.
2K-
KANGPING AVENUE INCIDENT (1966). A brutal attack of one
worker organization on another on Shanghais Kangping Avenue
on 30 December 1966, this event was generally considered to be
the beginning of the massive factional violence that subsequently
occurred throughout China. In November and December 1966, Mayor
Cao Diqiu and the Shanghai municipal party committee were under
much pressure from the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG) to give in to the demands of the Workers Command Post
of Shanghai and to give themselves up as targets of criticism. The Red
Defenders Battalion, another citywide worker organization opposed to
the Workers Command Post, had supported the Shanghai party com-
mittee in the Liberation Daily Incident and then felt betrayed when
Mayor Cao Diqiu was forced to endorse the Workers Command Post.
Confused and angry, the Red Defenders Battalion decided to go to
the secretariat of the Shanghai party committee on Kangping Avenue
to reason with Mayor Cao Diqiu and First Secretary Chen Pixian.
The leading members of the CCRSG, especially Zhang Chunqiao
who handled the Anting Incident in defiance of the Shanghai party
committee’s decisions, had been supporting the Workers Command
Post against the CCP leadership in Shanghai.
Upon hearing the report on the Kangping Avenue situation, Zhang
Chungiao telephoned Shanghai from Beijing, instructing Wang
Hongwen and other leaders of the Workers Command Post to “wage
a blow-for-blow struggle” against their rivals. By the evening of 29
KUAI DAFU ® 137
December, about 100,000 members of the Workers Command Post
and fewer than 30,000 members of the Red Defenders Battalion
converged on Kangping Avenue. At 2 a.m. on 30 December, Wang
Hongwen led the charge against the other organization. The violent
clash left 91 people injured. Taking the law into their own hands, the
Workers Command Post issued an urgent order of arrest the next day
and illegally detained more than 240 members of the Red Defenders
Battalion. The violence left the city in chaos. The Shanghai party
committee was completely powerless. With its newly gained domi-
nance among mass organizations, the Zhang Chunqiao-controlled
Workers Command Post was ready to engage in the struggle for power
in the 1967 January Storm.
KUAI DAFU (1946- ). One of the well-known “five Red Guard lead-
ers” in Beijing, Kuai was head of the mass organization Jinggang
Mountain Regiment at Tsinghua University and a prominent leader of
the Capital College Red Guards’ Representative Assembly during
the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Binhai, Jiangsu Province, Kuai was a third-year student
in chemical engineering at Tsinghua University when the Cultural
Revolution began. At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, Kuai was
struggled against at several mass meetings because of his strong
opposition to the Tsinghua work group to which Wang Guangmei,
wife of President Liu Shaoqi, was adviser; Kuai was denounced and
detained as a “reactionary student.” After Mao Zedong made a deci-
sion to withdraw work groups from college campuses, a number of
ranking leaders, including Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Tao Zhu,
Li Xuefeng, and some members of the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group (CCRSG), went to Tsinghua on 5 August 1966 to meet
students and to redress wrongful cases there, including Kuai’s.
On 23 September 1966, the Jinggang Mountain Regiment of Tsin-
ghua University, a rebel student organization that was to become
nationally influential, was formed, with Kuai as its leader. As one
of the founders of the “Capital College Red Guards Revolutionary
Rebel Headquarters,” popularly known as the Third Command Post,
Kuai organized the mass rally of 6 October 1966, at which more
than 100,000 people representing colleges across China gathered to
launch the campaign against the bourgeois reactionary line. During
this campaign Kuai emerged as a popular hero as well as Mao’s foot
soldier. Answering Mao’s call for rebellion and acting on instructions
138 © LAO SHE
from the CCRSG, Kuai played a significant role in bringing down Liu
Shaoqi and other ranking leaders of the old party establishment; the
Jinggang Mountain Regiment was the first mass organization in the
country to denounce Liu Shaoqi in name in December 1966. For his
achievements as a student leader, Kuai was appointed a member of the
Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Com-
mittee in 1967.
In the chaotic years of 1967 and 1968, Kuai and his organization,
like other rebels nationwide, were deeply involved in factional con-
flicts. During the well-known one hundred-day armed conflict on
the Tsinghua campus, for instance, Kuai led the Jinggang Mountain
Regiment in a notoriously bloody fight against their rival organiza-
tion the 4-14 group. Such widespread and seemingly endless fac-
tional violence finally led to Mao’s decision, in summer 1968, to end
the Red Guard movement altogether. On 27 July 1968, Mao sent a
Workers Propaganda Team and a PLA Propaganda Team to Tsin-
ghua University to stop the violence and take control of the campus.
On the early morning of 28 July 1968, Mao held a meeting with the
five Red Guard leaders, including Kuai Dafu. At the meeting, Mao
sent a clear signal to Kuai and others that they should exit China’s
political stage. Kuai was soon criticized at mass meetings organized
by the propaganda teams. He was taken into custody several times in
the remaining years of the Cultural Revolution.
Shortly after the downfall of the Gang of Four, the authorities
formally arrested Kuai on a counterrevolutionary charge. On 10
March 1983, the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him
to 17 years in prison, holding him responsible for the deaths and
the injuries caused by both the factional violence on campus and an
armed conflict with the propaganda teams and charging him with the
crimes of instigating attacks on party and state officials and framing
and persecuting innocent people during the Cultural Revolution. See
also MAO ZEDONG—MEETING WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD
LEADERS.
-L-
LAO SHE (1899-1966). A well-known and much-loved modern Chi-
nese writer, Lao She was an early victim of the Cultural Revolution
LAO SHE è 139
and died in the month of 1966 known as the Red August. Born in
Beijing and originally named Shu Qingchun, Lao She was a son of a
Manchurian soldier. While a lecturer in Chinese at the University of
London’s School of Oriental Studies from 1924 to 1930, he adopted
the penname Lao She and began to write novels and short stories in
Chinese. Continuing to teach and write after he returned to China,
Lao She established himself as a major writer known for his realistic
portrayal of the life of city residents in an authentic Beijing dialect. In
1949, he gave up a teaching position in the United States and returned
to Beijing, filled with enthusiasm for the newly established People’s
Republic. In 1951, he was named “People’s Artist’ by the city govern-
ment of Beijing. Many of his works, including the novels Rickshaw
Boy and Four Generations under One Roof and the play Teahouse,
became immensely popular. Some of them were adapted as films, and
five of his novels were translated into English. Although Lao She was
given a number of official titles, including member of the standing
committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,
vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers Association, vice-chairman of
China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and chairman of Beijing
Federation of Literary and Art Circles, he was never admitted into the
CCP despite having applied for party membership many times.
In summer 1966 when the Cultural Revolution was just beginning,
Lao She was ill and was hospitalized. However, anxious to participate
in a revolution that he had been struggling to understand, he left the
hospital as soon as he could, despite Zhou Enlai’s advice not to hurry.
On 23 August 1966, the day after he was released from the hospital,
Lao She went to work, only to find himself and his fellow writers and
artists in the hands of a group of Red Guards. They took Lao She and
his colleagues to the large courtyard of what used to be a Confucius
Temple in the Imperial Academy, where a huge pile of costumes and
props of the traditional theater—confiscated by the Red Guards as
material evidence of the Four Olds—was burning. The Red Guards
shaved the heads of their captives in a humiliating yin-yang style,
poured black ink on them, hung big signs on their necks that read
“black gang element,” “reactionary academic authority,” and “cow-
demons and snake-spirits,’ and forced them to kneel around the
burning fire for a “fire baptism.” One of the criminal charges against
Lao She was that he had been an American spy. The Red Guards beat
their victims with stage props and broad leather belts with copper
140 © LIDESHENG
heads. Lao She fainted and fell to the ground. Yet another round of
beating followed in the evening in another place and continued into
the night. Lao She’s refusal to hold the placard with criminal titles
only prompted further abuse from the Red Guards. He was then taken
to a nearby police station as an “active counterrevolutionary” and was
eventually sent home with an order from his captors that he report to
his work place the next day carrying a “counterrevolutionary”’ label.
When Lao She reached home, covered with blood, he found no sign
that his family members had full confidence in his complete inno-
cence. On the morning of 24 August, Lao She went alone to the edge
of Taiping Lake in the northwestern part of Beijing carrying Mao
Zedong’s poems that he had copied. He sat there for the whole day
and drowned himself in the lake that evening.
LI DESHENG (1916- ). A native of Xinxian, Henan Province, a mem-
ber of the CCP from 1932, and an army veteran from the Long March
to the Korean War, Li was made major general in 1955. In 1967, Li,
then commander of the Twelfth Army of the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA), led his troops from Jiangsu to Anhui to stop the violent fac-
tional fighting among mass organizations. In April 1968, he became
chairman of the newly established Anhui Revolutionary Committee
as well as deputy commander of the Nanjing Military Region. Li’s
successful handling of factional violence in Anhui caught the atten-
tion of Mao Zedong, who introduced Li to those present at the First
Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee (April 1969) at which
Li was elected an alternate member of the Politburo. In July 1969, Li
was transferred to Beijing at Mao’s suggestion. Li’s various military
appointments in Beijing, including director of the General Political
Department (GPD) of the PLA and commander of the Beijing Mili-
tary Region, were part of Mao’s strategic moves—‘dig corners and
add sand to the mix,” as Mao put it—to weaken Lin Biao’s influence
in the army. At the time of the September 13 Incident of 1971, Li fol-
lowed Premier Zhou Enlai’s orders to take over the command of the
air force and reportedly directed the operations of the air force for five
days without pausing for a break. In 1973, Li became vice-chairman
of the CCP and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee.
In the meantime, however, Jiang Qing began to report to Mao
about Li’s lack of enthusiasm for the radical cause and significantly
weakened Mao’s confidence in him, so much so that in January 1975,
LIJIULIAN @ 141
Li was forced to resign from his position as vice-chairman of the CCP
while remaining as commander of the Shenyang Military Region. In
1980, the central leadership approved a GPD report dismissing the
slanders that the Jiang Qing group had brought on Li in 1973-74.
Li was appointed political commissar of the University of National
Defense in 1985 and retired from all his military and administrative
duties in 1990.
LI FUCHUN (1900-1975). One of the chief architects of China’s social-
ist economy and a close associate of Premier Zhou Enlai, Li Fuchun
was vice-premier of the State Council (1954-1975) and member of
the Standing Committee of the CCP Politburo (1966-1969). Born
in Changsha, Hunan Province, Li joined the CCP while a student in
France in 1922. He was a leader of the CCP European general branch.
A veteran of both the Northern Expedition and the Long March, over
the years Li held various high positions in the CCP, including secre-
tary-general of the Central Committee (CC), director of the CC Gen-
eral Office, and minister of finance and economy. In the early 1950s,
Li Fuchun and Chen Yun were in charge of the design and the imple-
mentation of the new republic’s first five-year plan. In 1954, Li was
appointed vice-premier of the State Council (SC) and director of the
National Planning Commission. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Li
played a major role in moderating the radical economic policies of the
Great Leap Forward to restore the badly damaged national economy.
After the Cultural Revolution began, Li, as head of the SC business
group, assisted Premier Zhou Enlai in running the daily affairs of the
state during a chaotic time. He was called by Kang Sheng “the head
of the black club” because of the frequent business gatherings of
vice-premiers at Li’s residence. At the Twelfth Plenum of the CCP
Eighth Central Committee, Li was criticized for his involvement
in the February Adverse Current. Although Li was elected to the
CC again at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in 1969, he
no longer held any significant leadership position by then. Li Fuchun
died of illness in Beijing on 9 January 1975.
LI JIULIAN (1946-1977). In the early stages of the Cultural Revolu-
tion, Li was an enthusiastic Red Guard leader at Ganzhou No. 3
Middle School in Jiangxi Province. But her revolutionary fervor soon
gave way to skepticism and critical reflection. On 29 February 1969,
142 © LIJIULIAN
while a factory apprentice, Li wrote to her boyfriend about her ques-
tions and critical views concerning the Cultural Revolution. She sus-
pected that the Revolution might be a power struggle among different
factions within the central leadership, and she sympathized with Presi-
dent Liu Shaoqi whose views, in her opinion, were mostly right for
China at present. In her private journal, she also criticized Lin Biao’s
promotion of the personality cult of Chairman Mao Zedong and
expressed her contempt for such popular ideas as the “red sea” (i.e.,
covering all street walls with red paint with Mao’s quotations written
on them) and “three loyalties and four limitlessnesses.” In her view,
Lin Biao, rather than Liu Shaoqi, might be China’s Khrushchev.
Unfortunately, her boyfriend turned her letter over to the authorities,
which led to her arrest by police on 3 April 1969.
In July 1972, 10 months after the downfall of Lin Biao, Li was
released: the authorities still considered her case to be one of “con-
tradictions between ourselves and the enemy but treated as contra-
dictions among the people.” Li appealed to all levels of government
to clear her name but received no response. In spring 1974, during
the Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius campaign, Li put out a
number of big-character posters, including one entitled “It Is No
Crime Criticizing Lin Biao,” in downtown Ganzhou, calling on the
public to support her rehabilitation. Her sympathizers, then, orga-
nized an “Investigation Committee on the Li Jiulian Case” and won
the support of tens of thousands of Ganzhou citizens. In April 1974,
the provincial authorities arrested Li again and cracked down on the
movement. Later, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao voiced
support for the crackdown and named Li a counterrevolutionary. On
30 May 1975, the Xingguo County People’s Court sentenced Li to 15
years in prison. After the downfall of the Gang of Four, Li went on
a hunger strike to protest her persecution. She also criticized the new
personality cult of Hua Guofeng. With her criticism of Hua as a new
charge, Li was executed on 14 December 1977. During the period of
1974-1977, a large number of people in Ganzhou were accused of
supporting Li and were persecuted; some of them were imprisoned.
The officials involved in persecuting Li and her supporters tried to
dismiss the call of the public to redress the Li Jiulian case until Janu-
ary 1980 when Hu Yaobang, head of the CCP Organization Depart-
ment, intervened. In April 1981, Jiangxi Provincial Supreme Court
finally pronounced Li’s verdict unjust.
LIQINGLIN ° 143
LI QINGLIN (1928-2004). Li was the author of a well-known letter to
Mao Zedong, dated 20 December 1972, that prompted an adjustment
in the government’s policy toward educated youths in the countryside
and contributed considerably to the improvement of their working and
living conditions. An elementary school teacher in Fujian Province
and the father of a middle school graduate who had left home to settle
in the countryside, Li wrote candidly about the hunger and poverty in
which his son had been living, and he also wrote about the common
corruption problem called “walking through the back door”: families
with political power or with connections had been bringing their
children out of the countryside by arranging work for them in state
institutions and factories or sending them to colleges, while children
of ordinary people like himself, without power and without connec-
tions, were doomed to remain in the countryside.
Somehow Li’s letter reached Mao. On 25 April 1973, Mao mailed
Li 300 yuan (Chinese currency) and wrote him a brief letter, promis-
ing a comprehensive solution to this national problem. Soon the CCP
leadership issued Li’s letter nationwide as a CCP Central Committee
(CC) document. In June, the State Council (SC) held a long work ses-
sion on educated youths in the countryside at which proposals were
made that a government agency concerning educated youths be estab-
lished at county level, that one child per family be allowed to stay in
the city, and that various forms of state aid to educated youths in the
countryside be instituted. On 4 August, the CC authorized the SC work
meeting report be issued nationwide, and an editorial in the 7 August
issue of the People’s Daily took up the question of educated youths
and demanded that cadres be resolute in “resisting the unhealthy social
trends” (referring to the problem of “back-door” dealings) and that
those abusing urban youths in the countryside be severely punished.
In the meantime, Mao Zedong’s reply made Li Qinglin instantly
famous. The ultraleftists associated with the Jiang Qing group
characterized him as a hero of “going against the tide’—a fashion-
able substitution for the “spirit of rebellion” of the Red Guards. Li
then began to identify himself with the ultraleftists and published an
article simply titled “On Going against the Tide” in the November
issue of the CCP organ Red Flag. In 1974, he was elected a delegate
to the Fourth National People’s Congress. In January 1975, he was
made a member of the National People’s Congress’s Standing Com-
mittee. Li Qinglin’s deepening implication in ultraleftist politics at
144 © LIXIANNIAN
both national and provincial levels eventually led to his arrest after
the downfall of the “Gang of Four.”
LI XIANNIAN (1909-1992). Vice-premier of the State Council (SC)
from 1954 and a member of the CCP Politburo from 1956, Li was one
of the veteran leaders involved in the February Adverse Current of
1967. A native of Huang’an, Hubei Province, Li joined the CCP in
1927, participated in the Long March, and led the military and guer-
rilla activities in central China during the war of resistance against
Japan and the civil war of the late 1940s. In 1954, Li was appointed
minister of finance and became known as a moderate economic pol-
icy maker under Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun. In February 1967, as the
Cultural Revolution was evolving toward a turbulent power seizure,
Li joined the veteran leaders of the SC and of the armed forces at a
briefing session in voicing their opposition to the Cultural Revolution
and in criticizing the members of the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group (CCRSG). Li particularly blamed an editorial in the
CCRSG-controlled Party organ Red Flag for initiating attacks on
veteran cadres. In 1968, Li was sent to a lumber mill north of the city
of Beijing to do manual labor.
After the downfall of Lin Biao in 1971, Li resumed his work as vice-
premier and became a member of the newly established Central Mili-
tary Commission Administrative Conference Office. He assisted
both Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping in conducting the daily affairs of
the state in the last years of the Cultural Revolution. In 1976, Li played
an important role in bringing down the Gang of Four. In 1977, at the
First Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee, Li was elected
to the Politburo Standing Committee and became vice-chairman of the
CCP. He was also entrusted with the daily affairs of the SC. From 1983
to 1988, Li served in a still higher but more or less ceremonial position
as president of the PRC. He died on 21 June 1992.
LI XUEFENG (1907-2003). Born in Yongji, Shanxi Province, Li
joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1933. In the 1930s,
he worked underground as a CCP leader in Shanxi Province and in
Beijing. From the early 1940s to the early 1950s, Li was the top CCP
official first in the Taihangshan area and then in Henan Province. In
1948, he was appointed deputy secretary of the Central China Bureau
of the CCP. In 1954, Li was named deputy secretary general of the
LIYIZHE BIG-CHARACTER POSTER ® 145
CCP Central Committee (CC), and in 1956, he became head of the
Department of Industry and Transportation of the CC and a member
of the CCP Central Secretariat. In 1960, Li was appointed first secre-
tary of the CCP’s North-China Bureau and first political commissar of
Beijing Military Region.
After Peng Zhen was removed from power at the enlarged Polit-
buro sessions in May 1966, Li Xuefeng replaced Peng as first party
secretary of Beijing and was entrusted with the responsibility of
reorganizing the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee. Li’s tenure in
his new position, however, was rather brief because of his associa-
tion with President Liu Shaoqi in carrying out a work group policy,
which Mao dismissed as a repressive bourgeois reactionary line
against the mass movement. Though Li was promoted to the Politburo
as an alternate member at the Eleventh Plenum of CCP Eighth Cen-
tral Committee (August 1966), he and the Beijing party committee
under him were pushed to the sidelines when the Criticize the Bour-
geois Reactionary Line campaign started in October 1966. In January
1967, Li was reassigned as chairman of the newly established Revo-
lutionary Committee of Hebei Province. However, because of his
alleged conspiracy with Chen Boda to attack the Jiang Qing group
at Second Plenum of CCP Ninth Central Committee (23 August—6
September 1970), Li was dismissed from office in April 1971 during
the Criticize Chen and Conduct Rectification campaign. After Lin
Biao’s downfall in September 1971, the investigation of Li’s connec-
tion with Chen extended to his alleged involvement with the Lin Biao
Anti-Party Clique. As a result, Li was permanently expelled from the
CCP in August 1973.
Li’s case was reviewed and rehabilitated after the downfall of the
Gang of Four. In 1982, Li Xuefeng was reinstated as a CCP mem-
ber. In 1985, he was elected to the Advisory Committee of the CCP
Central Committee.
LI YIZHE BIG-CHARACTER POSTER. This was the phrase by
which the poster “On Socialist Democracy and the Socialist Legal
System: Dedicated to the Fourth People’s Congress” was popu-
larly known. This poster was written originally as a petition to the
Fourth National People’s Congress (13—17 January 1975) that
the rule of law be established in a new constitution to protect the
rights of ordinary citizens, including those “open and honest with
146 © LI ZAIHAN
their opposing views.” Li Yizhe represented an independent reading
group in Guangdong Province. As a pseudonym, it was based on the
names of the three major members of the group: Li Zhengtian, Chen
Yiyang, and Wang Xizhe. Guo Hongzhi, a senior communist theo-
rist, offered help as an adviser to the group. When the petition was
posted on 10 November 1974 at a busy junction of Beijing Avenue
in Guangzhou, it attracted large crowds. Subsequently, it was copied,
mimeographed, reprinted, and circulated in many Chinese cities.
In the poster, Li Yizhe observes that there has emerged in China a
privileged stratum similar to the one in the Soviet Union and that this
stratum is a new bourgeois class of party officials represented by Liu
Shaoqi and his colleagues before the Cultural Revolution and by Lin
Biao and his cronies during the Cultural Revolution. Though echo-
ing Mao Zedong’s theory of continuous revolution against the rise
of the new bourgeoisie within the party, the Li Yizhe poster touches
upon two issues that potentially challenge Mao’s authority. First, its
condemnation of Lin Biao’s “feudalist social fascism” goes beyond
the political rhetoric of the times: in the name of social legality it
challenges Lin’s cult of Mao and his suppression of dissent. Second,
taking “feudal fascism” as the most dangerous threat to China’s pro-
letarian dictatorship, the poster calls for the passage of a new constitu-
tion representing the “will of the proletariat and the masses of China,”
a constitution under which those who have persecuted innocent peo-
ple will be punished, those with dissenting political views, however
wrong they may be, will be protected, and those who are in power but
have abused their power and hence lost people’s trust will be replaced.
The author’s attempt merely to bring up the forbidden topic of social
legality and the rights of the masses made the poster a milestone in the
development of political dissent during the Cultural Revolution and
inspired further reflections on both the nature of ultraleftist politics
and the possibilities of democracy in a Chinese context.
LI ZAIHAN (1919-1975). One of the few provincial military leaders
who supported the rebels in the early stages of the Cultural Revo-
lution, Li became chairman of Guizhou Provincial Revolutionary
Committee in 1967 and an alternate member of the Central Com-
mittee (CC) at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in 1969
but was eventually dismissed from office for his involvement in the
violent factional battle in Guizhou.
LIZUOPENG © 147
A native of Fushun, Sichuan Province, Li joined the CCP in
1938. He began his military career as an infantry soldier and eventu-
ally became deputy political commissar of the Guizhou Provincial
Military District in 1960. When the Cultural Revolution broke out in
1966, Li was named a member of the Cultural Revolution Leading
Group under the CCP Guizhou Provincial Committee. When a group
of students came from Beijing to the provincial capital Guiyang and
incited local residents to criticize the provincial authorities, Li sym-
pathized with the masses that rose against the allegedly manipulative
and repressive provincial leaders. He wrote several letters critical
of the provincial authorities and reported to the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) on the Guizhou situation. Wang
Li, of the CCRSG, then recommended Li to Mao Zedong, referring
to him as a “Cultural Revolution activist in the army.”
In January 1967, Li traveled to Beijing to receive Jiang Qing’s
instructions concerning power seizure in Guizhou. Upon returning,
Li formed a rebel organization called the “General Headquarters
of Proletarian Revolutionary Rebels in Guizhou” and took over the
power of the Guizhou party committee on 25 January 1967. The
organization’s power-seizure announcement and related documents
were soon published in the People’s Daily and the Red Flag, which
indicated the approval of Mao and the central leadership in Beijing.
As the successful power-seizure put Li in the most prominent position
in the province as chairman of the Guizhou Revolutionary Committee
and first political commissar of Guizhou Military District, factional
violence broke out in the province. Li supported one mass faction
against the other in a series of bloody battles, including a large-scale
armed conflict in Guiyang on 29 July 1969. He also intervened in
the mass movement in the neighboring province Yunnan. Li’s deep
involvement in factional conflict and his unsettling overreach pro-
voked strong opposition both provincially and nationally. In March
1971, the CC stripped Li of all his official positions and publicly
criticized him. Li Zaihan died of illness in 1975.
LI ZUOPENG (1914- ). A close associate of Lin Biao and popularly
known as one of Lin’s “four guardian warriors,” Li was deputy chief
of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), commis-
sar of the navy, and a member of the Central Military Commission
Administrative Group (1968-1971). Born in Ji’an, Jiangxi Province,
148 © LI ZUOPENG
Li Zuopeng joined the Red Army in 1930 and participated in the Long
March. During the civil war in the late 1940s, Li was a corps com-
mander in Lin Biao’s Fourth Field Army. He was made lieutenant
general in 1955 and deputy commander of the PLA navy in 1962. In
late 1965, Li, along with Wang Hongkun and Zhang Xiuchuan, both
officers in the navy, forged material for Lin Biao to use to bring down
Chief of General Staff Luo Ruiqing.
Li Zuopeng was attacked by the rank and file within the navy dur-
ing the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. Lin Biao intervened
and protected him. Lin named him, along with Wu Faxian and Qiu
Huizuo, a leader of the “proletarian revolutionaries of the armed
forces.” As such a leader, Li authorized the persecution of 120 navy
officers and consolidated the pro-Lin forces in the navy. In 1968, Li
was appointed deputy chief of the general staff of the PLA, commis-
sar of the navy, and a member of the Central Military Commission
Administrative Group. At the Ninth National Congress of the
CCP (1969), Li was elected to the Central Committee (CC) and
to the Politburo. At the Lushan Conference of 1970, the conflict
between the Jiang Qing faction and the Lin Biao faction within the
CCP leadership surfaced. Li joined Chen Boda, Wu Faxian, Qiu
Huizuo, and Ye Qun in attacking Zhang Chungqiao and supporting a
proposal not to eliminate the office of the national president. Backing
Zhang Chunqiao and the Jiang Qing group, Mao singled out Chen
Boda as the main target of criticism and also told other supporters of
Lin Biao, including Li, to conduct self-criticism. In April 1971, the
CC held a meeting reviewing the ongoing Criticize Chen and Con-
duct Rectification campaign. Li’s written self-criticism, along with
those of other associates of Lin Biao, was discussed at the meeting. In
his summary report representing the view of the CC, Premier Zhou
Enlai criticized Huang, Wu, Ye, Li, and Qiu for following a wrong
political line and practicing factionalism. In the meantime, Mao con-
tinued to make harsh comments on Lin Biao and his supporters.
On 6 September, Li learned from Liu Feng, commissar of the
Wuhan Military Region, the critical comments Mao made in Wuhan
about Lin Biao. Li went back to Beijing on the same day to pass the
information on to Huang Yongsheng so that Huang might communi-
cate it to Ye Qun in time. After the plot against Mao’s life, allegedly
directed by Lin Biao and executed by Lin Liguo, failed on 12 Sep-
tember 1971, Li, duty-bound to work with Zhou Enlai to resolve the
LIAO MOSHA @ 149
crisis, twice changed Zhou’s orders concerning the aircraft Trident
256 on the early morning of 13 September 1971 so that the plane
carrying Lin Biao, Ye Qun, and Lin Liguo, could take off from Shan-
haiguan airport and flee the country.
After the September 13 Incident, Li Zuopeng was taken into
custody, and his involvement with Lin Biao’s alleged coup attempt
came under investigation. On 20 August 1973, the CC issued a reso-
lution concerning the “Lin Biao anti-Party clique.’ As a member of
the Lin group, he was dismissed from all his official positions and
was expelled from the CCP. On 25 January 1981, Li Zuopeng was
sentenced to 17 years in prison for organizing and leading a counter-
revolutionary clique, plotting to subvert the government, and bring-
ing false charges against innocent people.
LIANG XIAO. A homophonic reference to “two schools,” this was
one of the pennames of—and the one used most frequently by—the
Peking University and Tsinghua University Great Criticism
Group.
LIAO MOSHA (1907-1990). A native of Changsha, Hunan Province,
Liao was a writer and veteran member of the CCP (since 1930). In
1961, Liao, while a ranking official in the Beijing municipal govern-
ment, joined Wu Han and Deng Tuo in coauthoring a column called
“Notes from a Three-Family Village” in Frontline, the official organ
of the CCP Beijing municipal committee. He contributed learned but
also entertaining essays that were often critical of the social evils of
the day. A witty piece entitled “On the Harmlessness of Ghosts” was
so popular that Mao Zedong, speaking at an enlarged Politburo ses-
sion on 20 March 1966, mentioned it as evidence that class struggle
was going on. As a prelude to the Cultural Revolution, a political
campaign was launched in early May 1966 to denounce the so-called
Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique. Liao was named an anti-
party, anti-socialist “old-hand” and a member of the “black gang” of
the CCP Beijing municipal committee. During the Cultural Revolu-
tion, Liao was verbally attacked, publicly humiliated, and physically
abused. From 1968 to 1975, he was imprisoned for the alleged crime
of betraying the Party. Upon release from prison, he was sent to a
tree farm in Jiangxi to do manual work. He was allowed to return to
Beijing in 1978.
150 © LIBERATION DAILY INCIDENT
Liao Mosha was rehabilitated in March 1979 when the CCP Cen-
tral Committee approved the resolution of the Beijing municipal
committee to reverse the verdict of the “Three-Family Anti-Party
Clique.” In March 1983, Liao was elected vice-chairman of the Sixth
Consultative Committee of the Beijing People’s Congress. Liao died
on 27 December 1990.
LIBERATION DAILY INCIDENT (1966). This refers to the closing
down of the Liberation Daily, the official organ of the CCP Shanghai
municipal committee, by the Shanghai College Red Guard Revolu-
tionary Committee from 1 to 8 December 1966. In late November,
the Red Guard Revolutionary Committee newspaper Red Guard
Combat News came off the press carrying an article denouncing
the Liberation Daily as a “loyal instrument” of the Shanghai party
committee in carrying out the bourgeois reactionary line. The orga-
nization demanded that this issue of the Red Guard Combat News
be distributed together with the Liberation Daily as a measure of
“detoxification.” On 1 December, after the Liberation Daily refused
to meet their demand, several thousand college Red Guards occupied
the office building of the official newspaper and shut it down. The
action met with strong opposition from a Shanghai workers orga-
nization called the Red Defenders Battalion. The members of the
Battalion demonstrated outside the Liberation Daily office building,
shouting, “We want to read Liberation Daily!’ The Shanghai Work-
ers Command Post, the Battalion’s political rival, supported the
college Red Guards. Its members joined the college Red Guards and
debated the members of the Battalion. The heat of the debate led to
a violent confrontation. The college Red Guards’ occupation of the
office building finally ended when the Shanghai party committee
gave in to their demands on 5 December 1966.
LIN BIAO (1906-1971). Military strategist and Mao Zedong’s desig-
nated successor, Lin Biao was minister of defense (1959-1971) and
sole vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during
the first five years of the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Huanggang, Hubei Province, Lin entered the Huangpu
(Whampoa) Military Academy in 1925 as part of the school’s fourth
class and joined the CCP in the same year. In 1927, Lin, a veteran
of the Northern Expedition, took part in the Nanchang Uprising as
LINBIAO @ 151
a company commander and later joined Mao in the Jiangxi Soviet
revolutionary base. During the anti-encirclement campaigns (1928-
1934), the war of resistance against Japan (1937—1945), and the civil
war of the late 1940s, Lin continuously distinguished himself as
a military leader. He also served as president of the Anti-Japanese
Military and Political University at Yan’an after the Long March. In
1955, Lin was named one of the ten grand marshals of the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) and also entered the CCP Politburo. In 1958,
he became one of the five vice-chairmen of the CCP and a member
of the Politburo’s standing committee. In 1959, as Marshal Peng
Dehuai was dismissed for criticizing the Great Leap Forward, Lin
replaced Peng as minister of defense at Mao’s insistence.
In the first half of the 1960s, as Mao retreated from the frontline
of the central leadership after the disastrous experiment of the Great
Leap Forward, Lin Biao moved closer to Mao. At the Central Com-
mittee Work Sessions in January-February 1962, Lin voiced sup-
port for Mao’s radical policies in contrast to the cautiously critical
views given by President Liu Shaoqi and others. In the meantime,
embracing Mao’s emphasis on ideology, Lin advocated “politics in
command” in the armed forces and authorized the publication of
the Quotations from Chairman Mao—to be known in the Cultural
Revolution as a Red Book of Treasures—and the distribution of
it among the PLA personnel. Lin also formulated a “peak theory”
that elevated Mao and Mao Zedong Thought to an unprecedented
status and contributed much to Mao’s personality cult during the
Cultural Revolution.
In late 1965, in an attempt to consolidate his power in the armed
forces, Lin instructed his trusted generals, including Li Zuopeng,
deputy commander of the navy, to fabricate material against Lin’s
rival General Luo Ruiqing, chief of general staff of the PLA. In
February 1966, Lin allowed his name to be associated with Jiang
Qing in a report on a symposium Jiang organized on the work of
literature and the arts in the armed forces, which accorded Jiang,
a figure largely unknown in the army and to the public, consider-
able prestige. While Lin’s support contributed considerably to Jiang
Qing’s meteoric rise as the leader of the cultural revolutionaries in the
CCP leadership, the eventual downfall of Luo Ruiging as part of the
so-called Peng-Luo-Lu- Yang Anti-Party Clique marked Mao’s first
major victory in the beginning stage of the Cultural Revolution.
152 © LINBIAO
On 18 May 1966, Lin took a further step in the direction of Mao’s
Revolution by delivering a high-powered speech at an enlarged Polit-
buro session. In the speech—known today as the “scripture of coup
d’état’”—Lin, on the one hand, dramatized the imminent danger of
an enemy takeover from within the party leadership and, on the other,
idolized Mao in superlative terms.
In August 1966, at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Cen-
tral Committee, as Mao launched an offensive against Liu Shaoqi,
Lin Biao was elevated from the sixth to the second highest position in
the central leadership and became the only vice-chairman of the CCP.
From this point on, Lin was referred to in official media as “Chairman
Mao’s closest comrade-in-arms” to whom the masses in their daily
prayer wished “everlasting health” after Mao’s “boundless longevity.”
In the next few months, Lin accompanied Mao in his eight mass rally
receptions for more than 10 million Red Guards from all over China.
Politically, Lin consolidated his power, mainly in the armed forces,
by offering protection and support for his trusted generals, especially
his “four guardian warriors’ Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li
Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo, while eliciting their aid to frame Marshal
He Long, Generals Yang Chengwu, Yu Lijin, Fu Chongbi, and
other officials of power and influence in the military. In April 1969,
the Ninth National Congress of the CCP approved a revised CCP
Constitution which specified Lin as Mao’s successor, while Generals
Huang, Wu, Li, and Qiu, along with Lin Biao’s wife Ye Qun, were
elected to the Central Committee (CC) and the Politburo.
At the Lushan Conference of 1970, the conflict between the Lin
Biao group and the cultural revolutionaries led by Jiang Qing sur-
faced over the revision of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC). Following Lin Biao’s lead in the opening speech, Chen
Boda, who had been alienated from the Jiang group, and Lin’s other
supporters launched an attack on Zhang Chungqiao, of the Jiang fac-
tion, without mentioning Zhang’s name. Backing Zhang Chunqiao
and the Jiang Qing group as a whole, Mao singled out Chen Boda
as the main target of criticism and also told other supporters of Lin
Biao to conduct self-criticism. After the Lushan Conference, political
pressure on the Lin group continued in a campaign called Criticize
Chen and Conduct Rectification. Mao made tactical personnel
changes in the armed forces to weaken Lin’s power while continu-
ously, especially during his southern tour (14 August-12 September
LIN BIAO: MAY 18 SPEECH @ 153
1971), making harsh and provocative comments concerning the Lin
group and even Lin himself.
In the meantime, Lin Liguo, son of Lin Biao and Ye Qun and dep-
uty director of the general office of the air force, allegedly prepared
a coup d’état with his commando group, the United Flotilla, for fear
that Mao might remove Lin Biao as he had President Liu Shaoqi. On
6 September 1971, General Huang Yongsheng passed Mao’s criticism
of Lin to Ye Qun at Beidaihe resort where the Lins were staying for
the summer. In the following few days, Lin Liguo allegedly acted
upon Lin Biao’s order and plotted against Mao’s life. The alleged
assassination attempt was foiled due to the abrupt changes Mao made
to his itinerary. A few hours after Mao’s unexpected return to Beijing
on the evening of 12 September, Lin Biao, Ye Qun, and Lin Liguo
boarded the jet plane Trident 256 allegedly to flee the country. On the
early morning of 13 September, around 2:30 A.M., the plane crashed
near Undurkhan within the border of the Mongolian People’s Repub-
lic, reportedly having run out of fuel. All nine passengers, including
the three members of the Lin family, were killed in the crash.
On 18 September 1971, the CC issued a circular concerning Lin
Biao’s “renegade escape,” charging him with treason. The political
campaign that had started a year before against Chen Boda now con-
tinued to move forward but was renamed the “Criticize Lin and Con-
duct Rectification” campaign. In August 1973, the CC approved “The
Investigative Report Concerning the Counterrevolutionary Crimes of
the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique” and expelled Lin from the CCP. See
also CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS; LIN BIAO:
MAY 18 SPEECH; LIN LIHENG; MAO ZEDONG: SOUTHERN
INSPECTION; SECOND PLENUM OF THE CCP NINTH CEN-
TRAL COMMITTEE; SEPTEMBER 13 INCIDENT.
LIN BIAO: MAY 18 SPEECH (1966). Also known after Lin Biao’s
downfall as the “scripture of coup d’état” (zhengbian jing), this is
a notoriously militant speech that Lin delivered on 18 May 1966 at
an enlarged Politburo session. The speech focused on three issues.
First, Lin warns his audience of the ever-present threat of a counter-
revolutionary coup. He cites statistics on coup attempts in the world
in the past six years, lists numerous cases of usurpation in Chinese
history, and finally accuses Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi, and
Yang Shangkun of conspiring to take power: “A bunch of bastards,”
154 © LINJIE
Lin says, “they take risks, they wait for an opportunity, and they want
to kill us. We shall execute them.” Second, Lin talks about the danger
of a restoration of capitalism in China. To prevent this from happen-
ing, he proposes a slogan, soon to be known as the most popular “four
never-forgets”: “Never forget class struggle, never forget proletarian
dictatorship, never forget stressing politics, and never forget hold-
ing high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought.” Third, Lin
praises Chairman Mao Zedong in superlative terms. He calls Mao
a “genius,” “the greatest man living,” and Mao Zedong Thought the
“beacon light of humanity,” the “universal truth.” “As long as he lives,”
Lin says, ““—ninety, one hundred years old—Chairman Mao will be
our Party’s supreme leader. His words are the codes of our conduct.
The entire Party and the entire nation will crusade against whoever
opposes him. . . . Of Chairman Mao’s sayings, every sentence is truth,
and each sentence surpasses ten thousand sentences of ours.”
In his letter to Jiang Qing dated 8 July 1966, Mao expressed
reservations about Lin’s flattery. Yet, he interpreted it as a political
necessity of the left: in their battle against the demons, they need
a fearsome god. With Mao’s approval, the CCP Central Committee
issued Lin Biao’s May 18 Speech as an official document.
This speech had a strong impact on the Cultural Revolution in at
least two aspects. First, Lin successfully created an image of hate-
ful enemies in the mind of the masses and made people believe that
the danger of a counterrevolutionary coup by the “revisionists” was
imminent. Hence one of the most popular slogans during the Cultural
Revolution: “Be ready to die in defense of the Party Central and
Chairman Mao!” Second, the speech as an expression of Lin’s peak
theory contributed much to the personality cult of Mao Zedong and
promoted the supremacy of Maoism in the ensuing years of Chinese
political life.
LIN JIE (1929- ). One of Mao’s radical theorists, Lin was head of
the Cultural Revolution group at the CCP official organ the Red
Flag. Accused of being a behind-the-scenes backer of the May 16
Counterrevolutionary Clique, Lin was dismissed from office in
summer 1967.
A native of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, Lin graduated from Bei-
jing Normal University in the 1950s. While an editor at the Red Flag,
especially during the political campaign to criticize Wu Han, Jian
LINLIGUO @ 155
Bozan, and other “academic authorities” in early 1966, Lin became
a close associate of his Red Flag colleagues Qi Benyu, head of the
history group, and Guan Feng, one of the deputy chief editors. Lin co-
authored several militant articles with them, including “Comrade Jian
Bozan’s View of History Should Be Criticized” (with Qi, on 25 March
1966) and “Hai Rui Criticizing the Emperor and Hai Rui Dismissed
from Office Are Anti-Party and Anti-Socialist Poisonous Weeds”
(with Guan, on 5 April 1966), both published in Red Flag. These arti-
cles were instrumental in setting the stage for the Cultural Revolution.
In the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, Lin was in the fore-
front attacking the so-called bourgeois headquarters of Liu Shaoqi
and Deng Xiaoping. He was the first among central leaders to sup-
port Tan Houlan against the work group at Beijing Normal Uni-
versity in summer 1966. As head of the Cultural Revolution leading
group at the Red Flag, he published a number of editorials criticizing
the Liu-Deng bourgeois reactionary line and providing guidelines
for the rebel movement. A close follower of the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), Lin was deeply involved in the
conflict between the CCRSG members and veteran officials of the
State Council led by Premier Zhou Enlai. Lin remarked on several
occasions that the conflict between the CCRSG and Zhou’s team was
one between “a new CCRSG and an old bureaucratic apparatus.” His
remark was cited by the May 16 Regiment, an ultraleftist student
group, in its attack on Zhou in summer 1967. To assist Wang Li and
Qi Benyu in their efforts to spread the fire of the Cultural Revolu-
tion into the army, Lin published editorials in Red Flag, calling on
the masses to “ferret out that small handful [of capitalist-roaders]
within the armed forces.” Soon after Mao decided to remove Wang
Li, Guang Feng, and Qi Benyu from the CCRSG in August 1967, Lin
Jie was detained on the charge of being a backstage supporter of the
May 16 Counterrevolutionary Clique.
After the downfall of the “Gang of Four,” Lin was named a trusted
aide of the Jiang Qing group. He was expelled from the CCP in
1984.
LIN LIGUO (1945-1971). Son of Lin Biao and Ye Qun, Lin Liguo
was deputy director of both the air force command’s general office and
its combat division (1969-1971). He was the chief designer of a coup
plan and allegedly tried to execute a plot against Mao Zedong’s life.
156 © LINLIHENG
Lin Liguo was a freshman student in physics at Peking University
when the Cultural Revolution broke out in mid-1966. He joined the
PLA in 1967 and served as a secretary in the air force party commit-
tee office before he became a party member. On 17 October 1969,
Wu Faxian, the air force commander and Lin Biao’s close associate,
appointed Lin Liguo deputy director of both the air force command’s
general office and its combat division. By a careful arrangement of
the supporters of Lin Biao to promote the image of his son, Lin Liguo
was given an opportunity—and perhaps a script, too—to speak for an
entire day at a cadre meeting of the air force command, discussing his
readings of Mao Zedong’s works.
After the Lushan Conference of 1970, during which Mao launched
a campaign against Lin Biao’s ally Chen Boda and criticized Lin’s
associates in the armed forces, Lin Liguo committed himself to a
secret mission of planning and executing an armed coup. Lin Liguo
formed within the air force a special intelligence and operation team
called the United Flotilla, and under Lin’s command, core members
of this team, including Zhou Yuchi and Yu Xinye, drafted an opera-
tion plan called the “571 Project” Summary in March 1971. Lin
Liguo also established a secret communication network coordinating
the gathering of intelligence and the training of the special “com-
bat detachments” in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beidaihe.
Between 8 and 12 September 1971, Lin Liguo, allegedly acting on
orders penned by Lin Biao himself, carried out a plan to assassinate
Mao during his southern inspection. The plan was foiled since
Mao made several unexpected changes to his itinerary and suddenly
returned to Beijing on the evening of 12 September.
On the same evening, Lin Liguo boarded the aircraft Trident 256 to
fly to Beidaihe, where his parents had been staying. In the early morn-
ing of 13 September, Lin Liguo, along with Lin Biao and Ye Qun, fled
on Trident 256 and were killed when the plane crashed, supposedly
because it ran out of fuel, at Undurkhan within the borders of the
People’s Republic of Mongolia.
LIN LIHENG (1944— ). Also known by her familiar name Doudou,
Lin Liheng, daughter of Lin Biao and Ye Qun, provided crucial intel-
ligence to the leaders in Beijing the night before her parents fled the
country in the early morning of 13 September 1971. Lin joined the
PLA and served as a correspondent for the Air Force News in 1967.
She later became deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Staying
LIU BING @ 157
at the Beidaihe summer resort with her parents during the few days
before the September 13 Incident, Lin Liheng alerted the central
leadership on the evening of 12 September to unusual developments
surrounding Lin Biao: with the help of the security force 8341 troop
unit at Beidaihe and in Beijing, Lin Liheng managed to communicate
the message through several levels of command to Premier Zhou
Enlai that Ye Qun and Lin Liguo (Liheng’s brother) might force Lin
Biao to move somewhere and that the central leadership should for-
bid such a move for Lin Biao’s protection. She also mobilized part of
Lin Biao’s office staff to keep watch on Lin’s actions.
After the fatal crash of Trident 256, which killed Lin Biao, Ye
Qun, and Lin Liguo, Lin Liheng came under investigation. She was
released in July 1974 and assigned work first on a farm and then in
a factory in Henan Province. She was still under surveillance then.
The Organization Department of the CCP Central Committee finally
cleared her in 1981.
LITTLE RED BOOK. See QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO.
LIU BING (1921- ). A member of the CCP since 1938 and for many
years first deputy party secretary of Tsinghua University, Liu Bing
was denounced as a member of the “black gang” in association with
Peng Zhen’s CCP Beijing municipal committee at the beginning of
the Cultural Revolution but reinstated as deputy secretary of Tsing-
hua in January 1970. On 13 August and 13 October 1975, Liu, along
with three other veteran cadres of Tsinghua, wrote two letters to Mao
Zedong criticizing Chi Qun, party secretary of Tsinghua and head
of the PLA propaganda team, for his overt political ambition and
overbearing work style. Xie Jingyi, Chi Qun’s close ally at Tsinghua,
was also implicated in Chi’s alleged errors. The letters were passed
on to Mao by Deng Xiaoping. Considering the letters attacking Chi
and Xie to have represented a widely shared anti-Cultural Revolution
sentiment, Mao’s reaction was highly critical. In the harsh comments
he wrote on the letters, Mao pointed out that the Tsinghua case was
not isolated and that it reflected the current struggle between the two
political lines; that is, the “correct” line of the Cultural Revolution and
the one that betrayed it—“revisionist” and “right-wing.”
After Mao’s response to Liu’s letters was communicated to mem-
bers of the CCP Tsinghua committee on 3 November 1975, big-
character posters appeared on the Tsinghua campus, accusing Liu
158 © LIU GEPING
Bing, Education Minister Zhou Rongxin, and some other school and
government officials of “negating the revolution in education and
reversing the verdicts of the Cultural Revolution.” This wave of criti-
cism was known as the “great debate on the revolution in education”
though dissent was not allowed. Liu Bing and his colleagues were
soon dismissed from the Tsinghua party committee. Liu’s downfall
turned out to be the beginning of a nationwide “Counterattack the
Right-Deviationist Reversal of Verdicts Trend” campaign against
Deng Xiaoping and his overall rectification program. After the death
of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, Liu Bing’s verdict
was reversed. In 1978, he was reassigned as party secretary of Lan-
zhou University in Gansu Province.
LIU GEPING (1903-1992). One of the few provincial party leaders
who supported the rebels in the early stages of the Cultural Revolu-
tion, Liu became head of the Shanxi Provincial Revolutionary Com-
mittee in 1967 and a member of the CCP Central Committee (CC) in
1969 but was eventually dismissed from office for his involvement in
armed factional conflict in Shanxi.
Born of an ethnic minority Hui family in Mengchun, Hebei Prov-
ince, Liu joined the CCP in 1926 and worked underground in both
rural and urban areas. The Kuomintang government arrested Liu sev-
eral times. In the 1930s, Liu was imprisoned at the Beiping Branch
of the Military Men’s Introspection House with 61 leading CCP offi-
cials including Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, and Liu Lantao. Liu was one of
the few who rejected the CC’s proposal that they sign an Announce-
ment Renouncing Communism so that they would be released. Liu
served his full sentence and was released in 1947. After 1949, he was
appointed to a series of minority-related official positions including
president of the Central Institute of Nationalities, deputy head of
the United Front Department, and governor and party secretary of
Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Because of his moderate approach
to the CCP ethnic minority policies, Liu was criticized for being an
“ethnic splittist” in the early 1960s.
When the Cultural Revolution began, Liu was deputy governor of
Shanxi. On 10 January 1967, Liu and four other provincial leaders
put out a big-character poster to support local rebel organizations’
power-seizure efforts. On 23 February 1967, the CC appointed Liu
head of an ad hoc executive group to lead Shanxi’s Cultural Revolution
LIU JIETING @ 159
movement. In the following month, he became head of Shanxi Pro-
vincial Revolutionary Committee. In the meantime, as some Red
Guard organizations were working to uncover the case of the 61 party
officials, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing and other members of the Cen-
tral Cultural Revolution Small Group began to label these party
cadres as members of a “Sixty-One Traitors Clique.” Liu’s refusal to
sign the anticommunist announcement, then, became a much-praised
heroic deed, for which he was invited as a public speaker nationwide.
In April 1969, Liu became a member of the CC at the Ninth National
Congress of the CCP. However, because of Liu’s deep involvement
in the massive factional violence in Shanxi and because of his serious
conflict with local military leaders, the CC dismissed him from office
in July 1969. After the downfall of the Gang of Four, Liu was given
an essentially ceremonial title as a member of the National Committee
of the Sixth Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
LIU JIETING (1920- ). A rebelling official during the Cultural Revo-
lution, Liu became deputy head of Sichuan Provincial Revolution-
ary Committee in 1967 and a member of the Central Committee
(CC) at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in 1969 but was
eventually dismissed from office for his involvement in a factional
war in Sichuan and was imprisoned after Mao Zedong’s death.
A native of Shandong Province, Liu joined the CCP during the war
of resistance against Japan. In 1963, when he was party secretary of
the Yibin Prefecture, Sichuan Province, he and his wife Zhang Xiting,
party secretary of Yibin City, along with a few other prefectural and
local officials, were arrested on a charge of violating socialist legality
and framing innocent people. With the support of Deng Xiaoping,
Peng Zhen, and Yang Shangkun in Beijing, Li Jingquan, first secre-
tary of both the CCP Southwest-China Bureau and the CCP Sichuan
Provincial Committee, had them expelled from the CCP in 1965.
Liu and Zhang began to appeal their case directly to Mao Zedong.
In June and August 1966, Liu and Zhang went to Beijing to lodge
complaints with the CC and the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group (CCRSG) against Li Jingquan and his supporters in the central
government. Wang Li, of the CCRSG, received them on 30 December
1966 and showed support for what he considered to be their rebel
activities. Upon return to Sichuan in early 1967, Liu and Zhang orga-
nized a group and began to attack Li Jingquan, the Southwest-China
160 © LIU QINGTANG
Bureau, and the Sichuan party committee. Consisting of rebelling
party veterans and supported by Mao and the CCRSG, the Liu group
became well known nationwide.
On 4 April 1967, the CC issued a circular (zhongfa [67] 154) to
redress the Liu Jieting case. Naming Li Jingquan a capitalist-roader
and affirming the righteousness of Liu and his comrades in oppos-
ing Li in all these years, the circular also acknowledges their right
to participate in the Cultural Revolution and calls on the People’s
Liberation Army officers in the area to support their revolutionary
activities. In May 1968, the CC appointed Liu and Zhang as deputy
heads of Sichuan Provincial Revolutionary Committee. In 1969, at
the Ninth National Congress of the CCP, Liu became a member of
the CC, and Zhang an alternate member. As top-level provincial offi-
cials, however, Liu and Zhang abused their power and put in prison
many of the officials who had prosecuted them in 1963 and 1965.
They were also deeply involved in the massive factional violence in
the province, supporting one faction of mass organizations in heavily
armed conflicts against the other. In December 1969, the CC dis-
missed Liu and Zhang from office. On 24 June 1978, Liu and Zhang
were arrested on a charge of counterrevolution. On 24 March 1982,
Liu was sentenced to 20 years in prison and Zhang to 17 years.
LIU QINGTANG (1932- ). A native of Gai County, Liaoning Prov-
ince, and a member of the CCP from 1959, Liu was an actor in the
Ballet Troupe of the Central Song and Dance Academy. His role as
the party representative in The Red Detachment of Women, a mod-
ern ballet first produced in 1964 and later listed as one of the eight
model dramas, made him well known and caught Jiang Qing’s
attention. During the early days of the Cultural Revolution, Liu
was known for his loyalty to Jiang and for his denunciations of his
colleagues. Despite his unpopularity, he was given a top leadership
position in the ballet troupe in 1968, thanks to Jiang’s backing. In
1968 and 1969, Liu followed Jiang’s instructions and attacked and
persecuted hundreds of people in literature and art circles. In the
early 1970s, he became a member of the State Council Cultural
Group, and in January 1975, he was appointed deputy minister of
culture.
Liu, along with Yu Huiyong and Qian Haoliang, was the closest
ally of Jiang Qing and her group in cultural circles. The three were
LIU REN @ 161
instrumental in politicizing art in the later stages of the Cultural
Revolution. Liu was actively involved in the making of such propa-
ganda pieces as the dance drama The Battle Song of Youth (qingchun
zhan’ge) and the film Counterattack (fanji), both politically motivated
and aimed at Deng Xiaoping. Liu was detained on 22 October 1976
as a loyal follower of the Gang of Four. He was officially arrested
on 8 September 1982. On 2 November 1983, he was sentenced to 17
years in prison on the charges of being an active member of a coun-
terrevolutionary clique, instigating counterrevolutionary activities,
and bringing false charges against innocent people.
LIU REN (1909-1973). A native of Youyang, Sichuan Province, Liu
joined the CCP in 1927. He worked underground to lead the labor
movement in various cities during the early 1930s. After two years
of study in the Soviet Union, Liu came back to Yan’an in 1937 and
served briefly as secretary general of the Central Party School. From
1938 to 1949, he was a communist leader in the Jin-Cha-Ji area. After
the founding of the PRC, Liu was named head of the Organization
Department of the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee. Later, he was
appointed second party secretary of Beijing.
As the second highest official in Beijing’s municipal government,
Liu’s downfall was inevitable when Mao decided to purge Peng Zhen,
mayor and first party secretary of Beijing, because of Peng’s resistance
to the campaigns against Wu Han and the so-called Three-Family Vil-
lage Anti-Party Clique in late 1965 and early 1966. In spring 1966,
Mao named the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee as an “impen-
etrable and watertight independent kingdom” ruled by Peng, of which
Liu Ren was part. Liu lost his official positions after the CCP central
leadership made a decision in May 1966 at the enlarged Politburo
sessions that the entire Beijing municipal committee be reorganized.
Liu was denounced as a diehard follower of Peng Zhen, a revisionist,
and a traitor and lost his freedom. During the high tide of the Cultural
Revolution in late 1966 and 1967, Liu was frequently forced to attend
struggle meetings and suffered not only public humiliation but also
brutal physical abuse. In early 1968, Liu was imprisoned without a
trial. For his refusal to acknowledge false allegations, Liu was hand-
cuffed and fettered for several years. His health deteriorated quickly.
Denied adequate and timely treatment for illness, Liu died of tubercu-
losis on 26 October 1973. His case was rehabilitated in 1978.
162 © LIU SHAOQI
LIU SHAOQI (1898-1969). President of the PRC (1959-1968) and
vice-chairman of the CCP (1956-1968), Liu Shaoqi was the first
party theoretician to formulate Mao Zedong Thought as the CCP’s
guiding principle in 1945 at the Seventh National Congress of the
CCP and was widely acknowledged as Mao Zedong’s successor
from the late 1950s on. In 1966, he became the chief target of the
Cultural Revolution and was denounced as the “biggest capitalist-
roader within the Party” and “China’s Khrushchev.”
A native of Ningxiang, Hunan Province, Liu enrolled in the Com-
munist University for Laborers of the East in Moscow in 1921 and
joined the newly formed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the same
year. After returning to China in 1922, he began to be involved in the
Chinese labor movement and soon became one of its most influential
leaders. He was elected to the Fifth Central Committee (CC) of the
CCP in 1927 and became full member of the Politburo of the Sixth
Central Committee in 1935. After the Long March, Liu went to Beiping
to work underground as secretary of the CCP North China Bureau. In
1939 in Yan’an, the CCP revolutionary base, he delivered a series
of lectures under the title “The Cultivation of a Communist,’ which
established his position as a major theoretician for the CCP. In 1941,
he became secretary of the CCP’s Central China Bureau and political
commissar of the New Fourth Army. At the Seventh National Congress
of the CCP held in Yan’an in April-June 1945, Liu delivered a major
speech on the revision of the CCP Constitution, which was known for
its original and systematic formulation of Mao Zedong Thought. In
the same year, when Mao was negotiating with the Kuomintang in
Chongqing, Liu Shaoqi served as acting chairman of the CCP.
When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949,
Liu became vice-chairman of the central government. In 1954, at the
PRC’s First People’s Congress, Liu was elected head of the Congress’s
Standing Committee. In 1956, at the Eighth National Congress of the
CCP, Liu delivered the political report highlighting the economy
as the new focus of the work of the party. In May 1959, when the
disaster of the CCP’s radical economic policies known as “Three
Red Banners” (the CCP General Line for Socialist Construction, the
Great Leap Forward, and the People’s Commune) had become clear,
Mao relinquished his position as head of the state and retreated to the
“second line of leadership,” retaining his party chairmanship. Liu,
then, was elected president of the PRC and chairman of the National
LIU SHAOQI ® 163
Defense Commission and became Mao’s heir apparent. He, with
Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, was put in charge of the daily affairs
of the central leadership. At the Central Committee Work Sessions
in January-February 1962, Liu, representing the CC, delivered a
report concerning mainly the lessons from the experience of the CCP
leadership since 1958. In his speech, Liu supplemented the written
report with his own more candid views, including the well-known
assessment of the officially named “three years of natural disaster”
(1959-1961) in which 20 million people died of hunger: “three-part
natural disaster, seven-part man-made calamity in some areas,” as Liu
put it. To revitalize the nation’s economy, especially its agriculture,
Liu endorsed policies that permitted farmers to cultivate private plots
and sell their products on the market. These policies also allowed
contracting output quotas to each farm household.
In response to the pragmatism of Liu and others, Mao decided
to launch in the nation’s countryside a radical Socialist Education
Movement. In late 1964 and early1965, Mao criticized Liu for failing
to acknowledge the “contradiction between socialism and capitalism”
as the essence of class struggle in the ongoing Socialist Education
Movement. Mao insisted that the target of the campaign be “those
capitalist-roaders within the party,’ which would soon become the
main target of the Cultural Revolution as well.
In the preliminary stages of the Cultural Revolution in late 1965 and
early 1966, Liu, not knowing Mao’s real intentions, opted again for
moderation. He and his close associates, such as Peng Zhen, mayor
of Beijing, attempted to keep the criticism of Wu Han, Jian Bozan,
and other well-known intellectuals within the spheres of academic
discussion. After Peng Zhen’s downfall at the enlarged Politburo ses-
sions, 4-26 May 1966, Liu consulted Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping
on how to lead the Cultural Revolution that was officially launched
at the Politburo meeting. With Mao’s acknowledgement, who had
been away from Beijing, they decided to dispatch work groups to
schools—especially the most chaotic ones—to provide leadership
and guidance there, as they did during the Socialist Education Move-
ment. After he came back from the south in July, however, Mao talked
with the cultural revolutionaries in the central leadership and ordered
withdrawal of all work groups. At the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP
Eighth Central Committee (1-12 August 1966), Mao criticized the
work group policy as being repressive, and he wrote “Bombarding
164 © LIUTAO
the Headquarters—My Own Big-Character Poster,” attacking Liu
without mentioning Liu’s name. Liu was forced to criticize himself;
he came out of the plenum demoted from number two down to the
number eight position within the CCP central leadership.
In October 1966, Mao launched a mass campaign against Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, condemning their work group policy as
a bourgeois reactionary line. Toward the end of the year, Liu was
denounced at mass meetings as the “biggest capitalist-roader within
the party.” In March 1967, the CC established a special case investi-
gation group on Liu Shaoqi. The group submitted “An Investigative
Report on the Crimes of the Traitor, Spy, and Renegade Liu Shaoqi” at
the Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (13-31
October 1968). Though made of forced confessions, fabricated evi-
dence, and deliberate contrivances of accusatory material, the report
was approved by the CC. Also passed at the plenum was the motion
that Liu Shaoqi be stripped of all official positions and permanently
expelled from the CCP. In the meantime, Liu was brutally treated
by the mass organizations. In October 1969, he was escorted out of
Beijing. After suffering from grave illnesses and abuse for over two
years, Liu died on 12 November 1969 in Kaifeng, Henan Province.
In February 1980, at the Fifth Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central
Committee, Liu Shaoqi was rehabilitated. The CC dismissed all its
earlier decisions on Liu and recognized him as a “great Marxist and
proletarian revolutionary.” See also COLLAR LIU BATTLEFRONT;
SIXTY-ONE TRAITORS CLIQUE.
LIU TAO (1944- ). A daughter of President Liu Shaoqi and a student
at Tsinghua University, Liu Tao was a leader of the early conserva-
tive Red Guards at Tsinghua and director of Tsinghua’s short-lived
Temporary Cultural Revolution Committee. At the beginning of the
Cultural Revolution when conflicts between students and a work
group occurred on the Tsinghua campus, Liu Shaoqi sent his wife
Wang Guangmei as an advisor to the work group to help resolve the
conflicts and guide the mass movement at Tsinghua. Under the influ-
ence of Liu Shaoqi and Wang Guangmei, Liu Tao played a significant
role in mobilizing students, especially a group of ranking officials’
children at Tsinghua, to support the work group in such activities as
struggling against the so-called “black gang” elements (those alleg-
edly associated with the Peng Zhen-led Beijing party committee) and
“LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTIONARY REBEL SPIRIT OF THE PROLETARIAT” © 165
“reactionary academic authorities,” attacking Kuai Dafu and other
rebelling students, and defending Liu Shaoqi and other senior party
leaders. Some of these activities continued after the work group with-
drew in late July 1966.
In December 1966, when a nationwide campaign against Liu
Shaoqi moved forward with full force and when the Temporary Cul-
tural Revolution Committee at Tsinghua University was dismissed,
Liu Tao, under great pressure from the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group and the rebel students at Tsinghua, began to criticize
herself and denounce Liu Shaoqi and Wang Guangmei with a story
of how they had tried to influence the mass movement at Tsinghua
through her. Liu Tao’s big-character posters “Rebel against Liu
Shaoqi, Follow Chairman Mao, and Carry out Revolution All My
Life: My Preliminary Self-criticism’” (28 December 1966) and
“Look, the Ugly Soul of Liu Shaoqi” (2 January 1967) became well-
known examples of the widespread phenomenon that children, either
under pressure or swayed by the dominant ideology or both, would
break away from their persecuted parents to declare their own revo-
lutionary identity during the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, Liu Tao,
along with millions of Chinese youths, was sent to the countryside
for reeducation.
“LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTIONARY REBEL SPIRIT OF THE
PROLETARIAT?” This is the common title of a series of big-char-
acter posters written by the Tsinghua University Middle School
Red Guards, which is generally regarded as classic writing of the
Old Red Guards in the beginning stage of the Cultural Revolution.
This series includes four posters that came out on 24 June, 4 July, 27
July, and 1 September 1966. The title was inspired by Mao Zedong’s
words, “The manifold theories of Marxism in the end come down to
one sentence: ‘to rebel is justified’ . . . . Following this theory, we
revolt, we struggle, and we build socialism” (1939; reprinted in the
5 June 1966 issue of the People’s Daily). In turn, Mao’s support for
these posters, along with his reception for students at the Mass Rally of
18 August 1966, made of emerging Red Guard organizations an army
of crusaders nationwide against the so-called capitalist-roaders,
supposedly a following of President Liu Shaoqi.
Rather than a series of arguments for the spirit of rebellion, the
first three posters are made of clusters of bold assertions and spirited
166 © “LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTIONARY REBEL SPIRIT OF THE PROLETARIAT”
battle cries against “revisionists” (those believed to have “revised,”
or deviated from, Mao’s political line, particularly in education), the
“black line and black gang” (those associated with the fallen Beijing
municipal party committee), “bourgeois rightists,’ “counterrevolu-
tionaries,” and the “Four Olds.” The role of the Red Guards is that
of the legendary Monkey King turning the old world upside down.
Employing such metaphors as gunpowder and hand grenades in
response to the criticism that they were “too rude” and “too extreme,”
the authors of the poster call for more thoroughgoing revolutionary
violence and vow to drive out “human sympathy” (renqing): “We
shall knock you down on the ground,” they write, “and put a foot on
your body.” The second exposition begins with Mao’s words justify-
ing rebellion. But the authors make it clear that they are not challeng-
ing China’s ultimate power; rather, as successors of revolution, they
are the proletarian power: “We shall allow only leftists to rebel, but
not you rightists. If you dare to, we shall put you down immediately.
This is our logic. The state apparatus is in our hands after all.” Thus
ends the second poster. The fourth and last exposition came out on
1 September 1966 with the subtitle “Vow to Be International Red
Guards.” In this poster, the authors consider Chinese Red Guards
to be sparks that are to start a prairie fire of revolutionary rebellion
across the globe. The enemies now are U.S. imperialism, Soviet revi-
sionism, and the reactionaries of other countries that follow them,
while international red guards are to be their “executioners.”
After receiving the first two posters of the series and a letter from
the authors, Mao expressed strong support in a reply dated 1 August
1966, which was distributed to all attendees at the Eleventh Plenum
of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (1-12 August 1966). On
21 August, the party organ Red Flag published the first three posters
with a long note that characterizes the poster series as “magnificent
poetry of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a crystallization
of the genius and wisdom of the revolutionary youth, and an achieve-
ment nurtured by Mao Zedong Thought.” With this enthusiastic
endorsement from the central leadership, “carry out the revolutionary
rebel spirit of the proletariat” became the most popular slogan in the
summer of 1966. The militant rebel spirit represented by these post-
ers spread across the nation and led not only to the shake-up of the
party leadership at all levels as Mao hoped for but also to brutal vio-
lence against people of nonproletarian background, especially those
LONG MARCH TEAMS © 167
of the so-called Black Seven Categories and their children. See also
Mao Zedong: Letter to Tsinghua University Middle School Red
Guards; Red August.
LONG MARCH TEAMS. Also known as Red Guard Long March
Teams, these were self-organized groups of students participating
in the nationwide Great Networking activities by traveling on foot
to Beijing and to some historical sites of the communist revolution.
The first Long March Team was formed by a group of 15 student
Red Guards at the Dalian Merchant Marine Institute in late August
1966. At the Mass Rally of 18 August 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong
received and inspected an army of a million Red Guards and revo-
lutionary masses in Tiananmen Square to show his support for the
Red Guard movement and his determination to push the Cultural
Revolution forward across China. In order to have a glimpse of the
Chairman in person, the 15 students decided that rather than continue
to struggle with the country’s jammed transportation system and wait
for the train tickets to be assigned to them, they would travel together
on foot to Beijing. They named their group the “Dalian to Beijing
Long March Red Guard Team” to show their determination to fin-
ish the course in the spirit of the Red Army that marched 25,000 /i
(12,500 kilometers) from Jiangxi to Shaanxi in the 1930s. With each
member carrying a bedroll on his back, the team left Dalian, Liaon-
ing Province, on 25 August 1966 and walked for a month, covering
the distance of more than 600 miles between Dalian and Beijing.
By the time they arrived in the nation’s capital, China’s train system
had been jammed every day by hundreds of thousands of networking
travelers for over a month.
Considering traveling on foot to be a way to relieve the nation’s
transportation system of this unprecedented overload, leaders in Bei-
jing spoke highly of the Long March Team from Dalian. On 22 Octo-
ber, the People’s Daily ran an editorial entitled “Red Guards Unafraid
of the Hardship of the Long March,” urging students and teachers to
follow the example of the Dalian team. Soon a great number of Red
Guard Long March Teams were formed across China. Some were so
ambitious as to vow to retrace the steps of the Red Army all the way.
After the CCP Central Committee and the State Council issued a
series of directives in late 1966 and early 1967, first to halt and then
to end the Great Networking movement, some of the marchers, as
168 © LOYALTY DANCE
well as the train riders, continued to travel around the country for a
while and eventually went home in mid-1967.
LOYALTY DANCE (zhongziwu). This was a ritual of worship widely
practiced by people of all ages at the height of the personality cult
of Mao Zedong in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. To
perform this ritual, each participant would hold in hand a copy of
the Quotations from Chairman Mao, and they would dance around
a circle while waving the little red book and singing songs in praise
of the chairman. And eager participants would reproach those who
were unwilling to dance with a popular saying: “Whether one dances
well is a question of skill; whether one dances at all is a question of
loyalty.”
LU DINGYI (1906-1996). Propaganda chief of the CCP since 1945 and
deputy premier since 1959, Lu became one of the first victims of the
Cultural Revolution among ranking leaders when he was denounced
as a member of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique at the
enlarged Politburo sessions, 4-26 May 1966.
A native of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, Lu joined the CCP in 1925
when he was a college student in Shanghai. He devoted the rest of his
career to promoting and publicizing the political culture and ideology
of the CCP. In 1945, Lu was elected to the CCP Central Committee
(CC) and appointed head of the CCP Propaganda Department. In
1964 a Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group was formed
at Mao Zedong’s suggestion to lead the rectification in cultural
circles criticizing what was considered “bourgeois” or “revisionist”
works. Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing, was named director, and Lu
deputy director. Reacting to Yao Wenyuan’s militant critique of Wu
Han’s historical drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, published in
Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily in November 1965, the Five-Person Group
met and put out a not-so-militant February Outline as a guideline
for the ongoing political campaign.
Lu’s involvement in the creation of this document made him a
prominent target at the Politburo enlarged sessions in May 1966. Mao
named his Propaganda Department a “‘palace of the King of Hell” and
called for the “downfall of the King” and the “liberation of the little
ghosts.” Lu was under attack also due to his critical comments on Lin
Biao’s way of promoting Mao Zedong Thought—“simplifying” and
LU PING è 169
“vulgarizing’” Mao’s ideas, in Lu’s view—and due to his wife Yan
Weibing’s attack on Ye Qun in a series of anonymous letters to the CC.
Lu was struggled against and physically abused at mass rallies. He
was dismissed from his major official posts in late May 1966. He was
arrested in May 1968. In late 1975, the CC issued a resolution concern-
ing Lu Dingyi, in which Lu was named an “alien-class element,” an
“antiparty element,” and a “traitor” and expelled from the Party.
On 8 June 1979, the CC issued a document dismissing its earlier
resolution and clearing Lu’s name. In January 1980, Lu made his
first public appearance since his arrest. Later, he was given high cer-
emonial positions such as vice-chairman of the Political Consultative
Conference and membership in the standing committee of the CC
Advisory Committee. Lu died on 9 May 1996.
LU PING (1914-2002). President and party secretary of Peking Univer-
sity and a major target of what Mao Zedong called the first Marxist-
Leninist big-character poster by Nie Yuanzi and others, Lu Ping
was one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution. A native of
Changchun, Jilin Province, Lu joined the CCP in 1933. He was a
student leader of the 1935 December Ninth Protest Movement against
Japan in Beijing. After 1949, he held several important party and gov-
ernment positions before he became party secretary and vice-president
of Peking University in 1957, and later president of the university.
In 1964, during the Socialist Education Movement, Lu and his
university party committee were criticized by Zhang Panshi, head of
the socialist education work team from the CCP Propaganda Depart-
ment, and by a group of faculty from the Department of Philosophy,
including Nie Yuanzi, for allegedly carrying on a bourgeois and revi-
sionist line. Some party leaders were denounced as capitalist-roaders.
The Beijing municipal party committee stepped in to support Lu and
the party establishment by sending Song Shuo, deputy director of the
municipal committee’s university department, to the work team as a
new leading member and by appointing Peng Peiyun, also of the uni-
versity department, as deputy party secretary of Peking University.
With the assistance of the municipal committee, and especially with
Mayor Peng Zhen’s criticism of the Zhang-led work team in January
1965, the early verdict on Lu Ping and the university party leadership
was eventually reversed, and the activism of Nie and her colleagues
was put down.
170 © LUO RUIQING
But the launching of the Cultural Revolution by the CCP Politburo
in May 1966 provided an opportunity for the comeback of Nie and
her colleagues. On 25 May 1966, Nie Yuanzi and six other faculty
members of the Philosophy Department put out the big-character
poster “What Are Song Shuo, Lu Ping, and Peng Peiyun Really
Doing during the Cultural Revolution,” accusing the three of conspir-
ing with the Beijing municipal committee to suppress the revolution-
ary ideas of the masses and mislead the ongoing Cultural Revolution.
This poster soon reached Mao Zedong via Kang Sheng, and Mao’s
decision to broadcast the poster nationwide marked the beginning of
Lu’s rapid downfall. When the People’s Daily carried the poster on
2 June 1966, the commentator’s reference to Lu was an element of
the Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique. On 3 June, the reor-
ganized CCP Beijing Municipal Committee announced the decision
to remove Lu from office. Lu was then incarcerated and frequently
struggled against at mass rallies until 1969 when the Peking Uni-
versity Workers Propaganda Team sent him to a farm in Jiangxi
Province for reeducation.
In 1975, Lu was appointed deputy head of the Ministry of the
Seventh Machine Industry. After the downfall of the Gang of Four,
Lu was completely exonerated and rehabilitated. He became a stand-
ing committee member and deputy general-secretary of the Chinese
People’s Political Consultative Congress in 1983. Lu Ping died on 28
November 2002.
LUO RUIQING (1906-1978). Chief of general staff of the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) and deputy minister of defense since 1959,
Luo was one of the earliest victims of the Cultural Revolution among
ranking CCP leaders: he was removed from power in December 1965
and was denounced as a member of the Peng-Luo-Lu- Yang Anti-
Party Clique in May 1966.
A native of Nanchong, Sichuan Province, Luo joined the Chinese
Communist Youth League in 1926, and became a member of the Chi-
nese Communist Party (CCP) in 1928. A veteran of the Long March,
Luo was appointed in 1937 provost and vice-president of the Anti-
Japanese Military and Political University in Yan’ an and became head
of the political department of the Communist-led Eighth Route Army
in 1940. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Luo was named minister of public security. In 1959, he became a
LUO RUIQING ° 171
vice-premier of the State Council and a most powerful military offi-
cial as chief of general staff of the PLA, secretary general of the Cen-
tral Military Commission (CMC), and deputy minister of defense.
Luo’s downfall in 1965 is generally considered to be a political
tradeoff between Defense Minister Lin Biao and Chairman Mao
Zedong at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution. In 1962, due to Lin
Biao’s poor health, Mao asked He Long, a senior marshal, to be in
charge of the daily work of the CMC. In 1964, Luo, together with He
Long and Marshal Ye Jianying, led a successful army-wide training
campaign to enhance the PLA’s combat power, which was compli-
mented by top CCP leaders including Mao. To undermine Luo’s
influence in the armed forces, however, Lin Biao, with the assistance
of his wife Ye Qun, began to gather fabricated materials against Luo.
At the same time, Lin continued with his own political program in the
army, promoting the personality cult of Mao and calling on soldiers
to study Mao’s published works. In November 1965, Lin sent Ye Qun
to Hangzhou for a secret meeting with Mao. Ye brought with her a
letter from Lin Biao and fabricated materials against Luo Ruigqing.
Frustrated with the resistance within the central leadership to the
early steps of the Cultural Revolution and badly in need of Lin and
the army’s support, Mao agreed to purge Luo after six hours of lob-
bying by Ye. From 8 to 15 December, Lin chaired an enlarged session
of the Standing Committee of the Politburo in Shanghai, at which,
much to the surprise of a number of ranking leaders, Lin Biao’s letter
to Mao and the 11 pieces of fabricated material against Luo Ruiqing
were circulated, and Luo was accused of opposing the principle of
“politics-in-command” in the army and making moves to take over
Lin Biao’s power. Luo lost all his positions and his freedom, too, after
the meeting. An even more serious charge was brought against Luo in
a series of high-level meetings held in March 1966: Luo was accused
of opposing Mao and Mao Zedong Thought.
On the night of 18 March 1966, Luo, in a suicide attempt, jumped
from the third floor balcony of his residence and broke his left leg. The
act was condemned by Lin Biao as a betrayal of the party and the coun-
try. Luo was imprisoned afterwards. At the enlarge Politburo sessions,
4-26 May 1966, Luo was denounced as a member of the Peng-Luo-
Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique. In late 1966 and 1967, Luo was frequently
struggled against at mass rallies and was subjected to unbearable
public humiliation and physical abuse. Unable to walk because of his
172 © LUO SIDING
broken leg, he was once thrown into a basket and dragged to the meet-
ing by the Red Guards. Because he was deprived of timely medical
treatment, Luo’s infected leg was amputated in 1969.
In late 1973, two years after Lin Biao’s downfall, Luo was finally
released from prison. In December of the same year, Mao acknowl-
edged his mistake of allowing Lin Biao to purge Luo Ruiqing. Luo
was appointed adviser of the CMC in 1975 and secretary general of
the CMC in 1977. He died of a heart attack on 3 August 1978.
LUO SIDING. A penname used by the Shanghai Municipal Party
Committee Writing Group, a writing team headed by Xu Jingxian
and remotely controlled by Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan.
The penname is an oblique homonym of the Chinese term for “screw,”
echoing the much publicized phrase “a rust-free screw on the revolu-
tionary machine” by Lei Feng, a PLA soldier and the most admired
communist hero in the early 1960s. During the Cultural Revolution,
the writing group produced numerous articles—many under this pen-
name—to promote the interests of the ultraleftist faction of the CCP
central leadership and to attack its opponents.
LUSHAN CONFERENCE (23 August—6 September 1970). See SEC-
OND PLENUM OF THE CCP NINTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE.
-M-
MA SICONG (1912-1987). A native of Haifeng, Guangdong Prov-
ince, and precocious in music, Ma went to France twice—from
1924 to 1929 and again from 1930 to 1931—to study violin and
composition. Upon returning, he became an accomplished perform-
ing artist and professor of music. After the PRC was founded, Ma
became the first president of the Central Conservatory of Music and
vice-chairman of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. In
the early months of the Cultural Revolution, Ma was humiliated and
tortured. He was threatened at knife point by the Red Guards, and
he was called a horse (his surname also means “horse”) and made to
eat grass. In November 1966, with the help of his family and close
friends, Ma, still holding on to his violin, successfully escaped from
Beijing to Hong Kong via Guangzhou. In January 1967, Ma, his
wife, and two of their children arrived in the United States. where he
MATIANSHUI @ 173
lived for the rest of his life. In Beijing, he was pronounced a “traitor.”
While in the United States, Ma remained active both as a composer
and as a performing artist. His music compositions were almost
exclusively variations on themes of Chinese classics and Chinese
minority cultures. Ma was rehabilitated in Beijing in March 1985 by
the CCP Committee of the Central Conservatory of Music. Ma died
in the United States in May 1987.
MA TIANSHUI (1912-1994). A close associate of Zhang Chunqiao
and one of the few veteran cadres who sided with ultraleftists during
the Cultural Revolution, Ma came to be known as a “remnant of the
Gang of Four in Shanghai” at the end of the revolution. He was an
alternate member of the CCP Ninth Central Committee (CC) and a
full member of the Tenth CC. He was removed in late 1976 as a sec-
retary of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee.
Born in 1921 in Tang County, Hebei Province, Ma joined the
CCP in the late 1930s. He was appointed a regional deputy party
secretary in Anhui Province in 1949 and transferred to Shanghai in
1953, where, with initial responsibilities in the area of industry, he
was to become head of the CCP North-China Bureau’s department
of industry and a deputy secretary, and then a secretary, of the CCP
Shanghai Municipal Committee. In 1966, Ma did not show himself
as a supporter of the Cultural Revolution at first: he complained about
the Great Networking of the Red Guards in a speech he gave in
Beijing in November at a symposium of industrial and transportation
fronts on the Cultural Revolution. But after Lin Biao’s criticism of
his speech, Ma changed his position and offered his service to Zhang
Chungiao and the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG). Upon return to Shanghai, he began to support rebels in
their battles against the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee headed
by First Secretary Chen Pixian and Mayor Cao Digqiu.
Ma was regarded as a model cadre for the three-in-one presence
of cadre, military, and masses in the new power structure after the
January Storm power-seizure movement of 1967: he was made a
deputy head of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Ma then
turned himself into Zhang Chungqiao’s right-hand man in Shanghai
and persecuted Zhang’s critics, including those who participated in
the two mass protests known as “twice bombarding Zhang Chun-
qiao.” He persecuted Cao Diqiu and other Shanghai officials on false
charges. Ma was also involved in the power conflict in Beijing: in
174 © MAO YUANXIN
1975, he provided materials for the Jiang Qing group to use in their
attack on Deng Xiaoping.
In October 1976 when Jiang Qing and her allies were arrested
in Beijing, Ma’s political career was over. He was soon dismissed
from office and was expelled from the CCP. Ma suffered a mental
breakdown in 1978 while in prison and was thus spared a 1982 court
indictment.
MAO YUANXIN (1941- ). Mao Zedong’s trusted aide and kinsman,
Mao Yuanxin served as the chairman’s liaison at the Politburo in the
last few months of Mao’s life. With what he claimed to be Mao’s
directives, he dictated the moves of the CCP leadership, including the
decision to dismiss Deng Xiaoping from office in April 1976.
A native of Xiangtan, Hunan Province, Mao Yuanxin was the son
of Mao Zemin, Mao Zedong’s younger brother. Mao Yuanxin lost
his father at the age of two and grew up under the care of his uncle.
He entered the Harbin Institute of Military Engineering in 1960.
Transcripts of Mao Zedong’s talks with him during his college years
(mostly in 1964) on such topics as class struggle, political training,
and education reforms were widely circulated in the mid-1960s. In
September 1966, after a few months of military training with a PLA
unit, Mao Yuanxin returned to his former school to participate in
the Cultural Revolution there. Soon he became a rebel organization
leader. He was transferred to Liaoning Province in 1968 and became
vice-chairman of the newly formed Liaoning Revolutionary Com-
mittee and political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region.
While a young official in Liaoning, Mao Yuanxin launched a
number of radical initiatives. In 1973, to challenge the directive from
the State Council concerning the importance of college entrance
examinations, he made a hero, or what he called a “sharp rock,” of
the college applicant Zhang Tiesheng, who wrote a letter of protest
and plea instead of answering exam questions. In 1974, he advocated
a new college admission and placement program called “from com-
mune and to commune” modeled on the experiment of the Chaoyang
Institute of Agriculture that had defined itself as an institution of
higher education in the service of the local economy. Mao Yuanxin’s
ultraleftist politics also made Liaoning one of the most politically
repressive provinces in the nation. He was instrumental in the execu-
tion of Zhang Zhixin in April 1975 for her political dissent.
MAO ZEDONG œ% 175
In autumn 1975, Mao Zedong called Mao Yuanxin to Beijing to
serve as his liaison with the Politburo. Already closely associated with
the Jiang Qing group, Mao Yuanxin identified himself with the ultra-
leftist faction of the CCP leadership and spoke ill of Deng Xiaoping
in his conversations with Mao, especially in regard to Deng’s critical
view of the Cultural Revolution. Mao Yuanxin’s repeated negative
report on Deng apparently influenced the political judgment of Mao
Zedong, who eventually decided to launch a nationwide campaign
called Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts
Trend. In spring 1976, especially in early April during the time of
the April 5 Movement, Mao Yuanxin’s role at the Politburo became
even more crucial: Mao was bedridden and completely isolated from
the outside world, so much so that Mao Yuanxin became his informer
as well as his spokesman. The Politburo, on the other hand, often met
just to learn Mao’s directives from Mao Yuanxin. Following Mao’s
directives of 7 April as Mao Yuanxin reported, the Politburo replaced
Deng with Hua Guofeng as the person in charge. After Mao’s death
in September 1976, Jiang Qing proposed that Mao Yuanxin’s posi-
tion at the central leadership be retained. The proposal was rejected
by Hua Guofeng.
In October 1976, Mao Yuanxin was arrested with the members of
the Gang of Four. In official media, Mao Yuanxin was referred to as
a “diehard follower” (sidang) of the Gang of Four. He was expelled
from the CCP in 1979 and sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1986 for
persecution and false charge, among other crimes.
MAO ZEDONG (1893-1976). Chairman of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) from 1945 to 1976 and president of the People’s Repub-
lic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1959, Mao was the CCP’s foremost
revolutionary thinker, political leader, and military strategist. Putting in
practice his theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship
of the proletariat, Mao designed and directed the Cultural Revolution
as a nationwide campaign to uncover and denounce what he consid-
ered to be “capitalist-roaders within the party” and to instill revolu-
tionary ideology and political consciousness in the mind of the masses
so as to prevent China from repeating the Soviet path of “revisionism”
or “capitalist restoration.” Mao’s legacy of ultraleftism, however, came
to an end when the cultural revolutionary faction of the CCP leadership
known as the Gang of Four was purged shortly after his death.
176 ® MAO ZEDONG
Born in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, Mao was trained as a teacher
at a provincial normal school. At the time of the May Fourth Move-
ment, Mao was a radical writer and activist in his home province.
He attended the first CCP National Congress in Shanghai in July
1921, which marked the founding of the CCP. In the mid-1920s
when the CCP and the Kuomintang were united against the warlords
in the north, Mao, while holding important positions in both politi-
cal parties, began to be involved in the peasant movement in Hunan
and Guangdong. In 1927, when the CCP and the Kuomintang split,
he led the Autumn Harvest Uprising and took the guerrilla army to
Jinggangshan on the borders of Jiangxi and Hunan, where he started
a land reform and established the CCP’s first rural revolutionary
base. In 1928, Mao and Zhu De, who had led his own troops to Jing-
gangshan, founded the Red Army. In 1931, when the Chinese Soviet
Republic was proclaimed in Jiangxi, Mao became chairman of its
Central Executive Committee.
During this period, Mao articulated his vision of revolution in an
essentially agrarian country and formed the strategy of building rural
bases to encircle, and eventually take over, the cities. His writings
on this subject as well as his more philosophical writings of the late
1930s were celebrated as successful efforts to sinicize Marxism. In
late 1932, however, Mao, resistant to the instructions of the Comin-
tern, was criticized for being too passive in his military strategies and
lost his authority in military affairs. He began to come back as both
a political and a military leader after the Zunyi Conference (1935)
during the Long March. During the Yan’an period, Mao’s authority
was gradually consolidated. In 1943, during the CCP’s Rectification
Movement, Mao became chairman of both the Politburo and the
Central Committee Secretariat. From this point on, he remained at the
top of the party leadership. In 1945, at the Seventh National Congress
of the CCP and the First Plenum of the CCP Seventh Central Com-
mittee, Mao Zedong Thought was designated as the party’s guiding
principle, and Mao was elected chairman of the CCP Central Com-
mittee (CC) and the Central Military Commission (CMC). In 1949,
Mao proclaimed the founding of the PRC and became president of
the new Central People’s Government.
In 1956, as Nikita Khrushchev criticized the late Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin for violating socialist legality and promoting a cult of
personality, the Eighth National Congress of the CCP removed the
MAO ZEDONG œ 177
reference to Mao Zedong Thought from the CCP Constitution and
at the same time declared that the principal contradiction in China’s
society had become the contradiction between the “advanced social-
ist system” and the “backward productive forces.” Mao, on the other
hand, was alerted by de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, the demo-
cratic revolution in Hungary, and the shift in focus in the CCP lead-
ership from politics to economic development. As the criticism of
the CCP leadership rose in 1957, especially from intellectual circles,
in response to Mao’s proposal to “let a hundred flowers bloom and
let a hundred schools of thought contend,’ Mao decided to crack
down on the party’s critics with an Anti-Rightist Campaign. In 1958,
he endorsed the radical economic experiment Great Leap Forward,
which led to a nationwide famine and the death of 20 to 30 million
farmers. In 1959, Mao resigned as state president, retreating from the
“first front” of leadership.
However, when Marshal Peng Dehuai criticized the Great Leap
policies in the same year, Mao had him dismissed as minister of
defense and launched a movement against Rightist elements within the
party. In the meantime, efforts made by leaders on the “first front”—
President Liu Shaoqi and others—to restore the nation’s economy
appeared to Mao as measures of “economism” lacking revolutionary
commitment. By 1962 when the Tenth Plenum of the CCP Eighth
Central Committee was held in Beijing, Mao seemed to have come
to a conclusion about the emerging revisionism in socialist countries,
including China. “Never forget class struggle,” he admonished the
party officials at the plenum. In the years that followed, Mao directed
a theoretical debate with Soviet “revisionists”; he designed and led a
Socialist Education Movement in China, mostly in the countryside;
and he endorsed a movement led by his wife Jiang Qing to reform
literature and the arts. Out of all these movements, Mao’s idea of the
Cultural Revolution gradually took shape.
In the preliminary stages of the revolution, Mao stayed away from
Beijing while planning and directing the CC’s every move in the
capital, including the denunciation of the so-called Peng-Luo-Lu-
Yang Anti-Party Clique at the enlarged Politburo sessions in May
1966. He came back to Beijing in July 1966 and made a decisive
move in August at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Cen-
tral Committee: on the one hand, he wrote a big-character poster
entitled “Bombarding the Headquarters” implicitly criticizing Liu
178 © MAO ZEDONG
Shaoqi and those under his leadership for exercising “bourgeois dic-
tatorship” and suppressing the mass movement; on the other hand, he
promoted Marshall Lin Biao to the second highest place in the party
hierarchy, replacing Liu Shaogi—who was soon to be dismissed as
China’s Khrushchev and the biggest capitalist-roader within the
party—as his heir apparent.
China’s unchallenged supreme leader by now, Mao mobilized the
Red Guards to attack presumed capitalist-roaders within the party
and the so-called cow-demons and snake-spirits without. He also
encouraged mass organizations to take over party and government
offices in the provinces and ordered the army to support such efforts.
In February 1967, Mao denounced a group of veteran leaders’ anti-
Cultural Revolutionary outbursts known as a February Adverse
Current and gave much greater power to the ultraleftist Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group. In 1968, Mao managed to have
President Liu Shaoqi officially expelled from the party. And in April
1969, the Ninth National Congress of the CCP passed a new con-
stitution that designated Lin Biao as Mao’s successor.
Mao had hoped to conclude his Cultural Revolution program at
the Ninth Congress. But, as serious political as well as ideological
conflicts developed between the Lin Biao faction and the Jiang Qing
group, Mao sided with the latter and launched a campaign in 1970 to
criticize Chen Boda, who had become an ally of Lin’s. At the same
time, Mao made several personnel decisions to undermine Lin’s
influence in the military. Eventually, Lin died in a plane crash on 13
September 1971 while allegedly fleeing the country after an aborted
assassination plot against Mao.
After Lin’s downfall, Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s loyal assistant
who had kept the country running throughout the Cultural Revolu-
tion and helped Mao during the Lin Biao crisis, became the second
highest-ranking leader. But, fearing that Zhou as a moderate leader
would be a decisive anticultural revolutionary force after his death,
Mao never considered him as his successor; rather, he made Zhou the
unnamed target of criticism in a series of political campaigns includ-
ing the Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius campaign (1974) and
Water Margin Appraisal movement (1975-1976).
In choosing his successor, Mao wavered between Wang Hong-
wen, a member of the Jiang Qing group soon to be known as the
Gang of Four, and Deng Xiaoping, the pragmatist former head of
MAO ZEDONG: INSPECTION TOUR OF THREE REGIONS ® 179
the CC’s Secretariat who had been denounced as the second biggest
capitalist-roader. Though members of the Gang of Four were Mao’s
ideological faithful, their increasing unpopularity and their lack of
political and administrative skills tilted Mao toward Deng Xiaoping.
But the drastic measures that Deng took in 1975 in his Overall Recti-
fication program convinced Mao that Deng was already abandoning
his legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, just a few months
before his death on 9 September 1976, Mao had Deng dismissed
from office and made Hua Guofeng his successor. Within a month
of Mao’s death, however, Hua, in cooperation with a number of rank-
ing leaders and with broad support from the top to the grassroots,
arrested the Gang of Four, and the radical program that Mao had cul-
tivated in the last decade of his life was soon to be replaced by Deng
Xiaoping’s economic reform that indeed adopted certain measures of
capitalism.
In the landmark CCP document Resolution on Certain Questions
in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s
Republic of China passed in 1981 at the Six Plenum of the Elev-
enth Central Committee, Mao is criticized for his grave mistake of
launching the Cultural Revolution, but he is still acknowledged as
the founder of the CCP, the PRC, and the PLA and China’s greatest
communist leader.
MAO ZEDONG: INSPECTION TOUR OF THREE REGIONS
(1967). From July to September 1967, just as factional conflict was
widespread and escalating into a civil war, Mao Zedong toured
North, East, and Mid-South China and inspected the situation of the
Cultural Revolution in Hebei, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, and
Zhejiang Provinces and the city of Shanghai. On 25 September, the
CCP organ People’s Daily carried a news report about Mao’s inspec-
tion tour. On 17 October, the CCP Central Committee issued “The
Important Directives of Chairman Mao during an Inspection Tour
of North, Mid-South, and East Regions.” These directives addressed
the following issues: (1) Overall assessment of the Cultural Revolu-
tion: Mao considered the situation of the Cultural Revolution in the
entire country to be “supremely good” since the masses were truly
mobilized. He acknowledged the problem of much chaos in some
places but also added that the situation “simply threw the enemy into
chaos while the masses were tempered.” (2) Factional conflict: Mao
180 © MAO ZEDONG: INSPECTIONS OF RED GUARDS
blamed the “capitalist-roaders” for “deceiving the masses and incit-
ing them to fight against one another.” He called for “a grand revo-
lutionary alliance” of all factions. (3) Cadres: Mao still insisted on
“struggling against the capitalist-roaders within the party,” but he also
said that they were just “a small handful,’ while most cadres were
good and could be criticized for their mistakes and be educated by
the masses. The words “broaden the range of education; narrow the
range of fire” indicated that Mao was moderating his approach on the
cadre issue. (4) The Red Guards: In contrast to his full support and
encouragement of the Red Guards’ spirit of rebellion in the previous
year, Mao’s comments concerning the Red Guards now focused on
the need to educate them, reason with them, and warn them against
excesses: “Now is the time when they may make mistakes.” During
the inspection tour, in late August, Mao also had Wang Li and Guan
Feng, two frontline extremists of the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group, arrested to prevent further chaos in the military and
foreign affairs. Mao’s apparent concern with disorder and violence,
however, did not override his generally positive feeling about the
Cultural Revolution.
MAO ZEDONG: INSPECTIONS OF RED GUARDS. From 18
August to 26 November 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong held eight
inspections of Red Guard troops in Beijing, receiving a total of
11 million students and teachers from all over the country. At these
events, Mao wore an army uniform and a Red Guard armband and
waved to his audience from the Tiananmen gate tower or an open
army vehicle while the feverish crowd cheered on, chanting “Long
live Chairman Mao!” This was Mao’s response to the resistance to
his radical Cultural Revolution program from within the party leader-
ship. By receiving Red Guards from across China, Mao mobilized
the nation’s youths for the task of spreading the fire of revolution
across the country and turned Red Guards into a major political force
against the party establishment.
The mass rally of 18 August, the first and the best-known of
Mao’s eight inspections, was a defining moment of the Red Guard
movement. At this event, Mao accepted a Red Guard armband and
acknowledged his symbolic role as the commander of the Red Guard
army. Lin Biao, standing by Mao’s side, delivered a militant speech
to a crowd of one million—mostly from Beijing but also with Red
MAO ZEDONG: LETTER TO TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY @ 181
Guard representatives from the provinces—calling on Red Guards
to wage war against “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old
habits.” The news report about the event revealed to the public for
the first time the demotion of President Liu Shaoqi from the second-
ranked position in the CCP central leadership to the eighth. The
“8-18” rally triggered a massive assault on the Four Olds as well
as a nationwide travel campaign called the Great Networking. Red
Guards and other students began to pour into Beijing on free trains,
hoping to have a glimpse of Mao in person, which prompted the
chairman to hold further inspections on 31 August, 15 September,
1 October, 18 October, and 3 November.
As a ceremonial speaker at some of these inspections, Lin Biao
continued to applaud the Red Guards’ militant activities, assuring
them that whatever they did was right. In the meantime, the Red
Guards from the capital went to the provinces to instigate the masses
there to rebel against the authorities. By mid-November 1966, the
masses across China were well stirred up for the revolution, as Mao
had expected, whereas the nation’s transportation system was on the
verge of breaking down because of the Great Networking campaign.
Finally, Mao’s reception for Red Guards came to an end after two
rather hasty inspections on 10-11 November and 25-26 November
(though they were the most massive of all), in which the chairman
rode in an open car and reviewed a total of 4.5 million enthusiastic
youths in the chill of Beijing’s early winter season.
MAO ZEDONG: LETTER TO TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY MID-
DLE SCHOOL RED GUARDS. Dated 1 August 1966, this is
Mao’s response to the request by the Tsinghua University Middle
School Red Guards for comments on the first two pieces of their
big-character poster series “Long Live the Revolutionary Rebel
Spirit of the Proletariat,’ which they submitted to Jiang Qing with
a letter to Mao on 28 July. In his reply, Mao expresses strong support
for the work of the Red Guard organizations at both the Tsinghua
University Middle School and the Peking University Middle School
and for the “people with the same revolutionary attitude nationwide.”
Mao also suggests that Red Guards “leave a way out for those who
have committed serious mistakes so that they may start anew with
life’ On the day Mao wrote the letter, the Eleventh Plenum of the
CCP Eighth Central Committee convened. Although Mao’s letter
182 © MAO ZEDONG: MEETING WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD LEADERS
was never sent out, it was distributed as an important document at
the plenum. On 3 August, the Tsinghua University Middle School
Red Guards released the letter to the public soon after they learned
its content. With Mao’s personal endorsement—one of the major
steps Mao took to stir up the nation for the Cultural Revolution—Red
Guard organizations sprang up across China and became an army of
crusaders against what Mao saw as the state apparatus controlled by
President Liu Shaogqi’s bourgeois headquarters.
MAO ZEDONG: MEETING WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD
LEADERS (28 July 1968). Chairman Mao Zedong called this
urgent meeting on the early morning of 28 July 1968 at which he
spoke with the five most influential Red Guard leaders in Beijing.
The five leaders were Nie Yuanzi, of the New Beida Commune at
Peking University; Kuai Dafu, of the Jinggang Mountain Regiment
at Tsinghua University; Tan Houlan, of the Jinggang Mountain
Commune at Beijing Normal University; Han Aijing, of the Red
Flag Combat Team at Beijing Aeronautical Engineering Institute; and
Wang Dabin, of the “East Is Red” Commune at Beijing Geological
Institute. What prompted Mao to call for the meeting was the bloody
event that had occurred on the previous day on the campus of Tsing-
hua University where Jinggang Mountain Red Guards under Kuai’s
command opened fire at a joint propaganda team of workers and PLA
personnel on a mission to break a prolonged armed conflict between
two rival Red Guard organizations there. Mao’s harsh reproach of the
Red Guards at the meeting and his decision to send students away
from cities afterwards marked the beginning of the end of the Red
Guard movement in China.
Despite Mao’s apparently enthusiastic support for the Red Guards
and their rebellion against the old party authorities in the early stages
of the Cultural Revolution, which had caused the Red Guard move-
ment sweep across the country in summer 1966, the focus of the Cul-
tural Revolution as he saw it had shifted after the 1967 power seizure
movement from abolishing the old party apparatus to establishing new
authorities and restoring order. Mao called for a grand alliance of all
rebel forces during his inspection tour of three regions in summer
1967 and warned Red Guard and rebel leaders that it might be their turn
to make mistakes. However, factional conflicts among mass organiza-
tions between the radical and the conservative factions that resulted
MAO ZEDONG: MEETING WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD LEADERS ® 183
from several campaigns in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution
persisted. The determination of each side to gain dominance in the new
power structure further intensified the conflict, so much so that many
places in the nation had been in a state of war since 1967.
Mao’s determination to end nationwide chaos became clear in
July 1968 when he authorized two central party documents—July 3
Public Notice and July 24 Public Notice—targeting the armed fac-
tional fighting in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Shaanxi
Province. Mao’s decision to send the workers and PLA personnel to
Tsinghua campus on 27 July was another signal of Mao’s move to
stop factional violence. Therefore, when the news of Kuai’s com-
rades confronting the propaganda team with rifles and spears reached
him, Mao was furious and called the meeting in the small hours of
28 July. In addition to the five Red Guard leaders, almost all the top
CCP leaders, including Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda, Kang
Sheng, Jiang Qing, Yao Wenyuan, Xie Fuzhi, Huang Yongsheng,
Ye Qun, and Wen Yucheng, were present, which made the meeting
an unprecedented event.
The meeting started at 3:30 A.M. and lasted for five hours. At the
meeting, Mao harshly criticized the widespread factional fighting in
the country. To the bewilderment of the Red Guard leaders, Mao told
them that he himself was behind the decision to send the propaganda
team to Tsinghua and that he might resolve the factional conflict on
all college campuses by sending all students away. Mao called the
solution “struggle, criticism, go,’ which differed greatly from the
“struggle, criticism, reform,” the tasks that Mao had previously
entrusted to the Red Guards. This solution, combined with the move-
ment of educated youths to go up to the mountains and down to
the countryside, turned out to be a decisive step on Mao’s part to
resolve the nation’s employment crisis and, at the same time, to end
the Red Guard movement altogether. For student Red Guards, the
meeting at which Mao met and talked with their leaders at significant
length for the first time, was a turning point in their lives: they had
been praised as revolutionary pioneers during almost all of the cam-
paigns since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but now they
were beginning to realize that they would be the targets of the next
campaign; that is, to be reeducated by workers and peasants. Before
long, both college and middle school students left the city for remote
factories and farms, and the Red Guard movement finally came to
184 © MAO ZEDONG: SOUTHERN INSPECTION
an end. See also ONE HUNDRED-DAY ARMED CONFLICT ON
THE TSINGHUA CAMPUS; WORKERS PROPAGANDA TEAM.
MAO ZEDONG: SOUTHERN INSPECTION (14 August—12 Sep-
tember 1971). This was a strategic tour during which Mao Zedong
communicated to party and government officials and military gener-
als outside Beijing his view of the Lin Biao faction. This tour alleg-
edly both triggered and foiled a plan to assassinate Mao. On the early
morning of 13 September, within hours of Mao’s unexpected early
return to Beijing (on the evening of 12 September), Lin Biao, Ye Qun,
and their son Lin Liguo fled in panic and died in a plane crash.
In mid-August 1971, Mao proposed that the Third Plenum of the
CCP’s Ninth Central Committee and the Fourth National People’s
Congress convene around the National Day (1 October). Mao noti-
fied Lin Biao at Beidaihe of this proposal as the decision of the CCP
Central Committee (CC), and then left Beijing for Wuhan by train
on 14 August. During the next 30 days, Mao traveled to Wuhan,
Changsha, Nanchang, Hangzhou, and Shanghai and talked to pro-
vincial party leaders and government officials and generals at five
military regions about what he considered to be the ongoing tenth
line struggle in the history of the CCP that began at the 1970 Lushan
Conference at which Chen Boda, along with Lin Biao’s close asso-
ciates Wu Faxian, Ye Qun, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo, allegedly
planned actions in secret and launched a surprise attack to disrupt the
proceedings of the plenum.
Lin Biao’s name came up quite a few times during these conversa-
tions: Mao complained about Lin’s flattery and “peak theory” and
called them “inappropriate”; he suggested that Lin should bear his
share of responsibility for what happened at the Lushan Conference;
and he was particularly sensitive to the commanding power in the
military: “Who said the founder cannot be the commander as well?”
Mao asked rhetorically in response to a popular saying that the PLA
was founded and led by Mao and commanded directly by Lin Biao.
He was apparently concerned with Lin’s influence in the army (with
Wu Faxian as commander of the air force, Li Zuopeng commander of
the navy, and Huang Yongsheng chief of general staff) when he said,
“The army must be united and rectified. I just can’t believe our armed
forces would rebel; I just don’t believe that Huang Yongsheng would
be able to direct the forces to rebel?” Mao also made some critical
MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT ¢ 185
comments on Lin Biao’s wife Ye Qun regarding her position as direc-
tor of Lin’s office. The focus of all these talks was the Lushan Confer-
ence, the pivotal event since the downfall of Liu Shaoqi during what
Mao saw as the ninth line struggle within the CCP. Liu Shaoqi’s case,
however, had a conclusion, while Lin’s, that of the tenth line struggle
between the two headquarters, did not: “The business of Lushan had
not come to an end; it was not settled.”
Despite Mao’s declared intention to “protect Vice-Chairman Lin,”
the words about the unfinished business of Lushan and the pending
Third Plenum and the People’s Congress (in both of which leadership
might be restructured) particularly alarmed Lin Biao and his close
associates. On 5 and 6 September, their sources were finally able to
provide them with reliable intelligence concerning Mao’s comments
during his southern tour. Then, they were said to begin carrying out
an assassination plot. Mao had been staying in Hangzhou, Zhejiang
Province, since 3 September. On the night of 9 September, Mao
ordered that his special train be moved out of Hangzhou to Shaoxing.
On the afternoon of 10 September, Mao suddenly changed the origi-
nal itinerary, called the special train back to Hangzhou, and took the
train to Shanghai. When he arrived in Shanghai in the evening, Mao
decided to work, meet people, and rest on the train. On the afternoon
of 11 September, Mao made another unexpected decision to leave
Shanghai for Beijing immediately and not to stop along the way. On
the afternoon of 12 September, Mao’s train entered Fengtai station in
the suburbs of Beijing. There he ordered the train to stop. At Fengtai,
he conferred with the leaders of the Beijing Military Region and
municipal authorities for more than two hours aboard the train, find-
ing out about the situation in Beijing and making arrangements. The
train carrying Mao arrived at Beijing station at dusk, thus concluding
his 30-day southern inspection.
MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT. Designated as the party’s guiding
principle at the Seventh National Congress of the CCP (1945) at Liu
Shaogqi’s proposal and hailed by Mao’s hand-picked successor Lin
Biao in the 1960s as the peak of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong
Thought was the dominant ideology of the Cultural Revolution. As
represented by the four-volume Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Mao
Zedong Thought was considered before the Cultural Revolution to
be Mao’s successful sinicization of Marxism; that is, his creative
186 ® MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT PERFORMANCE TEAMS
adaptation of a theory coming out of industrial Europe to the condi-
tions of the essentially agrarian Chinese society. During the Cultural
Revolution, Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the prole-
tarian dictatorship, which informed the ongoing political movement,
became a new distinguishing feature of Mao Zedong Thought. In a
sanitized version introduced in the resolution of the Sixth Plenum of
the CCP Eleventh Central Committee (1981), however, Mao Zedong
Thought is defined as a “scientific system” which, while originating
with Mao, represents a “crystallization of the collective wisdom of
the CCP”; this new definition thus omitted Mao’s idea of the Cultural
Revolution. See also QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO.
MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT PERFORMANCE TEAMS (Mao
Zedong sixiang wenyi xuanchuandui or Mao Zedong sixiang
wenyi xiaofendui). Under the banner “arts must serve the masses”
and “arts must serve the politics,” these teams were formed by both
professional and amateur artists to deliver songs, dances, music,
and minidramas of pure propaganda value to the masses. These
teams were usually small in size, with members from fewer than a
dozen to several dozens. At the height of the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1968), a large number of such teams were active in all parts
of the country. Some were dispatched by professional performing
troupes, but the majority of them were amateur groups affiliated with
certain schools, colleges, or school districts. Since schools were not
in session at the time, there were plenty of energetic, willing, and
artistically inclined young men and women available as members of
such teams. They performed in schools and factories, and even on
the street in cities. Some went on tour through small towns and vil-
lages in the countryside. Most of the teams, especially those made
of college and middle school students, were dismissed when the
entire Red Guard generation of youths was sent to the countryside
and factories for reeducation—beginning in late 1968. Some of
the performance teams, however, were institutionalized in factories,
enterprises, farms, and townships and survived until the end of the
Cultural Revolution.
MASS DICTATORSHIP. This is the name for the legal authority that
mass organizations assumed to arrest, imprison, and torture ordi-
nary citizens, to search their homes, and to confiscate their personal
MASS RALLY OF 18 AUGUST 1966 ® 187
belongings. Widespread persecution during the Cultural Revolution
took place mostly under mass dictatorship.
The practice of mass dictatorship started at the very beginning of
the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards took the law into their own
hands while Chairman Mao Zedong and other government leaders
cheered them on, offering no protection for innocent people from Red
Guards’ verbal and physical abuse and administering no punishment
for violators of the law. In many places, especially on middle school
and college campuses, illegal prisons known as cow sheds were set
up, where people denounced as class enemies, or “cow-demons and
snake-spirits,’ were detained, interrogated, and tortured. They were
forced to perform manual labor during the day and to confess their
“crimes” in the morning, in the evening, and sometimes before each
meal. They were told to bow their heads while walking and not to
speak to one another at any time. Home visits were strictly forbidden.
This kind of persecution was even more widespread in the late
1960s during the Rectify the Class Ranks movement when mass
dictatorship became a tool of the new power organ the revolutionary
committee. In this period, special case groups set up by mass organi-
zations everywhere assumed the authority of law enforcement agen-
cies, and a vast number of people suspected of having a “problematic
history” (lishi wenti) were detained, interrogated, and tortured in
illegal prisons on the premises of their work units. Members of these
special-case groups traveled across China to gather information in
government-held personnel dossiers. Forced confessions were widely
used as evidence against the detainees and whoever was named in the
confessions. It was a common practice of special case groups to try to
break down the detainees by forcing their family members to speak
against them. This kind of psychological pressure, in combination
with isolation and torture, resulted in numerous suicides. According
to official estimate, the total number of people affected by the Rectify
the Class Ranks campaign, including those persecuted and their fam-
ily members, amounted to one hundred million.
MASS RALLY OF 18 AUGUST 1966. Officially named “Mass Rally
Celebrating the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” also known
simply as the “8-18,” the huge gathering of a million people—many
of them students and Red Guards—was held at Tiananmen Square
following Mao Zedong’s suggestion. The event prompted a massive
188 © MASS RALLY OF 6 OCTOBER 1966
response among Chinese youths to Mao’s Cultural Revolution pro-
gram and created for both China and the world the famous image of
Mao as commander-in-chief wearing a military uniform and a Red
Guard armband waving on the enthusiastic crowd to join the crusade
against the old, nonproletarian world.
At 5:00 a.m. on the day of the rally, Mao, after a sleepless night,
walked out of Tiananmen (Gate of Heaven) to join the masses. He
invited 1,500 Red Guards to join the party leaders on Tiananmen
and review the parade from there. As the rally was in progress, Mao
received a Red Guard armband from Song Binbin, a Red Guard from
the Beijing Normal University Female Middle School, who was
to change her genteel name “Binbin” into an overtly militant one,
“Yaowu” (meaning “be valiant”), following Mao’s admonition. The
gesture showed Mao’s strong support for the Red Guard movement.
In the following three months, Mao was to receive more than 10 mil-
lion Red Guards from all over China in seven more rallies.
During the 18 August rally, Chen Boda, Lin Biao, and Zhou Enlai
delivered speeches. Chen, director of the Central Cultural Revolu-
tion Small Group presiding over the rally, granted Mao three titles:
“the great leader, the great teacher, and the great helmsman.” In his
militant speech denouncing “capitalist-roaders, reactionary bour-
geois authorities, bourgeois royalists, various activities repressing the
revolution, and all “cow-demons and snake-spirits” and calling for
the total destruction of “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old
habits” (popularly known as the Four Olds), Lin spoke of Mao as the
“great commander of the Cultural Revolution.’ From this moment
on, the Four Greats (great teacher, great leader, great commander,
and great helmsman), along with the “red sun,” became Mao’s most
popular prefix, and 18 August 1966 became the unofficial holiday of
the Red Guard movement.
MASS RALLY OF 6 OCTOBER 1966. Well-known for the battle cry
in its full name “The Oath-Taking Rally of Revolutionary Teachers
and Students Present in Beijing to Commence Fierce Firing upon the
Bourgeois Reactionary Line,” the gathering of over 100,000 people
representing colleges all over the country was organized by the “Third
Headquarters” of Beijing college Red Guards and held at the spa-
cious Workers Stadium in Beijing. Attending the rally were Premier
Zhou Enlai and key members of the Central Cultural Revolution
MASS RALLY OF 6 OCTOBER 1966 ® 189
Small Group (CCRSG) Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, and
Zhang Chungiao. At the rally, Red Guard representatives from Bei-
jing Normal University, Beijing Geological Institute, Beijing Institute
of Aeronautics, and schools in provinces like Guangxi, Jiangsu, and
Shaanxi criticized the work groups and party organizations for car-
rying out a bourgeois reactionary line and repressing the Cultural
Revolution in the summer months of 1966. Jiang Qing, and then
Zhang Chungiao, and finally Zhou Enlai made speeches in support
of the Red Guards. The rally sent out a telegram calling on the entire
country to wage war against the bourgeois reactionary line.
Of particular note was a document issued by the Central Military
Commission and the PLA General Political Department that Zhang
Chunqiao announced in his speech. The document was titled the
“Emergency Directive Concerning the Cultural Revolution in all Mili-
tary Units and Schools.” According to this directive, school party com-
mittees were not to resume leadership upon the dismissal of the work
groups, and the popularly elected Cultural Revolution groups, com-
mittees, and congresses should become legitimate organs of power
during the Cultural Revolution. The directive also stipulated that care
should be taken to protect those in the minority; that all those branded
by the work groups and school party committees as “counterrevolu-
tionaries,” “‘antiparty elements,” “rightist elements,” or “false leftists
and true rightists” during the early stages of the movement were to
have their names publicly rehabilitated; that materials written by indi-
viduals under duress were to be returned to the persons themselves;
that after approval from the masses as well as the individual concerned
had been attained, materials used to fabricate evidence were to be pub-
licly destroyed. After reading the directive aloud, Zhang suggested that
this important document was suitable not only for military units and
military schools; the directive must be carried out thoroughly in non-
military institutions and at all levels of party organizations as well.
The mass rally of 6 October 1966 was a significant event for the
rebel faction of the Red Guards who were repressed by the work
groups and old party committees early on but thrived after the rally.
The “Emergency Directive” read at the rally had a strong impact on
the evolving mass movement. Slogans such as “kick away the party
committees and carry out the revolution” would become actions
in the remaining months of 1966, which drove the country further
into chaos. Also under this directive, a partial redress of the wrongs
190 © MAY 7 CADRE SCHOOL
committed in the summer months of 1966 was underway and would
become an important part of the Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary
Line campaign.
MAY 7 CADRE SCHOOL. This was a new institution set up in the
remote countryside where party and government officials and college
professionals were sent to perform manual labor. Supposedly, they
would be tempered by hard work, educated by local peasants, and
reconnected with the real life of the laboring masses. On 7 May 1968,
the Revolutionary Committee of Heilongjiang Province set up the
first of such schools on a farm in Liuhe, Qing’an County, and named
it after Mao Zedong’s May 7 Directive (1966). On 5 October 1968,
the People’s Daily published a report entitled “Liuhe ‘May 7’ Cadre
School Presents New Experience for Revolutionizing Government
Agencies,” which speaks highly of cadres’ “relearning” experience
at the May 7 cadre school as an effective measure to counter the
bureaucratic privilege that had alienated them from the masses. In
an editor’s note to the report, a new directive of Mao is made public
for the first time, which requires all cadres, except for the elderly, the
infirm, or the disabled, to take turns to go down to the grassroots and
do manual labor.
Soon after the publication of Mao’s directive and the report on the
Liuhe cadre school, thousands of May 7 cadre schools were formed
all over the country. Millions of party and government officials and
college and research institution professionals were sent down to do
hard labor. Some returned to their original posts or were assigned
other positions after a year or two of “relearning” in these schools.
Others stayed there indefinitely. After the fall of Lin Biao in 1971,
more sent-down officials and intellectuals were called back to the
cities. In the last few years of the Cultural Revolution, many of these
schools were already vacant. On 17 February 1979, the State Council
issued a directive to close all May 7 cadre schools in the country. See
also REEDUCATION.
MAY 7 DIRECTIVE. In this letter, dated 7 May 1966, to Lin Biao from
Mao Zedong regarding the report of the General Logistics Depart-
ment of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on “Further Develop-
ments of Agricultural and Sideline Production in Armed Forces,’ Mao
articulated a utopian view of labor as a certain profession participating
MAY 16 CIRCULAR ® 191
in all other major professional experiences—like a soldier who can be
at the same time a worker, a farmer, and a student. On 15 May, one day
ahead of the passage of the May 16 Circular with which the Cultural
Revolution was formally launched, the CCP Central Committee (CC)
authorized a nationwide innerparty issuance of Mao’s letter to Lin
with a note that calls the letter “a document of great historical signifi-
cance, a new and epoch-making development of Marxism-Leninism.”
In the letter, Mao projects his vision of the PLA as an institution at
once self-sufficient and educational. In his view, the PLA should be
a great school where military professionals not only receive political,
military, and cultural training but also engage in agricultural, sideline,
and small-to-medium-scale industrial production and participate in all
political campaigns, including the Socialist Education Movement
(which was still going on) and the Cultural Revolution (which was
just beginning). “Thus,” Mao concludes, “the army is integrated with
students, peasants, workers, and civilians in general.”
In a similar fashion, Mao suggests that workers, peasants, students,
and people from other walks of life participate in other spheres of
work and learning experience than their own. In his comments on
students, however, there is an additional radical thrust: “Years of
schooling should be reduced, education needs to be revolutionized,
and bourgeois intellectuals’ dominance over our schools has to end.”
As part of the Cultural Revolution program, Mao’s May 7 Directive
was used to name any experiment that integrated divisions of labor,
especially intellectual and manual labor, as in the case the May 7
Cadre School, where state officials and administrative workers from
the cities went to work as laborers to reform themselves; they were
called “May 7 soldiers.”
MAY 16 CIRCULAR (1966). Carefully edited and revised by Mao
Zedong and approved by the Politburo on 16 May 1966, the CCP
Central Committee Circular revoked the February Outline, dis-
banded the Peng Zhen-led Five-Person Cultural Revolution
Small Group, and announced the establishment of the new Cen-
tral Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Politburo. The
circular accused Peng Zhen of concocting the February Outline
without consulting other members of the Five-Person Group and
without reporting it to the CCP central leadership and Mao despite
the fact that the outline was produced collectively and that Mao was
192 © MAY 16 COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CLIQUE
consulted in person. According to the circular, the February Outline
adopted a bourgeois perspective on the current academic discus-
sion and obscured its political nature; in advocating the principle
of “everybody being equal in front of truth,” the Outline denied the
class identity of truth and protected the bourgeoisie from the right-
ful oppression of the proletarian dictatorship; at the same time, the
outline attempted to disintegrate the left ranks in the name of recti-
fication and create obstacles to the proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The circular condemned the February Outline on 10 counts and con-
cluded with a warning: “The representatives of the bourgeois class
who have infiltrated our party, our government, our armed forces,
and cultural circles are a group of counterrevolutionary revision-
ists. When the time is right, they will try to seize power, turning the
proletarian dictatorship into a bourgeois dictatorship. Some of these
people have already been exposed by us, some have not, and some
are still in our trust and being groomed as our successors. They are
of the Khrushchev type sleeping right next to us. Party cadres at all
levels must be especially aware of this fact.” Such an assessment of
China’s political situation called for the uncovering and the mas-
sive purging of hidden enemies and served to justify a nationwide
campaign. This conclusion, along with the preceding militant attack
on the “bourgeois” February Outline, highlighted Mao’s ultraleftist
ideology and made the May 16 Circular the first “programmatic
document” of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. See also
ENLARGED POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4-26 MAY 1966.
MAY 16 COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CLIQUE. This was the
term the central leadership adopted in August 1967 to refer to a
small organization of college students in Beijing called “The Capital
May 16 Red Guards Regiment,” usually abbreviated as “May 16”
or “5-16” (read “five-one-six” in Chinese). But after its brief initial
stage, in which only this small organization and its associates were
targeted, the investigation of the “May 16” became a nationwide
political witch-hunt. Though its supposed target no longer existed,
over a million innocent people were incriminated, according to offi-
cial estimate. The movement had no official closure and did not end
until after the Cultural Revolution.
The original May 16 Regiment was an ultraleftist group named
after the CCP May 16 Circular of 1966. In the summer months of
MAY 16 COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CLIQUE ® 193
1967, members of the May 16 Regiment secretly distributed pam-
phlets and posted slogans calling Premier Zhou Enlai a “black back-
stage supporter of the February Adverse Current” and a “shameful
traitor of Mao Zedong Thought” and accusing him of betraying the
spirit of the May 16 Circular.
The May 16 Regiment’s attack on Zhou provoked a public outcry
and a quick condemnation by the central leadership, as well. Some
time in August 1967 when Mao Zedong was reading a draft of Yao
Wenyuan’s article “On Two Books by Tao Zhu,” he named the
“May 16” as an example of the counterrevolutionaries who, in Yao’s
words, “shout slogans that are extreme left in form but extreme right
in essence, whip up the ill wind of ‘suspecting all, and bombard
the proletarian headquarters:” “The organizers and manipulators of
the so-called ‘May 16,” Mao wrote, “are just such a conspiratorial
counterrevolutionary clique and must be thoroughly exposed.” The
government’s crackdown on the “May 16” was swift and successful.
However, after the leaders of the “May 16” were arrested, the
movement to “ferret out the ‘May 16’” continued. In 1968, the CCP
central leadership set up a Chen Boda-led special case group to inves-
tigate the “May 16.” At a meeting on 24 January 1970, Lin Biao and
Jiang Qing called for further investigation of the “May 16.” By then,
the hunt for the “May 16” had already evolved into a nationwide cam-
paign, and the “May 16”—a convenient catch-all label for those on
the extreme left—was a term to use to label one’s enemies. In places
where factional strife was intense, each side often accused the other of
being the “May 16.” In some work units, over 14% of the people were
falsely named “May 16” members.
On 27 March 1970, the CCP Central Committee (CC) issued a
“Notification Concerning the Investigation of the ‘May 16’ Counter-
revolutionary Conspiratorial Clique” to put in check the widespread
persecution and confusion. Yet the statement in the “Notification”
that it was wrong to deny the existence of the “May 16” and that class
struggle was so complicated that the “May 16” was just one of the
many counterrevolutionary organizations actually encouraged further
political witch-hunting. The “Notification” also named without any
factual basis four generals, Xiao Hua, Yang Chengwu, Yu Lijin,
and Fu Chongbi, together with three fallen cultural revolutionaries,
Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu, as behind-the-scenes manipu-
lators of the “May 16 clique.”
194 © MORNING REQUEST, EVENING REPORT
On 8 February 1971, with Mao’s approval, the CC announced its
decision to form a 13-member special case task force to lead the inves-
tigation of the “May 16.” Chen Boda, head of the “May 16” special
case group established in 1968, was now pronounced the backstage
supporter of the “May 16.” In 1972, shortly after Lin Biao’s downfall,
Lin and Chen were named together as chief backstage manipulators
of the “May 16.” In the meantime, the CC special case task force
continued to operate until its dissolution in late 1978 when the inves-
tigation of the “May 16” finally came to an inconclusive end.
MORNING REQUEST, EVENING REPORT (zaogingshi wanhui-
bao). The phrase refers to the ritual of the masses during the Cultural
Revolution to request instructions from Chairman Mao Zedong in
the morning and report to him in the evening about what one thought
and did during the day. The ritual was invented in the early stage of
the Cultural Revolution when the personality cult of Mao was at
its height. It soon became a common practice across China. Usually
performed in groups with participants standing in front of Mao’s
portrait at home or in public, the ritual would begin with a prayer for
Mao’s longevity and Vice-Chairman Lin Biao’s long-lasting health
while everyone in the group waved the pocket-size Quotations from
Chairman Mao. The prayer was followed by the reading of Mao’s
quotations. The ritual usually ended with an oath that Mao’s instruc-
tions just chanted would be carried out in action during the day. The
beginning prayer was the same for the evening ritual just before bed
time. Then each participant would examine closely his or her deeds
of the day against Mao’s instructions and express his or her determi-
nation to follow Mao’s instructions more closely and overcome any
shortcomings the next day. Similar to this ritual is a slightly less com-
mon practice of reading Mao’s quotations before each meal.
When gigantic Mao statues were erected on many school campuses
and on the premises of state institutions in 1968, the morning ritual
in the public square in front of Mao’s statue became a spectacle:
hundreds, and even thousands, of people (depending on the size of
the institution) would come in groups and speak to the statue of the
chairman in a loud voice. The so-called class enemies—those being
denounced, illegally detained, and usually forced to perform manual
labor—were not allowed to participate in the ritual the way other
people did; they were often herded by Red Guards to line up in front
NANJING INCIDENT @ 195
of the statue, bow their heads, and perform a “Morning Confession,”
in which they were forced to name their “crimes” against the chair-
man and ask for punishment. In summer 1969, the central leadership
attempted to stop the practice of “Morning Request, Evening Report”
by dismissing it as “formalistic” in a party central document (dated
12 June 1969). But the ritual continued to be performed in many
places until after the downfall of Lin Biao in 1971.
-N-
NANJING 12 FEBRUARY COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CASE
1970. A wrongful case against a group of students in Nanjing for
their protest against the “One Strike and Three Antis” campaign
and their opposition to Lin Biao and Jiang Qing. This case was
related to another unjust verdict in Nanjing: on 12 February 1970,
when the “One Strike and Three Antis” campaign was just begin-
ning, a young man named Jin Chahua became the first victim of the
campaign and was executed in Nanjing because of his critical views
of the Cultural Revolution and his efforts as an organizer of a Marx-
ism-Leninism study group. Sympathizing with Jin’s views and out-
raged by his execution, Chen Zhuoran, a student at the Nanjing No. 8
Middle School, and some of his friends and fellow students went out
on the night of Jin’s execution and posted on the streets six slogans
including “Immortal is the martyr Jin Chahua,” “We need true Marx-
ism,” “Down with Lin Biao,” and “Down with Jiang Qing.” In April
1970, Chen and his friends were arrested for their involvement in the
“12 February counterrevolutionary case.” On 28 April 1970, a pub-
lic trial was held, during which Chen Zhuoran’s death sentence was
pronounced; Su Xiaobin, one of Chen’s friends, was sentenced to 15
years in prison. Wang Maoya, another student involved, was driven
insane by the harsh measures and eventually committed suicide. On
13 May 1981, the Nanjing Intermediate People’s Court redressed the
case and pronounced all of the verdicts unjust.
NANJING INCIDENT (1976). A spontaneous political movement in
the form of a public mourning for the late Premier Zhou Enlai as
well as a mass protest against the Jiang Qing group took place in
Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, in late March and early April 1976. The
196 © NATIONAL RED WORKERS REBEL CORPS
immediate cause of the protest was a series of slanders in the media
against Zhou Enlai, especially an implicit reference to Zhou as a
capitalist-roader supporting Deng Xiaoping in an article published
in the 25 March issue of ultraleftists-controlled Shanghai newspaper
Wenhui Daily. While careful readers across China were enraged by
such insinuations and writing and calling the newspaper to protest,
people in Nanjing were the first to be organized and take to the street.
With the approach of the traditional Qingming Festival (4 April in
1976)—a day to visit cemeteries and remember the dead—numer-
ous wreaths honoring the late premier were made and placed in the
Yuhuatai Cemetery of Revolutionary Martyrs at Meiyuan in the sub-
urbs of Nanjing.
On 28 March, more than 400 students and teachers from Nanjing
University held Zhou’s portrait, carried a flower wreath, and marched
through Nanjing’s busiest streets to Meiyuan. The traffic police gave
them green lights, while all vehicles made way for them. More and
more people joined the march while a huge number of pedestrians
stood silently along the streets. The next day, college students posted
or painted slogans on the walls in the city and on the trains passing
through Nanjing—slogans commemorating Zhou, protesting against
Wenhui Daily, and denouncing the Jiang Qing group although with-
out mentioning names. On 1 April, an official notice came from Bei-
jing via telephone charging the authors of posters and slogans with the
crime of “splitting the central leadership.” The notice further irritated
the masses, so much so that not only did protest activities intensify
in Nanjing, but they spread quickly to other cities, including Beijing.
In the few days in late March and early April, about 667,000 people
visited the Yuhuatai cemetery, and over 6,000 wreaths were laid there
in honor of the late premier. Nanjing provided the first instance of
public mourning as a form of protest, the signature of the nationwide
April 5 Movement.
NATIONAL RED WORKERS REBEL CORPS (quanguo hongse
Zaofanzhe zongtuan). An organization of contract and temporary
workers formed on 8 November 1966 and one of China’s first national
mass organizations, the Rebel Corps was known for its practical orien-
tation in fighting for its members’ job security and economic benefits.
The organization initially won support from the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), particularly Jiang Qing who, in
NEW PEKING UNIVERSITY ® 197
a speech given on 26 December 1966, blamed President Liu Shaoqi
for the unfair treatment of contract and temporary workers and called
upon the Rebel Corps to criticize Liu’s revisionist line. Yet, as the
organization continued to work for its members’ economic interests
and as Mao Zedong expressed dissatisfaction with such an economic
distraction in a political movement and supported some mass orga-
nizations in Shanghai in their critique of economism, the CCRSG
eventually turned its back on the Rebel Corps. On 12 February 1967,
the CCP Central Committee and the State Council issued a public
announcement (zhongfa [67] 47) to disband all national mass orga-
nizations, including the Rebel Corps. On 15 February, the Military
Control Commission of Beijing Public Security Bureau pronounced
the Rebel Corps a “reactionary organization” and ordered the arrest of
its leaders. See also ECONOMISM.
NEW PEKING UNIVERSITY (xinbeida). A major mass organization
newspaper during the Cultural Revolution, the New Peking University
was the publication of the Peking University Cultural Revolution
Committee from 22 August 1966 to 17 August 1968, totaling approxi-
mately 200 issues. Publication began on the day when Mao Zedong,
upon request from Peking University cultural revolutionaries led by
Nie Yuanzi, inscribed the title “New Peking University” to replace
that of the old official news bulletin. In the issues published in the
early stage of the Cultural Revolution, the New Peking University
devotes much space to attacking school authorities, especially Lu
Ping and Peng Peiyun, for their close association with the so-called
“black gang” of the former CCP Beijing municipal committee led by
Mayor Peng Zhen. During the campaign to criticize the bourgeois
reactionary line, the paper shifted its focus to criticizing the work
group of Peking University. From late 1966 on, the New Peking Uni-
versity Commune, the dominant mass organization that virtually con-
trolled the school’s Cultural Revolution Committee, sent its members
to many parts of the country, first to stir up the masses for revolution in
the provinces, and then, to engage in provincial factional fighting. Its
provincial liaison offices sometimes published joint issues with local
mass organizations.
When sectional battles turned into a civil war in 1967, the Peking
University Cultural Revolution Committee was split into two fac-
tions: the original New Peking University Commune and a new group
198 © NEWTREND OF IDEAS
including the Revolutionary Rebels Headquarters, Jinggang Mountain
Regiment, and Fluttering Red Flag, all of which joined hands later
on to form the New Peking University Jinggang Mountain Regiment.
The latter began to publish its own newspaper New Peking University
News (xinbeida bao) on 12 July 1967. At this stage, both newspapers
of Peking University mainly focused on factional battles. On 28 July
1968, at his meeting with the five Red Guard leaders, including Nie
Yuanzi of Peking University, Mao was sharply critical of the wide-
spread Red Guard factionalism. Within a month the New Peking Uni-
versity ceased publication; its last issue came out two days before the
workers propaganda team and the PLA propaganda team entered
the Peking University campus and took control of the school.
NEW TREND OF IDEAS (xinsichao). This phrase denoted a strain
of radical ideas embraced by some student thinkers and writers dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution. The phrase first appeared as the title
of a journal that a group of students at Beijing Normal University
established in late 1966 and early 1967. The leader of the group was
Li Wenbo who argues in “A Commune Is No Longer a State” (17
October 1966) and some other big-character posters that China’s
socialist government structure, having derived from a bourgeois
system, is still a hotbed for the growth of a capitalist class, revision-
ism, and bureaucracy. Therefore, Li believes, the old state and party
apparatus must be completely dismantled, and a new form of govern-
ment must be created following the principles of the Paris Commune
of 1871 by which people have the right to elect as well as replace
government officials. This transformation, according to Li, is the goal
of the Cultural Revolution. Pursuing a similar line of argument, the
collective author of “On the New Trend of Ideas: The Declaration of
the 4-3 Faction” (11 June 1967) holds that since in socialist China
some government officials have become members of a privileged
class, cultural revolutions are needed to purge capitalist-roaders
within the party, to strip them of their newly acquired privileges, and
to redistribute property and political power.
Yang Xiguang, a middle school student in Hunan Province, fur-
ther radicalized this line of thinking in his article “Where Is China
Going?” (6 January 1968). A self-labeled ultraleftist, Yang denounces
a new class of red capitalists that consists of 90% of ranking officials
with Premier Zhou Enlai as their current general representative. In
NIERONGZHEN © 199
his view, Chairman Mao Zedong’s ultimate political vision, the real
goal of his Cultural Revolution program, is to do away with the old
state and party apparatus completely and to establish a new form of
government called “Chinese people’s commune,” a mass dictator-
ship that had already existed briefly in the Paris Commune of 1871,
the Shanghai January Storm of 1967, and what Yang calls China’s
“partial revolutionary civil war” of August 1967. Mao’s decision
to establish the revolutionary committee (which includes military
leaders and officials from the pre-Cultural Revolution government)
instead of the commune as the organ of power is to Yang a necessary
concession to the bourgeoisie at the moment, a great strategic move;
when the masses are mature enough, Yang predicts, they will under-
stand Mao’s vision, abandon the revolutionary committee, and turn
China into a completely new society governed by the masses. Though
some of these radical ideas may indeed underlie Mao’s cultural revo-
lution theory, they were invariably suppressed by the government.
Yang Xiguang, the most prominent voice of the “new trend” was
imprisoned for 10 years from 1968 to 1978.
NIE RONGZHEN (1899-1992). A senior leader of the Chinese Com-
munist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Nie
played a significant role in the CCP’s political and military affairs
before 1949 and in the modernization of the Chinese military after
the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the Cul-
tural Revolution, Nie was one of the veteran officials involved in the
1967 February Adverse Current.
Born in Jiangjin, Sichuan Province, Nie took part in the communist
movement in the early 1920s while a student in France. He joined the
CCP in 1923 after his return to China and was trained in the Soviet
Union from 1924 to 1925. A veteran of the Northern Expedition and
a leader of both the Nanchang Uprising and the Guangzhou Uprising,
Nie served on prominent military posts in the Red Army in 1930s, in the
Communist-led Eighth Route Army during the war of resistance against
Japan, and in the PLA’s Western-China Field Army in the civil war in
the second half of the 1940s. After the founding of the PRC, Nie was
appointed to various high-level positions in the party, the state, and the
army, including mayor of Beijing, deputy chief of general staff of the
PLA, vice-premier of the State Council (1958-1975), vice-chairman
of the CCP Central Military Commission (CMC) (1959-1987), and
200 © NIEYUANZI
chairman of the National Defense Science and Technology Commis-
sion. He was one of the 10 marshals of the PRC and a member of the
CCP Seventh and Eighth Central Committee (CC). In August 1966,
Nie became a member of the Politburo—an indication of his support
for Mao Zedong at the outset of the Cultural Revolution.
In early 1967, Nie was, however, involved in the first of the “two
great disturbances” of what was soon to be known as the February
Adverse Current, in which a group of senior party and military leaders
confronted the ultraleftists of the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group (CCRSG) and accused them of persecuting veteran cadres
and interfering with military affairs. Mao sided with the CCRSG and
criticized Nie and his comrades. The veterans were under attack again
in 1969 at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP; though Nie
retained his membership in the CC, his power and influence in state
and military affairs were much reduced. After Lin Biao’s demise in
1971, Mao began to seek support from the “old government” faction
of the central leadership and sent friendly signals to Nie and other
senior party and military leaders. Nie reappeared at the CMC Standing
Committee and was named a vice-chairman of the National People’s
Congress in 1975. In the post-Mao era, Nie became a member of the
Politburo of both the Tenth and the Eleventh CC and vice-chairman of
the State Central Military Committee of the Sixth National People’s
Congress. Nie Rongzhen retired in 1987 and died in 1992.
NIE YUANZI (1921- ). One of the well-known “five Red Guard
leaders” in Beijing and an alternate member of the CCP Ninth Cen-
tral Committee (CC), Nie was chair of the Peking University Revo-
lutionary Committee and head of the Capital College Red Guards’
Representative Assembly during the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Hua County, Henan Province, Nie joined the CCP in
1938. Unlike the other four student members of the “five Red Guard
leaders,” Nie was a faculty member and party secretary of the Depart-
ment of Philosophy at Peking University when the Cultural Revolu-
tion began. What Mao Zedong called the first Marxist-Leninist
big-character poster, which Nie cosigned with six other authors
on 25 May 1966, made her nationally famous. After 1 June 1966
when Mao ordered the nationwide broadcast of this poster for the
purpose of mobilizing the masses to shake up the party leadership,
Nie herself became one of the henchmen upon whom Mao and the
NINGXIA COMMUNIST SELF-STUDY UNIVERSITY ® 201
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) relied heavily
in implementing their radical policies at the grassroots. Nie, along
with a few other prominent rebel Red Guard leaders, organized the
mass rally of 6 October 1966, at which more than 100,000 people
representing colleges across China gathered to launch the campaign
against the bourgeois reactionary line of Liu Shaoqi. During and
after this campaign, Nie and her supporters participated in the nation-
wide bombarding of party and state leaders who allegedly did not
side with Mao and the CCRSG. In 1967, Nie was appointed deputy
head of the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee.
During her brief career of two years as the most powerful per-
son at Peking University, Nie became popularly known as laofoye,
an appellation of the old Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty, and
was responsible for the persecution of many people. She was much
involved in violent factional conflicts on the university campus as
well. By summer 1968, mass organizations led by Nie and other Red
Guard leaders had become so intractable that Mao finally decided to
end the Red Guard movement altogether. On the early morning of
28 July 1968, Mao held a meeting with the five Red Guard leaders,
including Nie Yuanzi. At the meeting, Mao sent a strong signal to Nie
and others that they should exit China’s political stage. Shortly after
the meeting, a Workers Propaganda Team and a PLA Propaganda
Team were sent to Peking University to take over power from Nie
and her supporters. The propaganda teams soon took her into custody
and forced her to do penal labor under surveillance.
Shortly after the downfall of the Gang of Four, Nie was formally
arrested on a counterrevolutionary charge. On 10 March 1983, the
Beijing Intermediate People’s Court sentenced her to 17 years in
prison. She was accused of a variety of crimes including instigating
attacks on party and state officials and framing and persecuting inno-
cent people.
NINGXIA COMMUNIST SELF-STUDY UNIVERSITY (ningxia
gongchanzhuyi zixiu daxue). This reading group was formed by 13
college and middle school students in Yinchuan, Ningxia Province,
in November 1969 for the purpose of studying and discussing classic
texts of Marxism-Leninism. The group had a mimeographed publica-
tion called Journal of Learning. A total of two issues were published,
carrying six articles and three reports on the condition of the Chinese
202 è NINTH NATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE CCP
countryside. In these writings, as well as their correspondences to
one another, some members of the group are critical of the personal-
ity cult of Mao Zedong and obscurantist policies of the CCP. One
member, for instance, draws an analogy between the Cultural Revo-
lution and the Republican Revolution of 1911 in which Lin Biao
is compared to Yuan Shikai as a hidden usurper of state power. In
March 1970, during the One Strike and Three Antis campaign, the
authorities named this group an “active counterrevolutionary clique.”
Three members of the group were executed, one committed suicide,
four received prison sentences varying from three years to life, and
the rest were put under surveillance by the state. On 5 August 1978,
the Ningxia Autonomous Region Supreme Court pronounced the
case of the Communist Self-Study University misjudged.
NINTH NATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE CCP (1-24 April 1969).
After years of anticipation and preparation during which grave events,
especially the post-Great Leap Forward economic crisis and the tur-
moil in the early part of the Cultural Revolution, had interrupted the
regular meeting schedule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
the Ninth National Congress finally opened in the beginning of April
1969, 13 years—instead of 5 years as specified in the CCP Constitu-
tion—after the Eighth Congress. The entire meeting was held in secret
under heavy security due to war concerns over the Sino-Soviet border
dispute. Some 1,512 delegates attended the meeting representing 22
million CCP members. Chairman Mao Zedong called for unity in
his opening speech, but the ceremonial seating on the rostrum was
highly suggestive of the division within the Party: Mao was seated in
the center; on his left were Lin Biao, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, and
other new stars of the Cultural Revolution; on his right were Zhou
Enlai and prominent pre-1966 “old government” leaders.
Lin Biao, representing the Central Committee (CC), delivered the
Ninth Congress Political Report. Lin spoke of the Cultural Revolu-
tion as a great political movement guided by Mao’s theory of con-
tinuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. He
surveyed the CCP history, especially its post-1949 socialist period, as
merely a preparation for the Cultural Revolution and denounced Liu
Shaoqi as the general representative of capitalist-roaders within the
party. Liu’s “counterrevolutionary conspiracy” to restore capitalism
in China, according to Lin, was detected by Mao long ago and finally
NINTH NATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE CCP ® 203
defeated during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s idea that class strug-
gle exists in the entire historical period of socialism gained official
status in Lin’s report as the basic line of the CCP, while Mao Zedong
Thought as a whole, Lin said, must command everything.
The Ninth Congress adopted a new party constitution. Mao’s theory
of class struggle and continuous revolution became part of the consti-
tution’s general program. Also in the general program was a specific
goal to overthrow the imperialism led by the United States, the mod-
ern revisionism of the Soviet Union and its allies, and the reactionaries
of all countries. According to the new constitution, party members had
only compulsory duties; the rights defined in the original constitution
were eliminated. In a move unprecedented in the history of the CCP,
the new constitution specified Mao Zedong as the leader of the CCP
and Lin Biao as Mao’s “close comrade-in-arms and successor.”
The election of the Ninth Central Committee was the last item on
the agenda. The candidate nomination and selection proceeded with
strict regulations in favor of the new establishment: Mao Zedong and
Lin Biao were designated as “natural candidates;” 12 participants of
the extended Central Cultural Revolution Small Group routine
meetings and three members of the Central Military Commission
Administrative Group were “unanimously approved candidates;” the
number of candidates from the Eighth Central Committee was not to
exceed 53. Before the election, there was much backstage maneuvering
by Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and their supporters who tried to embarrass
the old leaders by reducing their votes. Behind-the-scenes activities
also included those of Lin’s close allies undermining the power of
Jiang’s group. The election results were predictable: 170 members for
the CC were elected from exactly 170 candidates; 109 alternates were
elected from the same number of candidates as well; Mao was elected
chairman of the CC; and Lin Biao the only vice-chairman.
The personality cult of Mao Zedong was at its peak at the Ninth
Congress. Delegates often talked about their two greatest desires: first,
to see Chairman Mao as much as possible and to hear his “great voice”
as much as possible; second, to have a picture taken with Mao. Mao’s
brief opening speech was interrupted dozens of times by the audience
shouting the slogan “Long live Chairman Mao” and singing the song
“Chairman Mao, the Red Sun in Our Heart.” Delegates even gathered
in the Great Hall of People, the congress site, and did the “loyalty
dance” to demonstrate their love for the Chairman. The elevation of
204 © NIXON VISIT
Lin Biao’s status was no less phenomenal. As delegates were elect-
ing the all-powerful presidium at the opening session, Mao proposed
that Lin be elected chairman. Lin protested, and Mao’s proposal was
naturally turned down. Yet, with Mao giving the opening speech and
Lin announcing the adjournment of the congress at the end, and with
the downfall of Liu Shaoqi and the entry of Lin Biao’s name, together
with Mao’s, into the party constitution, the question of a successor to
Mao that had much to do with Mao’s desire for a cultural revolution
seemed resolved—at least for the moment.
NIXON VISIT (1972). See UNITED STATES-CHINA RELATIONS.
NOTES FROM A THREE-FAMILY VILLAGE (sanjiacun zaji). See
THREE-FAMILY VILLAGE ANTI-PARTY CLIQUE.
ie
OIL PAINTING CHAIRMAN MAO GOES TO ANYUAN (1967).
Highly praised by Jiang Qing, this well-known piece by Liu Chunhua
and his fellow students and teachers at the Central College of Arts and
Crafts promoted the image of Mao Zedong at the expense of histori-
cal reality. The historical setting of the painting is an Anyuan miners’
strike in the early 1920s. Although Mao had been to the Anyuan Coal
Mine, it was Liu Shaoqi who played the leading role in organizing
the Anyuan miners’ union, the first major union led exclusively by the
CCP. However, a popular 1961 painting entitled Liu Shaoqi and the
Anyuan Coal Miners that portrays Liu as the leader of the strike was
labeled a “poisonous weed” in the Cultural Revolution. In the mean-
time, in 1967, the Museum of Chinese Revolution planned an exhi-
bition (entitled “Mao Zedong Thought Lit up the Anyuan Miners’
Movement”) with a clear political purpose. Following the instructions
of the exhibition organizers, Liu Chunhua and his comrades produced
the oil painting portraying Mao in a long blue gown carrying a red
umbrella on his way to Anyuan as the organizer of the miners’ strike.
On 1 October 1967, the painting was displayed at the exhibition and
enthusiastically received by the audience. Jiang Qing then called it a
model painting. On 1 July 1968, the piece was printed as a large sin-
gle page attached to both the People’s Daily and the Liberation Army
OLD RED GUARDS @ 205
Daily. The painting was also made into posters, stamps, and badges
and became the most reproduced icon of Mao during the Cultural
Revolution, with copies of various kinds totaling 900 million.
OLD RED GUARDS (lao hongweibing). Also known as “Old
Guards” (lao bing), Old Red Guards were members of Red Guard
organizations established in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution
mostly in middle and high schools in Beijing and a few other large
cities. These organizations adopted a politically discriminating mem-
bership policy and only admitted those from families of the so-called
Five Red Categories. Some Old Red Guards also promoted a notori-
ous blood lineage theory. Old Red Guards labeled themselves “old”
when a new school of Red Guards, the rebels (zaofanpai), began
to form organizations and allow those from nonproletarian families
to join. In the summer of 1966 when the Cultural Revolution was
first launched, Old Red Guards were the major force in denouncing
the “revisionist line in education” and in attacking teachers, school
authorities, “black gang” members, and people of the Five Black
Categories. They were the ones who first embraced the words “to
rebel is justified” and made this lesser known 1939 quotation of Mao
the slogan of Red Guards. They were also the most enthusiastic in the
campaign to destroy the Four Olds and considered themselves to be
the heroes of the violent and bloody Red August.
However, when Mao Zedong moved to take on the old party
establishment and attack Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in the
Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign in autumn
1966, Old Red Guards—especially children of the party officials
under attack—became much less enthusiastic, while the newly
emerging rebel faction began to take their place as Mao’s crusading
army. While continuing to assail alleged traditional class enemies
mostly outside the party, some Old Red Guards began to denounce
the radical Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG)
for hijacking Mao’s Cultural Revolution program with its own
agenda to overthrow old party officials. In December, a group of
hardcore Old Red Guards formed a Capital Red Guard United
Action Committee in Beijing and attempted to launch a campaign
against the CCRSG’s “new bourgeois reactionary line.” But this
time, unlike the early stage of the revolution, the central leadership
did not support their rebellion; rather, the United Action Committee
206 © OLD THREE CLASSES
was named a “‘counterrevolutionary organization” by the authorities,
and many of its members were arrested. Despite their attempt to
reassert themselves as revolutionaries, Old Red Guards were never
able to come back again as an effective political force.
OLD THREE CLASSES (laosanjie). The term refers to both middle-
school and high-school classes graduating in 1966, 1967, and 1968.
Students of these three classes were a major force of the Red Guard
and rebel movements during the early stages of the Cultural Revo-
lution while regular school programs were suspended. In 1968 and
1969, most of these students were assigned work in the countryside,
at the frontier, as well as in mines and factories, thus ending their
turbulent revolutionary years. See also EDUCATED YOUTHS; UP
TO THE MOUNTAINS AND DOWN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE.
“ON FAMILY BACKGROUND?” (chushen lun). A celebrated essay
by Yu Luoke criticizing the blood lineage theory, “On Family Back-
ground” first appeared in a hundred mimeographed copies pasted
on wire poles along the streets of Beijing in December 1966. Yu put
“Family Background Study Group” as the author. Its revised ver-
sion of about 15,000 words was published on 18 January 1967 in the
Journal of Middle School Cultural Revolution, a mass organization
newspaper to which Yu Luoke was the main contributor and of which
Yu Luowen, Luoke’s younger brother, was a cofounder. About 90,000
copies of this issue and a later special edition were sold in Beijing
within a short period of time, and more than a million copies were
printed in various forms by other mass organizations nationwide. The
editors received numerous letters of support from across China.
“On Family Background” argues for the “emphasis on perfor-
mance” (zhongzai biaoxian), a phrase in the CCP class line statement:
Yu writes, “On the grounds of performance, all youths are equal.” But
the essence of Yu’s argument is equality and human rights, especially
equal political and education rights for millions of youths who had
been discriminated against in Chinese society because of their non-
proletarian family backgrounds. “We don’t recognize any right that is
not achieved through one’s personal efforts,” Yu writes. Although Yu’s
point of departure is a critique of the blood lineage theory crystal-
lized in a notorious Red Guard couplet, “If the father is a hero, the
son is a real man. If the father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard,”
ONE HUNDRED-DAY ARMED CONFLICT ON THE TSINGHUA CAMPUS ® 207
the real target of his criticism is a government-sanctioned system
of discrimination that underlies the CCP class policy. Under this
system, “those from the families of the so-called ‘Black Seven Cat-
egories’—the ‘sons-of-dogs,’ that is—have already become second-
ary targets of the proletarian dictatorship; they are born ‘sinners’. . .
and treated beneath human dignity.” “How do they differ, then,’ Yu
asks, “from those living in other caste systems like blacks in America,
Sudras in India, and untouchables in Japan?” Yu denounces as “seri-
ous violations of human rights” such government-sanctioned actions
as verbal and physical abuse, body searches, and illegal detention
that Red Guards carried out to appear “super-Maoist.” Yu is also the
first to note that “a new privileged class has emerged” in China and
that the blood-lineage theory serves to protect the vested interests of
this group. Yu’s embrace of equality and human rights, and his use
of these very terms—a taboo during the Cultural Revolution—makes
the article “On Family Background” a “‘declaration of human rights’
in the east,” as a contemporary reader called it, and a precursor of the
post-Cultural Revolution democracy movement in China.
ONE HUNDRED-DAY ARMED CONFLICT ON THE TSINGHUA
CAMPUS (Qinghua yuan bairi da wudou). This armed confronta-
tion between two rival Red Guard organizations on the campus of
Tsinghua University lasted for about a hundred days from late April
to late July 1968. This prolonged military-style factional conflict was
the bloodiest incident of its kind in Beijing, causing 18 deaths and
more than 1,100 injuries. The incident triggered Mao Zedong’s deci-
sion to dissolve all Red Guard organizations and end the Red Guard
movement altogether.
The origin of the factional conflict at Tsinghua can be traced to an
event in April 1967 when several columns of Red Guards under the
Jinggang Mountain Regiment, one of the most influential Red Guard
organizations in the country, formed a “4-14 Revolutionary Network-
ing Group” to distinguish themselves from the rest of the Regiment
on the basis of their dissenting views, especially in regard to how
former party officials should be treated: the 4-14 group considered it
necessary and right to rehabilitate most cadres and include them in the
yet-to-be-formed power organ the revolutionary committee at both
departmental and university level, whereas the leaders of the Regi-
ment, including Kuai Dafu, who was known as the “commander,”
208 è ONE HUNDRED-DAY ARMED CONFLICT ON THE TSINGHUA CAMPUS
believed that the former party officials were basically not worthy of
rehabilitation, except those who had confessed their “crimes” and
were willing to “turn their spears around and strike.’ The issue was
pressing, though, since the Cultural Revolution had already entered
a new phase marked by the establishment of the new power structure
in many other places. Kuai, who viewed himself as the leader of the
country’s Red Guard movement, pushed hard for an agenda of estab-
lishing Tsinghua’s revolutionary committee by the end of May, but he
was unable to settle differences with his dissenters. On 29 May 1967,
the 4-14 group formally broke with the Jinggang Mountain Regiment
and established its own organization called the 4-14 Regiment, which
made Kuai’s goal impossible to accomplish.
In spring 1968, after a series of small-scale clashes between the
two competing organizations at Tsinghua, including the kidnapping
and the torturing of each other’s members, Kuai Dafu gave orders
to launch a full-scale offensive, perhaps hoping either to subdue his
rivals or force the radical faction of the CCP leadership, which had
supported him and his organization before, to intervene in his favor.
On 23 April, the Jinggang Mountain Red Guards began to attack a
4-14-occupied building on campus. About 50 people were injured in
the first day of fighting. In the next few days, both sides occupied
more buildings and turned them into fortifications, while each side
tried to seize the other’s territory. During the continuous battle, rocks,
bricks, and spears were used as weapons, and then rifles, incendiary
bottles, homemade bombs, hand-grenades, and even homemade can-
nons. Casualties increased on both sides, including several deaths and
hundreds of injuries. On 3 July 1968, the CCP Central Committee
issued nationwide a public notice concerning the armed conflict in
Guangxi Province, sending a clear signal to the country that armed
fighting would no longer be tolerated. In Beijing, the municipal revo-
lutionary committee made several attempts, in the name of publiciz-
ing and implementing the July 3 Public Notice, to end the conflict
at Tsinghua: it urged both parties to stop fighting, but nothing was
accomplished.
On 27 July, an army—known as a propaganda team—of more than
30,000 workers from 61 factories in Beijing led by the PLA officers
of central leaders’ guards regiment Unit 8341 was sent to Tsinghua
campus to stop the factional battle. When unarmed team members
started to dismantle fortifications and remove roadblocks and barbed
ONE STRIKE AND THREE ANTIS ® 209
wire entanglements, the 4-14 members gave in to the team’s demand
and disarmed themselves, whereas the Jinggang Mountain Regiment,
following orders from Kuai Dafu, opened fire at workers and also
attacked them with rocks, spears, and hand-grenades, leaving five
team members dead and more than 700 injured. Under pressure
from the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee, which had
conducted intense negotiations with Red Guard leaders at Tsinghua,
members of the Jinggang Mountain Regiment eventually began to
withdraw from the campus at 2:30 a.m. on 28 July. The hundred-day
armed conflict on the Tsinghua campus was finally over.
At the moment when the Jinggang Mountain Red Guards started
to withdraw, Mao was calling for an emergency meeting with the five
most influential leaders of Beijing Red Guards including Kuai Dafu.
The meeting lasted for five hours from 3:30 to 8:30 a.m. on 28 July,
which turned out to be the beginning of the end of the Red Guard
movement which Mao had once so enthusiastically supported. See
also MAO ZEDONG: MEETING WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD
LEADERS.
ONE STRIKE AND THREE ANTIS (yida sanfan). This was a nation-
wide movement guided by three central party documents: “Direc-
tive Concerning the Strike against Counterrevolutionary Destructive
Activities” issued on 31 January 1970, and “Directive Concerning
Anti-Graft and Embezzlement and Anti-Speculation and Profiteering”
and “Notice on Anti-Extravagance and Waste” issued on 5 February
1970. While the effort of the “Three Antis” mainly focused on eco-
nomic affairs, the “One Strike” supposedly aimed at those inside China
who coordinated with a Soviet-U.S. conspiracy to invade China; such
“destructive counterrevolutionary activities” were named a “noteworthy
new direction of the current class struggle.” Although neither the for-
eign conspiracy nor the domestic echo was substantiated, according
to official assessment, 1.87 million people were persecuted as traitors,
spies, and counterrevolutionaries, over 284,800 were arrested, and
thousands were executed during the 10-month period from February
to November 1970. Prominent among the persecuted “counterrevolu-
tionaries” were those who openly criticized the Cultural Revolution.
The best known cases include those of Yu Luoke and Zhang Zhixin:
Yu, author of “On Family Background” criticizing the blood lineage
theory, was executed on 5 March 1970; Zhang, a most outspoken and
210 © OVERALL RECTIFICATION
loyal communist, was sentenced to life in prison on 20 August 1970.
Later Zhang was sentenced to death and was executed.
OVERALL RECTIFICATION (quanmian zhengdun) (1975). A
major effort led by Deng Xiaoping to counter the ultraleftist poli-
cies of the Cultural Revolution with pragmatic ones, to energize the
national economy, and to restore normality to the country, the nation-
wide rectification in all major economic and sociopolitical spheres
began in February 1975 but was forced to end in November of the
same year when Chairman Mao Zedong, concerned with the criticism
of the Cultural Revolution implicit in Deng’s tactics, proposed to the
Central Committee (CC) of the CCP that a campaign be launched to
counterattack the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend.
In January 1975, Deng was appointed to a number of key leader-
ship positions including vice-chairman of the CC, a member of the
Politburo Standing Committee, vice-chairman of the Central Military
Commission (CMC), chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA), and first vice-premier of the State Council (SC). With
strong support from Premier Zhou Enlai, who was hospitalized for
cancer treatment, and with blessings from Mao, Deng was formally
entrusted with power to preside over the daily affairs of the party
leadership, the administration, and the military.
In late February, Deng began his overall rectification program by
taking the first step in a railway transportation reform to make sure
that both freight and passenger trains ran full, fast, and on time. Fol-
lowing Deng’s instruction closely, Wan Li, minister of railways, was
instrumental in overhauling the nation’s inefficient transportation
system and setting up a rectification model for other sectors. In step
with the railway transportation reform was the rectification in different
areas of industry and, later and to a lesser extent, in agriculture.
In the summer, the rectification program was carried out further in
various fields. On 14 July, at an enlarged session of the CMC, Deng
called for a reform and restructuring in the PLA to resolve five prob-
lems: “overstaffing,” “disorganization,” “arrogance,” “extravagance,”
and “indolence.” Also in July, Hu Yaobang was sent to the Academy
of Sciences to lead the rectification work there. Both Hu and Deng
put much emphasis on science and technology as the leading force
in China’s quest for modernization, and they both called for respect
and reward for intellectual and professional work, which had been
OVERALL RECTIFICATION ° 211
denied since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. With Deng’s
support, Zhou Rongxin, minister of education, spoke out about the
serious problems in education caused by the Cultural Revolution. In
the sensitive area of culture, literature, and the arts, Deng used Mao’s
slogan “let a hundred flowers bloom” and pushed for the release of
certain new and classic works that had been condemned by the Jiang
Qing group. Finally, on the party organization and personnel front,
the major tasks of the rectification included the enforcement of tough
measures against the lingering factionalism (paixing) and the demo-
tion or dismissal of incompetent officials who had enjoyed a meteoric
rise on political capital during the Cultural Revolution. Largely due
to the overall rectification program, China’s economy succeeded in
1975: gross national output increased by 11.9% in 1975, compared
to 1.4% in 1974. And with this program Deng won broad support
across the country.
Much resistance and opposition to Deng’s program came from
the ultraleftist faction of the central leadership. In spring 1975, Jiang
Qing, Zhang Chungiao, and Yao Wenyuan insisted that empiricism
was the main danger at present, referring to Zhou Enlai and Deng
Xiaoping’s pragmatic approach to economy. But Mao dismissed
the idea and allowed the rectification to continue. However, Deng’s
aggressive measures made Mao question his stand concerning the
Cultural Revolution. When Mao Yuanxin, Mao Zedong’s nephew
and Jiang Qing’s close associate, became the Chairman’s liaison at
the Politburo in October 1975, the increasingly isolated Mao became
more skeptical of Deng’s rectification program. Knowing the discon-
tent within the party leadership about the Cultural Revolution, Mao
hoped that the Politburo members could reach a consensus, and he
proposed that Deng be in charge of drafting a resolution concerning
the Cultural Revolution. Mao wanted the overall appraisal to be “30
percent error and 70 percent achievement.’ Deng refused, saying
that he was away from the scene of revolution most of the time. At a
Politburo meeting, Deng also refuted Mao Yuanxin’s alleged words
to Mao Zedong that a revisionist line had emerged in the central
leadership of the party. In late November, Mao Zedong finally issued
instructions that a campaign to fight the trend of the “right-deviationist
reversal of verdicts” begin across the country. Deng Xiaoping thus
became a representative of the right deviation, and his overall rectifi-
cation came to a halt.
212 © PAN FUSHENG
_Pp-
PAN FUSHENG (1908-1980). One of the few provincial party leaders
who supported rebels in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution,
Pan became head of the Heilongjiang Provincial Revolutionary
Committee in 1967 and a member of the Central Committee (CC) at
the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in 1969 but was eventually
dismissed from office for his involvement in factional violence and the
persecution of his political rivals in Heilongjiang.
A native of Wendeng, Shandong Province, Pan joined the CCP in
1931. In the 1950s, Pan was labeled a conservative in a number of
political campaigns, including the agricultural collectivization move-
ment and the Anti-Rightist campaign. Because of his sympathy for
Peng Dehuai’s view on the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, Pan
was branded a Right-opportunist and dismissed from office in the
late 1950s. But he was exonerated and rehabilitated by the central
leadership in 1963. When the Cultural Revolution began, Pan was first
party secretary of Heilongjiang Province. After the Eleventh Plenum
of the CCP Eighth Central Committee, which he attended as an
alternate member of the CC, Pan supported rebel Red Guards in their
bombarding of the Heilongjiang party committee. In January 1967,
he and army leaders of the Heilongjiang Provincial Military District
supported the rebels in their power seizure movement, and together,
they established a temporary institution which was regarded by Mao
Zedong as a model of the “three-in-one presence of cadre, military,
and masses” in a new power structure. In March 1967, Pan was named
head of the Heilongjiang Provincial Revolutionary Committee. He
was granted full membership of the CC at the Twelfth Plenum of the
CCP Eighth Central Committee (13-31 October 1968).
Shortly after the establishment of the provincial revolutionary com-
mittee, however, mass organizations in Heilongjiang were divided
into two factions, and one faction opposed Pan and attempted to
bring him down from power. Pan, then, began to be involved in fac-
tional violence, supporting those loyal to him against his opponents
in massive armed confrontations. He put in prison a number of party
officials and ordinary citizens of the rival camp. He also had serious
conflicts with local army leaders. So great was his involvement in
factional conflicts that, in June 1971, the central leadership in Beijing
decided to remove him from power and subject him to an investiga-
PEKING UNIVERSITY CULTURAL REVOLUTION BULLETIN NO. 9 ® 213
tion. In 1980, Pan died of illness. In 1982, the CC issued a document
criticizing Pan Fusheng for the serious mistakes he made during the
Cultural Revolution.
PEAK THEORY (dingfenglun). This was a reference to the much
publicized assertion of Lin Biao that Mao Zedong Thought was
the peak of Marxism-Leninism. See also CONTINUING REVOLU-
TION UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT;
LIN BIAO-MAY 18 SPEECH; PERSONALITY CULT.
PEKING UNIVERSITY AND TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY GREAT
CRITICISM GROUP. Formed in March 1974, this was a writing
team in the service of the Cultural Revolution faction of the central
leadership. The team was controlled by Chi Qun and Xie Jingyi,
who were sent by Mao Zedong to Tsinghua University as members
of the PLA propaganda team and the workers propaganda team
in 1968 and later became party secretary and deputy party secretary
of Tsinghua University. By the time the writing team was organized,
Chi and Xie had already been known as the “two soldiers” of Mao
and become such close associates of Jiang Qing that Jiang was able
to direct every move of the writing team through Chi and Xie.
Along with the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee Writing
Group, its counterpart in China’s most populous city, the writ-
ing team of Peking University and Tsinghua University produced
many articles to promote the interests of the Jiang Qing group and
to attack—mostly by innuendo and by allusion—the leaders of the
moderate faction, especially Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. Pub-
lished mostly in top official organs such as the People’s Daily and
the Red Flag under the penname Liang Xiao and reprinted immedi-
ately by many provincial and local newspapers across China, these
articles were often viewed as indicating the new moves of the CCP
central leadership. The team was disbanded soon after the downfall
of the Gang of Four. See also ALLUSORY HISTORIOGRAPHY;
CONFUCIANISM VERSUS LEGALISM; CRITICIZE LIN AND
CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS.
PEKING UNIVERSITY CULTURAL REVOLUTION BULLETIN
NO. 9. This was a brief report by the Peking University work group
on an eruption of violence and brutality on the university campus on
214 © PENG DEHUAI
the morning of 18 June 1966. On 20 June, the CCP Central Commit-
tee (CC) distributed the bulletin to party organizations at all levels
nationwide in hopes of preventing similar violence elsewhere.
As Mao Zedong’s radical policies of class struggle on a massive
scale were being articulated and advocated in such militant pieces
as the People’s Daily editorial “Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and
Snake-Spirits” (1 June 1966), several hundred Peking University
students deliberately ignored the authority of the work group and held
physically abusive struggle meetings against more than 40 so-called
black gang members (officials allegedly associated with the Beijing
party committee under Peng Zhen), “bourgeois academic authorities”
(accomplished scholars), and “reactionary students.” According to the
bulletin report, some “bad people,” including students, workers, and
a number of people off campus, conspired in tormenting people on a
“platform for fighting demons,” and similar incidents happened across
campus in which the so-called class enemies were smeared on the face
with black ink and were paraded through the streets wearing tall paper
hats; some female “targets of struggle” were sexually harassed. The
Peking University work group called this incident one of “disordered
struggle” and was highly critical of it in its bulletin report. President
Liu Shaoqi, who was in charge of the daily affairs of the CC at the
time during Mao’s absence, concurred with the work group’s view
upon reading the report and decided to distribute the report and a brief
supporting comment together in the form of a CC circular.
In early August, however, Mao commented harshly on the bulletin
and on Liu’s view of it and labeled Liu’s move as repression and
bourgeois dictatorship. Following Mao’s instructions, the CC issued
a notice on 9 August 1966 to withdraw the 20 June circular. This con-
flict between Mao and Liu concerning the Peking University incident
anticipated the movement against the bourgeois reactionary line,
which would lead to the downfall of Liu Shaoqi.
PENG DEHUAI (1898-1974). An outspoken senior leader of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA), Peng was dismissed from office in 1959 for his criticism of
Mao Zedong’s radical Great Leap Forward policies. To launch and
justify the Cultural Revolution, Mao brought up the Peng Dehuai
case again in late 1965 in connection with Wu Han’s historical play
Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.
PENG DEHUAI @ 215
A native of Xiangtan, Hunan Province, Peng was a veteran of the
Northern Expedition. He joined the CCP in 1928. In the same year, he
led the Pingjiang Uprising and became one of the founders of the Red
Army. He served as commander of the Fifth Corps of the Red Army
in the 1930s, deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army in the war
of resistance against Japan, and deputy commander of the PLA during
the civil war of the second half of the 1940s. In 1950, after certain ini-
tial reluctance, Peng accepted the appointment as commander of the
Chinese army during the Korean War. A strong advocate for building a
professional army, Peng was made the PRC’s first minister of defense
in 1954 and one of 10 marshals in 1955—he ranked second next to
Marshal Zhu De. As a senior party and government leader, Peng was
a member of the Politburo from 1935 and a vice-premier from 1954.
On 14 July 1959, at the CCP Central Committee’s Lushan Confer-
ence, Peng wrote Mao a candid personal letter to call his attention to
the serious problems in the CCP’s Great Leap Forward and People’s
Commune policies. Mao considered the letter to be an offense against
the CCP leadership and passed it to those attending the conference
as a target for criticism. On 16 August, the Central Committee (CC)
passed a resolution denouncing Peng and a few other officials as
a “right-opportunist antiparty clique.’ Peng was soon dismissed as
minister of defense and moved out of Zhongnanhai. In 1962, after
the disaster caused by the Great Leap policies became clear—with
20 million peasants having died of famine—President Liu Shaoqi
suggested that the verdict on Marshal Peng Dehuai be reconsidered,
but the suggestion was dismissed by Mao. Peng wrote Mao another
letter, of 80,000 words, to clarify himself, only to find himself in a
more difficult situation: he was stripped of all official titles, and a
special case committee was formed to investigate him further.
In September 1965, however, Mao made a surprise decision to
send Peng to Sichuan Province as deputy director of the “third front”
construction project as part of war preparations. But just before his
departure from Beijing, Yao Wenyuan’s article “On the Historical
Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” was published in Shanghai
with Mao’s approval. The article, with implicit references to the Peng
Dehuai case, was to become known as the “blasting fuse” of the Cul-
tural Revolution. On 21 December 1965, soon after Peng’s arrival in
Sichuan, Mao made a devastating remark concerning Peng Dehuai.
Yao Wenyuan’s article was good, Mao said, but it did not quite hit
216 © PENG DEHUAI
the vital part: “The vital point is dismissal. Emperor Jiajing dismissed
Hai Rui. We, in 1959, dismissed Peng Dehuai. Peng Dehuai is also
Hai Rui.”
As soon as the Cultural Revolution broke out, the Central Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group began to seek a way to get Peng back
to Beijing as a target of public criticism. Following Jiang Qing and
Qi Benyu’s instructions, two Red Guard organizations—the Red
Flag Combat Team of the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and the
East-is-Red Commune of the Beijing Institute of Geology—sent their
members to Sichuan to kidnap Peng Dehuai. They brought Peng back
to Beijing on 28 December 1966. Peng lost his freedom, but the Bei-
jing Garrison Command acted upon instructions from Premier Zhou
Enlai and put Peng in confinement, which sheltered him temporarily
from the Red Guards’ abuse.
In July 1967, however, Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, and Qi Benyu
called upon the Peng special-case investigation group and college
rebels to get Peng out of the Garrison Command and struggle against
him at mass rallies. Several struggle meetings, then, were held by
Red Guards, at which Peng was so brutally beaten by the crowd that,
with ribs broken, he had to be carried back to the Garrison quarters
after these meetings. Peng was also placed on a truck, bareheaded and
with a heavy placard hanging from his neck, and paraded through the
streets of Beijing. Struggle meetings against Peng were held much
more frequently in August and September by various schools and work
units—more than a hundred times within the two-month period.
In the meantime, major CCP organs the People’s Daily, the Red
Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily carried five editorials in July
and August 1967, denouncing Peng as the military representative of
the biggest capitalist-roader within the Party and turning him into
a main target of the CCP firepower. On 17 September 1970, Huang
Yongsheng, chief of the general staff of the PLA and Lin Biao’s
close associate, approved a report by the Peng special-case group
that charges Peng with the crimes of opposing the party and having
illicit relations with foreign powers and calls for his expulsion from
the CCP and a sentence of life imprisonment. In April 1974, Peng
was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. On 29 November 1974,
he died in a small, heavily guarded jail-like ward with newspaper-
covered windows. His body was secretly transported to Sichuan and
cremated under the false name Wang Chuan.
PENG-LUO-LU-YANG ANTI-PARTY CLIQUE ® 217
The CCP Eleventh CC rehabilitated Marshal Peng Dehuai at its
third plenum in December 1978 and held a memorial service for him
on 24 December 1978.
PENG-LUO-LU-YANG ANTI-PARTY CLIQUE. This was the charge
brought against Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi, and Yang
Shangkun at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4-26 May 1966.
The denunciation of the four ranking party leaders was celebrated
at the time as the first major victory of Mao Zedong’s proletarian
revolutionary line over a bourgeois revisionist one in the course of
the Cultural Revolution.
There was, however, no evidence of the four conspiring against the
Party. Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing and director of the Five-Person
Cultural Revolution Small Group, was denounced because of his
resistance to the campaign against Wu Han in late 1965 and because
of his involvement in the making of the 1966 February Outline
that defines the campaign as an “academic discussion.” His apparent
reservations about what would soon be known as the “blasting fuse”
of the Cultural Revolution prompted Mao’s remark that the Beijing
party committee led by Peng was an “impenetrable and watertight
independent kingdom.” At an enlarged meeting of the Politburo
Standing Committee held in Shanghai in April 1966, Peng Zhen was
suspended from his duties as mayor of Beijing. At the Politburo’s
May meeting, the February Outline was delegitimized, the Five-
Person Cultural Revolution Small Group dismissed, and Peng Zhen
branded as the leader of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique.
The downfall of General Luo Ruiqing, chief of general staff of the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA), had mainly to do with power con-
flicts and political differences between himself and Marshal Lin Biao,
minister of defense. Due to Lin’s poor health, Luo conducted many
PLA affairs. In 1964, with the authorization of Mao and the Central
Military Commission, Luo led an armywide “dabiwu,’ a mass exer-
cise competition that focuses on combat skills. Lin made Mao believe
that this exercise was meant to counter Lin’s principle of “emphatic
politics” and challenge Mao’s ideological line. Luo was also known
for contradicting Lin’s “peak theory” that claims Mao Zedong
Thought to be “the highest and the most flexible Marxism-Leninism.”
Luo’s view of the “peak theory” as in itself a negation of Mao Zedong
Thought was interpreted in a party document as evidence of Luo’s
218 © PENG PEIYUN
extreme hostility to Mao Zedong Thought. Luo was already dismissed
from office and criticized at two high-level party meetings before he
was named as part of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Clique in May 1966.
Lu Dingyi, head of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central
Committee (CC), showed little interest in the Lin Biao-style promo-
tion of political and ideological work and opposed “simplifying,
vulgarizing, and making pragmatic” Mao Zedong Thought. He was
also resistant to the first wave of political criticism in academic fields
beginning in late 1965. He did not consent to the publication of some
militant articles. Mao was critical. He called the Propaganda Depart-
ment the “palace of the King of Hell” (yanwangdian), and Lu was
condemned by analogy as the King himself. Lu was also suspected of
conspiring with his wife Yan Weibing against Lin Biao and his wife Ye
Qun, since Yan had been sending letters under pseudonyms to the CC
exposing Ye Qun mostly on personal matters and the character issue.
Yan Weibing was arrested in April 1966. Lu Dingyi was condemned
as a member of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Clique a month later.
Yang Shangkun was dismissed as director of the General Office of
the CC in November 1965 on a charge of breaching security proto-
cols in such activities as taping Mao’s conversations.
There was no evidence that these ranking leaders were against the
party. Their “cases” were not related to one another, either. But, with
Mao’s support, Kang Sheng, Zhang Chungqiao, and Chen Boda
delivered tone-setting speeches at the Politburo’s enlarged meeting in
May 1966 incriminating the four, while the Lin Biao May 18 speech
(also known as the “scripture of coup d'état”) targeted the four as a
group conspiring to stage a coup and to restore capitalism. The Peng-
Luo-Lu-Yang case was used as evidence to support Mao’s view that
there was a bourgeois revisionist line within the party represented by
capitalist-roaders; a cultural revolution was therefore necessary. The
dismissal of Peng, Luo, Lu, Yang, and the Peng-led Five-Person Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group prepared the way for the rapid ascent of
Lin Biao to the second leadership position and of Kang Sheng, Jiang
Qing, Chen Boda, and Zhang Chunqiao as part of the newly formed
powerful Central Cultural Revolution Small Group.
PENG PETYUN (1929- ). Deputy party secretary of Peking University
and one of the three people under attack in what Mao Zedong called the
first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster by Nie Yuanzi and her
PENG ZHEN ® 219
colleagues, Peng was an early victim of the Cultural Revolution. Born
in Liuyang, Hunan Province, Peng was one of the many left-leaning
students drawn to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the war
of resistance against Japan and the civil war that followed. Peng joined
the CCP in 1946 while she was a student at Southwest Union Univer-
sity carrying out underground activities on college campuses against
the Kuomintang government. After 1949, she held office related to
higher education at both Tsinghua University and the CCP Beijing
Municipal Committee. In 1964, during the Socialist Education Move-
ment, when Peking University President Lu Ping and his school party
committee were under attack by the socialist education work team and
by a number of philosophy department faculty including Nie Yuanzi,
the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee led by Peng Zhen stepped in to
support Lu Ping and to put down Nie and her colleagues; to reinforce
Lu’s power, the municipal committee appointed Peng Peiyun deputy
party secretary of Peking University as Lu’s main assistant.
Largely because of Peng Peiyun’s involvement in this political con-
flict on the campus of Peking University, Nie and her six colleagues
made her one of the targets of criticism in the big-character poster
“What are Song Shuo, Lu Ping, and Peng Peiyun Really Doing in the
Cultural Revolution,” which was posted on 25 May 1966. This poster
accuses Peng, Song, and Lu of conspiring with the Beijing munici-
pal committee to suppress the revolutionary masses and mislead the
ongoing Cultural Revolution. On 2 June 1966, a People’s Daily com-
mentary further accuses her of being a member of the Three-Family
Village Anti-Party Clique. On 3 June, the newly organized CCP Bei-
jing Municipal Committee announced a decision to remove Peng Pei-
yun from office. Peng, then, became a main target of endless struggle
meetings. She was also forced to do manual labor to reform herself.
Peng was reassigned work at Peking University in 1975. After
the Cultural Revolution, she was rehabilitated and assumed various
important positions in education institutions and other government
agencies, including deputy minister of education in 1982. As a promi-
nent female politician in her late years, Peng became a member of the
CCP’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Central Committee and was elected
vice-chairman of the Ninth National People’s Congress.
PENG ZHEN (1902-1997). Mayor and first party secretary of Beijing,
a member of the Politburo, and head of the Five-Person Cultural
220 © PENG ZHEN
Revolution Small Group, Peng was among the first few ranking
CCP leaders to fall at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He
was criticized for misleading the Cultural Revolution (in its develop-
ing early stage) with a revisionist February Outline. Mao Zedong
particularly accused him of turning Beijing municipal government
into an “impenetrable and watertight independent kingdom” and
attempting to keep out the Cultural Revolution in the city he ruled.
A native of Quwo, Shanxi Province, Peng joined the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) in 1923 and soon became a CCP under-
ground leader in north China. In 1929, Peng was arrested in Tianjin
by the Nationalist government. After his release in 1935, Peng
was appointed party secretary of Tianjin and director of the CCP
North China Bureau’s organization department, working under Liu
Shaoqi, the head of the Bureau. He was one of the first CCP lead-
ers to call for the “sinicizing” of Marxism. In the 1940s, Peng was
assigned positions in the central leadership in Yan’ an. He was named
director of the CCP Department of City Work in 1944 and head of
the CCP Department of Organization in 1945. He became a member
of the Politburo in 1945. After the communists took over Beijing,
Peng led the municipal government of the nation’s capital—as both
first party secretary (1948-1966) and mayor (1951-1966).
In July 1964, a Five-Person Group (to be known later as the “Five-
Person Cultural Revolution Small Group”) was established at Mao
Zedong’s suggestion to lead a rectification movement in art and
literature circles. As a ranking leader with a certain theoretical edge,
Peng was named head of the group. But due to Peng’s resistance to
the emerging ultraleftist forces in cultural circles, they, especially
Jiang Qing, had to plan what would come to be known as the “blast-
ing fuse” of the Cultural Revolution outside Beijing.
After much planning and work by Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao,
and Yao Wenyuan in Shanghai, Wenhui Daily, a Shanghai news-
paper, finally published Yao Wenyuan’s article “On the New Histori-
cal Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’ on 10 November 1965
with Mao’s approval. Wu Han, the author of the historical play, was
a renowned historian and also a deputy mayor of Beijing with whom
Peng Zhen sympathized. Peng also did not approve of Yao’s politi-
cizing what he believed to be an academic issue. Without knowing
Mao’s support for Yao, Peng ordered Beijing’s newspapers not to
reprint Yao’s article and did not change his mind until 29 November
PERSONALITY CULT @ 221
after Zhou Enlai’s intervention. In February 1966, as the criticism
of Wu Han and a few other “academic authorities” continued, the
Five-Person Group produced a policy guide to keep the criticism of
Wu Han and others from getting too political. This document, soon to
be known as the “February Outline,” was disseminated nationwide.
Peng’s action was perceived by Mao as a direct challenge to his devel-
oping Cultural Revolution program. In late March, Mao criticized the
February Outline, the Beijing party committee, and the Five-Person
Group on several occasions.
This led directly to Peng’s downfall; even his effort to conduct
a campaign in the municipal media against Deng Tuo, culture and
education secretary of the Beijing party committee and a victim
of the Cultural Revolution at its preparation stage, could not save
him. From 16 to 26 April, Mao chaired an enlarged meeting of the
Standing Committee of the Politburo. At the meeting Peng Zhen was
charged with anti-Party crimes, and decisions were made to abrogate
the February Outline and replace the Five-Person Group with a new
group which would soon be named Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group. On 1 May, Peng Zhen made no public appearance
at the International Labor Day celebration. He was denounced as
a member of the Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique and was
removed from all his positions at the enlarged Politburo sessions,
4-26 May 1966. Soon Peng lost his freedom. During the high tide
of the Cultural Revolution in late 1966 and 1967, Peng was forced to
attend struggle meetings and was subjected to much humiliation and
physical abuse at the hands of the masses.
In February 1979, the post-Mao CCP central leadership reha-
bilitated Peng Zhen. In June of the same year, he was added to the
Standing Committee of the Fifth National People’s Congress as a vice-
chairman, and in September he became a member of the CCP Polit-
buro. In 1983, he was elected chairman of the Standing Committee of
the Sixth National People’s Congress. Peng died on 26 April 1997.
PERSONALITY CULT. Promoted by Lin Biao with Mao’s acquies-
cence, a personality cult of Chairman Mao Zedong became wide-
spread in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. On the eve of the
Cultural Revolution, Lin spoke of Mao as such a rare genius that it took
the world hundreds of years, and China thousands of years, to produce
one, that every sentence he spoke was truth and worth ten-thousand
222 © PING-PONG DIPLOMACY
sentences in an ordinary discourse. Mao Zedong Thought, in Lin’s
view, was the peak of Marxism-Leninism. Lin’s praise of Mao became
all the more influential after he was elevated to the second highest
position in the CCP leadership as “Chairman Mao’s dearest comrade-
in-arm[s].”
The Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution bore much resem-
blance to the imperial worship of the past: the Chinese prayer “wan-
sui” (literally, “May someone live ten thousand years”) that used to
be reserved for emperors was now the most popular prayer for Mao,
and the masses hailed Mao as the “great savior of the Chinese people”
and the “reddest sun in our heart.” Mao’s statues were erected in pub-
lic squares all over China, Mao’s portraits were enshrined in private
homes, and Mao’s quotations were written on walls everywhere,
usually in gold against a red background. Such religious rituals as
the “morning request, evening report” and the “daily reading [of
Mao’s works]” were widely practiced. Many quotations of Mao were
set to music and chanted at public meetings. In summer and autumn
of 1966, tens of millions of Red Guards went on a pilgrimage to
see the supreme leader in Beijing, and Mao granted their wishes by
holding eight inspections of Red Guard troops between August and
November 1966. In 1970, Mao himself began to voice reservations
about the cult of the personality. But, at the same time, he defended
the practice as a strategy necessary in his battle against President Liu
Shaoqi and the party establishment. The fervor of the Mao cult gradu-
ally receded after the downfall of Lin Biao in 1971. See also BADGES
OF CHAIRMAN MAO; FOUR GREATS; LIN BIAO-MAY 18
SPEECH; LOYALTY DANCE; QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN
MAO; THREE LOYALTIES AND FOUR LIMITLESSNESSES.
PING-PONG DIPLOMACY (1971). The decision Mao Zedong made
upon careful deliberation to invite the United States ping-pong team to
visit China was the major diplomatic move of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) toward normalizing United States-China relations. In
late March and early April 1971, the 31st Table Tennis World Cham-
pionship Game was held in Nagoya, Japan—the first international
sports event in which a Chinese team participated since the beginning
of the Cultural Revolution. Considering the game to be an occasion for
promoting China’s relations with the outside world and thinking of the
strategy of “people diplomacy” that he had been exercising in China’s
PING-PONG DIPLOMACY ® 223
contact with Japan, Premier Zhou Enlai set up a principle called
“friendship first, competition second” for the Chinese ping-pong team.
On 11 March, at a meeting with officials from the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and the National Sports Commission, Zhou anticipated the
Chinese team’s contact with the U.S. team and contemplated the pos-
sibility of mutual visits. “If the U.S. team is progressive,” Zhou said,
“we may invite them to come here and compete. If we can compete
with the U.S. team, then the non-contact no longer makes sense.”
During the game, the Chinese ping-pong team invited teams from
a number of countries to visit China after the competition but had
to report to Beijing and request instructions when the U.S. team
expressed its wish to receive such an invitation. On 3 April, a deci-
sion was made in Beijing by the National Sports Commission and
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to invite the U.S. team, and the
draft of the decision was presented to Zhou Enlai for approval. Zhou
wrote “Considering approval” but also penned on the margin, “[You]
may take their address but should indicate clearly to their principal
representative that the Chinese people are opposed to the conspiracy
of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China and one Taiwan.” On 5 April, Mao
approved the decision. On 6 April, an internal Chinese publication
carried reports of foreign news agencies about the friendship between
Chinese and American ping-pong players. Late in the evening, Zhou
informed Mao that in mid-March the U.S. government lifted all
restrictions on travel to the PRC and that there were different views at
the National Sports Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
on whether to invite the U.S. ping-pong team. On the early morning
of 7 April, Mao reversed the earlier decision and decided to issue an
invitation to the U.S. delegation right away.
The U.S. ping-pong team’s 8-day visit started on 10 April. Zhou
Enlai gave much personal attention to the delegation’s itinerary. He
received all of its members in the Great Hall of the People and gave a
warm speech on 14 April. With his authorization, the Forbidden City,
which had been closed since the beginning of the Cultural Revolu-
tion, was open for visitors on 14 April. Also on 14 April, the Richard
Nixon administration lifted trade sanctions against China. The visit
of the U.S. ping-pong team, the first U.S. delegation to come to
China since the founding of the PRC in 1949, marked the beginning
of the end of decades of hostility between the two countries. See also
UNITED STATES-CHINA RELATIONS.
224 © PIONEERS
PIONEERS (chuangye). Based on a script by Zhang Tianmin and pro-
duced by Changchun Film Studio in early 1975, this film celebrates
the hard work and self-reliance of Chinese workers in their effort
to tap the nation’s oil resources. The protagonist Zhou Tingshan is
modeled on Wang Jinxi, the best known hero in China’s oil industry.
Because of its attention to work and production—more than just
words and revolutionary rhetoric characteristic of the literary and
artistic models of the time—the film was perceived as a challenge to
the Cultural Revolution faction of the central leadership. Jiang Qing
placed the film under restrictions soon after its official release on the
day of Spring Festival (11 February) in 1975 that coincided with the
beginning of the overall rectification movement set in motion by
Deng Xiaoping. She and her supporters at the Ministry of Culture
listed 10 counts of the film’s “serious political and artistic problems”
and held a struggle session against Zhang Tianmin. Refusing to
accept Jiang’s judgment as final, Zhang wrote Mao Zedong on 18
July 1975, asking for a reevaluation. Via Deng Xiaoping, Zhang’s
letter reached Mao. In a brief comment he wrote on 25 July, Mao
defends the film as “having no great errors.” The re-release of the film
that immediately followed Mao’s recommendation was celebrated
nationwide. Pioneers became one of the few genuinely popular films
produced during the Cultural Revolution.
PLA PROPAGANDA TEAM (junxuandui). This was a short form
for the “People’s Liberation Army Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda
Team” (jiefangjun Mao Zedong sixiang xuanchuan dui). As part of
Mao Zedong’s effort to restore order—and, in some cases, to end
factional violence immediately—in the country, the teams consisting
of army officers and soldiers began to be dispatched in summer 1968
to the schools, research institutions, and some government agencies
plagued with factional conflicts. The first PLA propaganda team was
sent to Tsinghua University in Beijing on 27 July, together with a
workers propaganda team, to stop a prolonged bloody clash between
two rival Red Guard organizations there. As in the case of Tsinghua,
a PLA propaganda team was often joined by a workers propaganda
team when it was dispatched to a certain institution, and PLA officers
usually held leading positions of the combined group.
The propaganda teams were instrumental in taking control of
widespread anarchy and helping to establish new authorities. But
POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4-7 APRIL 1976 @ 225
they were much less effective in governing the institutions not just
because of their characteristic adherence to a line of political pro-
paganda but also because of their lack of necessary knowledge and
experience in managing cultural, educational, academic, and govern-
ment affairs. In August 1972, about a year after the downfall of Mar-
shal Lin Biao, the CCP Central Committee issued an order to pull out
PLA propaganda teams from the institutions where the party authori-
ties had been reestablished. Before long, all PLA propaganda teams
withdrew, while workers propaganda teams, already diminished and
still diminishing, stayed on until a year after the Cultural Revolution
was over. See also WORKERS PROPAGANDA TEAM.
POISONOUS WEED (ducao). This is the label for any writing or art
deemed antiparty, antisocialist, and nonproletarian. During the Cul-
tural Revolution, almost all artistic and scholarly works of the past,
Chinese or foreign, were dismissed as “poisonous weeds.” Numerous
campaigns, large and small, were launched to criticize these works. It
was an important part of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution program
to involve the masses in such campaigns so that they might become
sensitive to anything that might have deviated from Mao’s radical
ideology.
POLITBURO SESSIONS, 4-7 APRIL 1976. The Politburo held
emergency sessions daily between 4 April and 7 April in the face
of a sudden explosion of public rage against the ultra-leftist faction
of the party led by Jiang Qing—a spontaneous mass demonstration
that took the form of public mourning during the traditional Qing-
ming Festival season in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in memory of
the late Premier Zhou Enlai. Hua Guofeng chaired these sessions,
while Mao Zedong, sick and bedridden, controlled the sessions by
communicating his instructions to the Politburo via his liaison Mao
Yuanxin. A number of Politburo members, including Deng Xiao-
ping, Ye Jianying, Li Xiannian, and Su Zhenhua, were absent from
some of the sessions. Deng attended the 5 April session but remained
silent while Zhang Chungqiao was attacking him as China’s Imre
Nagy (leader of Hungary’s democracy movement of 1956). At the
session on 7 April, the Politburo passed two resolutions proposed
by Mao Zedong: that Deng Xiaoping be dismissed from office in
both the party and the government, although he could keep his party
226 ® POOR PEASANTS MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE
membership, and that Hua Guofeng be appointed first vice-chairman
of the CCP Central Committee and premier of the State Council. In
the resolution dismissing Deng, the protest movement at Tiananmen
Square was labeled a “counterrevolutionary incident.”
POOR PEASANTS MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE (pinguanhui).
This was a short form for the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants
School Management Committee (pinxiazhongnong guanli xuexiao
weiyuanhui). Comparable to the workers propaganda teams sent
to educational institutions in the cities, the poor peasant management
committees were established to lead elementary and middle schools
in the countryside. Their establishment was based on Mao Zedong’s
judgment that the country’s education system had been controlled by
bourgeois intellectuals. School management committees were formed
across China after Mao’s directive concerning school leadership was
publicized in Yao Wenyuan’s article “On the Supreme Leadership
of the Working Class” that appeared in the CCP official journal Red
Flag on 25 August 1968.
In Mao’s view, education reform must be led by the working class;
in the cities, this leadership was represented by the workers propa-
ganda teams in all educational institutions, while in the countryside,
“poor and lower-middle peasants, the most reliable ally of the work-
ing class, shall manage schools.” School management committees
were made of local farmers in poor and lower-middle peasant fami-
lies. Some committees also included a few teacher representatives.
Most peasant members had little education. Many were illiterate.
Although the committee was supposed to replace the school principal
and serve as the ultimate decision-making body for all school affairs,
it seldom assumed this charge effectively. In the later years of the
Cultural Revolution, many committees existed merely in name. After
the Cultural Revolution ended, all school management committees in
the countryside were dissolved.
POWER SEIZURE (duoquan). This term refers to the activity of
mass organizations to take control of the state and party apparatus at
various levels, including those of provincial government and minis-
tries of the central government. The power seizure movement started
in a few provinces in early 1967 and quickly spread out to other parts
of the country. See also JANUARY STORM.
“PROVINCIAL PROLETARIAN ALLIANCE” ® 227
PROFESSOR EXAMINATION INCIDENT (kaojiaoshou shijian)
(1973-1974). In the midst of controversy over the legitimacy of col-
lege entrance examinations, the testing of college professors on such
general subjects as mathematics and science took place first in Liao-
ning and then in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and some other places in
late 1973 and early 1974. Similar to the Zhang Tiesheng Incident, in
which an applicant who wrote an essay pleading his case rather than
answering questions at a college entrance examination was hailed as
a hero daring to “go against the tide,” the testing of professors for
the purpose of humiliation was a reaction of cultural revolutionaries
to the proposal made by the State Council’s Science and Education
Group in April 1973 that college applicants’ examination scores be
taken seriously in the admission process. The proposal, along with
the positive response from the educational circles, was seen by Jiang
Qing and her supporters as a clear indication of a “resurgence of the
revisionist line in education.” At a reception for Politburo members
and military leaders on 12 December 1973, Mao Zedong also spoke
of Zhang Tiesheng with approval and went on to suggest that profes-
sors at “eight colleges” in Beijing be gathered and given a test.
On the evening of 30 December 1973, 631 college professors in
Beijing were told that they were invited to symposiums, only to find
themselves at 17 different examination sites. They were forced to
solve problems in areas that had nothing to do with their expertise.
Some professors protested by refusing to take the test or by writing
critical comments on the prevailing anti-intellectual trend. This event,
as well as similar examinations held in other places, was publicized
in symposiums, bulletins, and publications in education circles, in
which the predictably low scores of the unexpected tests were used
both to humiliate the professors and to trivialize testing in general.
PROVINCIAL PROLETARIAN ALLIANCE (shengwulian). This
is the abbreviated name for the Committee for the Great Alliance of
the Proletarian Revolutionaries of Hunan Province. The “Provincial
Proletarian Alliance” was formed by some 20 mass groups on 11
October 1967, against the competing Preparation Group of Hunan
Revolutionary Committee appointed by the leadership in Beijing.
Although it was a “hodgepodge” of diverse groups, as Mao Zedong
and other CCP leaders called it, the organization became well-known
across China due to the publicity of some radical ideas articulated by
228 © QIBENYU
one group. This was a group of middle school students led by Yang
Xiguang, a self-labeled ultraleftist, who, in a long article entitled
“Where Is China Going,” further radicalizes what he believed to be
Mao’s original conception of the Cultural Revolution and calls for
the total destruction of the party and state apparatus and the complete
eradication of what he saw as a new “red capitalist class” made of
90% of senior CCP officials. Yang also sees as the goal of the Cul-
tural Revolution the establishment of a “Chinese people’s commune”
under Mao, a mass dictatorship modeled on the Paris Commune of
1871. On 24 January 1968, Zhou Enlai and members of the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group received the representatives
of mass organizations from Hunan and denounced the “Provincial
Proletarian Alliance” as a reactionary organization. At the reception,
Kang Sheng gave a point-by-point critique of Yang’s article, which
Kang considered to be the political program of the organization. See
also NEW TREND OF IDEAS.
-Q-
QI BENYU (1931- ). One of Mao Zedong’s radical theorists, head of
the history group at the CCP official organ Red Flag, deputy director
of the Secretarial Bureau of the CCP General Office, and a member
of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), Qi was
removed from power in January 1968 as a member of the Wang-Guan-
Qi Anti-Party Clique.
A native of Weihai, Shandong Province, Qi joined the CCP in the
early 1950s while a student at the Central School of the Chinese Com-
munist Youth League. Upon graduation, Qi was assigned work at the
CCP General Office as an assistant to Tian Jiaying, Mao Zedong’s
secretary and deputy director of the General Office. In 1963, his article
on Li Xiucheng, a leader of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom peasant
uprising, challenging the historian Luo Ergang’s authority on the sub-
ject, won the applause of Mao, which led to his appointment on the
editorial board of the Red Flag; he later became head of the journal’s
history group.
Following the publication of Yao Wenyuan’s critique of Wu Han’s
historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, Qi put out “Study
History for the Revolution” in a December 1965 issue of the Red
QIBENYU @ 229
Flag, in which he attacks a number of historians including Wu Han
and Jian Bozan. Mao responded positively to the article but thought
that it would have been even better had Qi named these scholars. With
Mao’s encouragement, Qi coauthored an essay criticizing Jian Bozan
and wrote a piece by himself attacking Wu Han, both published in the
People’s Daily (on 25 March 1966 and 2 April 1966, respectively).
These articles established his name as a radical theorist and critic. In
May 1966, Qi was appointed a member of the CCRSG and began to
play a significant role in bringing down the Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping faction of the central leadership. During the campaign to
criticize the bourgeois reactionary line in late 1966 and early 1967,
Qi and other CCRSG members pushed the rebel movement forward
against the old party establishment.
Of particular importance in his many speeches and writings of
this period was the article “Patriotism or Betrayal? A Critique of the
Reactionary Film Inside Story of the Qing Court,’ published in the
People’s Daily on 30 March 1967. Approved and highly praised by
Mao, this article is a classic example of the Cultural Revolution-style
political insinuation and slander; it aimed beyond the film at President
Liu Shaoqi and referred to him for the first time in official media as
the “biggest capitalist-roader within the party” and as “China’s
Khrushchev” without ever mentioning his name. The article stirred
up a new wave in a nationwide campaign against Liu. Qi also engaged
in a number of manipulative actions against Liu and other senior party
leaders: he directed Red Guards to kidnap Marshal Peng Dehuai
and instructed rebels to struggle against Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping,
and Tao Zhu inside and outside Zhongnanhai compound.
Following Mao’s strategic plans and supported by Lin Biao and
Jiang Qing, Qi Benyu, Wang Li, Guan Feng, and some other mem-
bers of the CCRSG began to press the military to adopt Mao’s Cultural
Revolution policies in 1967: in their public speeches and in several
articles they wrote for official media, they called on the masses to “fer-
ret out a small handful [of capitalist-roaders] inside the army,” which
met strong resistance from the rank and file of the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA). They also began to make similar radical moves in the
area of foreign affairs. Weighing revolutionary chaos against stability,
Mao decided to remove Qi and his close comrades in the Cultural
Revolution faction of the central leadership to keep order and to pacify
the protesting PLA officials and senior party leaders. On 13 January
230 © QIAN HAOLIANG
1968, about four and a half months after the dismissal of Wang and
Guan, Qi was detained. On 26 January 1968, Qi’s long imprisonment
began.
On 14 July 1980, the post-Mao authorities officially arrested him
on a counterrevolutionary charge. On 2 November 1983, the Beijing
Intermediate People’s Court named Qi Benyu an accomplice of the
Lin Biao and the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary cliques and sen-
tenced him to 18 years in prison for engaging in counterrevolutionary
propaganda and instigation, bringing false charges against innocent
people, and inciting the masses to violence and destruction (da-za-
qiang). After he served his prison sentence, Qi was assigned work at
the Shanghai City Library. See also WANG-GUAN-QI AFFAIR.
QIAN HAOLIANG (1934- ). Also known as Hao Liang, a name given
by Jiang Qing and adopted by Qian during the Cultural Revolution,
Qian was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, and became a mem-
ber of the CCP in 1959. He was trained as a Peking opera singer from
childhood. In 1963, Qian distinguished himself playing Li Yuhe, the
hero of the revolutionary model opera The Red Lantern and began
to associate himself with Jiang Qing. His portrait as Li Yuhe soon
became a Cultural Revolution icon. In the early stages of the Cultural
Revolution, Qian led a rebel organization and attacked his superiors
and his colleagues. He was made vice-chairman of the revolutionary
committee of the China Peking Opera Troupe in 1967, a member of
the State Council Cultural Group in 1971, and deputy minister of cul-
ture in 1975. In all of these positions, Qian carried out Jiang Qing’s
orders dutifully. He, Yu Huiyong, and Liu Qingtang became the
closest followers and allies of Jiang Qing in cultural and art circles.
In October 1976, when the Gang of Four was purged, Qian was
also detained. For the next 5 years, he was under investigation as
a close associate of the Gang of Four. Expelled from the CCP but
spared criminal prosecution, Qian was released from detention in
1981. He taught Peking opera at the Hebei Academy of Arts and
performed both classical and modern Peking operas in various cities
until retirement.
QINGTONGXIA INCIDENT (28 August 1967). In this deadly
incident, PLA troops attacked civilians during a factional conflict
in Qingtongxia County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. During
QUI HUIZUO œ% 231
the power seizure movement in 1967, mass organizations in Ningxia
were sharply divided into two camps. There was the Preparation
Committee that sided with Zhu Shengda, commander of the Ningxia
Provincial Military District and a close associate of Marshal He Long,
and there was the General Headquarters which a field army unit on a
left-supporting mission endorsed because Kang Sheng, who was at
the time entrusted with the responsibility of resolving the factional
conflict in Ningxia, had dismissed the Preparation Committee faction
as “conservatives.”
In August 1967, the civilians and the peasant militia supporting
the Preparation Committee launched offensives, blocking railways
and highways in the region; armed fighting in Qingtongxia County
was especially heavy. In a speech given on 26 August, Kang Sheng
denounced Zhu Shengda as the leader of a “reactionary line” and
voiced support for an “armed suppression” of the mass organizations
supporting Zhu. With Kang’s consent, the field army unit launched an
attack on 28 August on the Preparation Committee faction in Qing-
tongxia County, killing 101 civilians and wounding 133. On 30 August
1967, the CCP Central Committee (CC) issued a directive in support
of the massacre, denouncing the Preparation Committee offensive in
Qingtongxia as a “counterrevolutionary rebellion.” On 21 January
1979, the CC redressed the case of the Qingtongxia Incident and pro-
nounced the verdict of “counterrevolutionary rebellion” unjust.
QIU HUIZUO (1914-2002). A close associate of Lin Biao and popu-
larly known as one of Lin’s “four guardian warriors,” Qiu Huizuo was
director of the General Logistics Department (GLD) of the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) (1959-1971), deputy chief of general staff
of the PLA, and a member of the Central Military Commission
Administrative Group (1968-1971).
Born in Xingguo, Jiangxi Province, Qiu joined the Red Army in
1929, became a member of the CCP in 1932, and participated in the
Long March in 1934-1935. In the late 1940s, Qiu was a ranking
political officer in Lin Biao’s Fourth Field Army. Qiu was made lieu-
tenant general in 1955 and director of the GLD in 1959.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Qiu, known for his
“wayward” life style, was a popular target of the rebels in the GLD.
In response to his request for help, Lin Biao arranged a dramatic
rescue, moving Qiu from the GLD’s compound to a safe place in
232 © QUEEN OF THE RED CAPITAL
Beijing’s Western Hills in the early hours of 25 January 1967—a
moment of “rebirth” in Qiu’s own words. In May 1967, Lin named
him, along with Li Zuopeng and Wu Faxian, a leader of the “pro-
letarian revolutionaries of the armed forces.” Qiu, in return, helped
Lin fight his political enemies and consolidate power for Lin in the
armed forces. In particular, he lashed out at General Xiao Hua, direc-
tor of the General Political Department of the PLA, and created chaos
in that department. In his own GLD, Qiu authorized the torture and
persecution of 462 people, causing eight deaths. In 1968, Qiu was
appointed deputy chief of general staff of the PLA and member of
the Central Military Commission Administrative Group. At the
Ninth National Congress of CCP (1969) Qiu was elected to the
Central Committee (CC) and the Politburo.
At the Lushan Conference of 1970, the conflict between the Jiang
Qing faction and the Lin Biao faction surfaced. Qiu joined Chen
Boda, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Ye Qun in attacking Zhang
Chungqiao and supporting a proposal not to eliminate the position of
the president of state. Backing Zhang Chunqiao and the Jiang Qing
group, Mao Zedong singled out Chen Boda as the main target of
criticism and also told other supporters of Lin Biao, including Qiu, to
conduct self-criticism.
After the September 13 Incident of 1971, Qiu’s involvement in
Lin Biao’s alleged power-seizing scheme was under investigation.
On 20 August 1973, the CC issued a resolution concerning the “Lin
Biao anti-Party clique.” As a member of the Lin group, Qiu Huizuo
was dismissed from all his official positions and was permanently
expelled from the party. On 25 January 1981, Qiu was sentenced to
16 years in prison for organizing and leading a counterrevolutionary
clique, plotting to subvert the government, and bringing false charges
against innocent people.
QUEEN OF THE RED CAPITAL (hongdu niihuang). A biography
of Jiang Qing published in Hong Kong in the mid-1970s, this book
was for quite some time mistaken for a Chinese translation of Roxane
Witke’s Comrade Chiang Ch’ing. See also COMRADE CHIANG
CH’ING.
QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO. Also known as the “little
red book” (mostly outside China), this collection of 427 quotations of
QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO ® 233
Chairman Mao Zedong in 33 categories, produced in pocket size with
a red plastic cover, was the most printed and the most widely distrib-
uted book during the Cultural Revolution. The Quotations was origi-
nally a product of the political education program Lin Biao initiated
in the early 1960s after he became minister of defense and was put in
charge of the daily work of the Central Military Commission. Advo-
cating the study of Mao’s works as a shortcut to studying Marxism-
Leninism, Lin recommended that soldiers in the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) learn by heart short passages from Mao’s works. Follow-
ing Lin’s instruction, the Liberation Army Daily began in May 1961 to
carry on the front page of each issue a quotation from Mao. In Janu-
ary 1964, the PLA General Political Department put out a collection
based on the Liberation Army Daily selections. A fuller version of 433
entries came out later in the year and was distributed widely in the
PLA. By the time when the second edition consisting of 427 definitive
entries with Lin Biao’s inscription was issued on 1 August 1965, the
Quotations had already been distributed far beyond the PLA.
The image of Lin Biao standing next to Mao and waving a copy
of the Quotations—a picture taken at Mao’s reception for the Red
Guards—fueled the explosive popularity of this book in the early
stages of the Cultural Revolution and contributed much to the hege-
mony of Maoism and the personality cult of the Chairman. The
book was further popularized by its late 1966 reprint that carries a
“Foreword to the Second Edition” which, written in the name of Lin
Biao, hails Mao as “the greatest Marxist-Leninist of our times who,
with genius and creativity, has inherited, defended, and developed
Marxism-Leninism in all areas and brought Marxism-Leninism up
to a brand new stage.” The Foreword also recommends a method of
studying Mao’s words with questions in mind for quick results, like
“raising a pole to see the shadow.” This edition is the most widely
distributed official version—about 740,000,000 copies were printed
between 1966 and 1968, almost one copy per person in the People’s
Republic of China (PRC).
The Quotations, then, became a scripture everyone carried. People
read and recited passages from it during the daily ritual of “morning
request, evening report” and political study hours and waved the
booklet as they cheered or shouted slogans at mass rallies. Popular
quotations were all set to music. They were sung at public events,
broadcast on the radio, and used as accompanying music for the
234 © REBELS
loyalty dance and keep-fit exercises. In 1966, the Quotations was
also beginning to be translated into all major languages and distrib-
uted outside China. It became a bestseller worldwide.
-R-
REBELS (zaofanpai). The term refers to the radical mass faction dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution. The early rebels, later known as Old Red
Guards, were mostly children of ranking officials in middle schools
in Beijing and a few other cities. When the first organization of Red
Guards was established at Tsinghua University Middle School, the
founders were inspired by the words of Chairman Mao Zedong, “To
rebel is justified,” and put out three expositions of a big-character
poster entitled “Long Live the Revolutionary Rebel Spirit of the
Proletariat” in June and July 1966. The authors of the poster claim
that rebellion is the soul of Mao Zedong Thought and that following
Mao’s command, they would turn the old world upside down, smash
it to pieces, and create a proletarian new world. In August 1966, the
CCP theoretical organ Red Flag carried the three-part poster in sup-
port of the rebelling of the Red Guards. “Rebels,” then, became a
popular revolutionary term for enthusiastic youths.
In the name of rebellion, this first group of rebels, the Old Red
Guards, attacked the traditional enemies labeled Black Seven Cat-
egories and launched a culturally devastating battle against the so-
called Four Olds. As the Cultural Revolution continued to unfold,
however, the early rebels soon became conservatives (though they
never called themselves as such) in line with the old power establish-
ment represented by many of their parents, who were now denounced
as capitalist-roaders. The notorious blood lineage theory that some
of them had embraced in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution
also became a target of criticism during the campaign to criticize the
bourgeois reactionary line.
In the meantime, a new mass faction emerged during this campaign.
Many people—especially many students—in this group had been
politically discriminated against due to their non-proletarian family
background. There were also temporary and contract workers without
job security and some CCP members unfairly treated in the political
movements before the Cultural Revolution. In the early stage of the
RECTIFY THE CLASS RANKS @ 235
Cultural Revolution, some members of this group were persecuted by
party officials, the work groups, and Old Red Guards. Eventually, it
was this group, rather than the early Red Guards, that the term “reb-
els” comes to identify. Supported by Mao and the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group and joined by a great number of people
with working class background, this faction of mass organizations
became the major force against the old party and state apparatus in
the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line and during the
power seizure movement initiated by the January Storm of 1967.
During the nationwide violent factional battles in 1967 and 1968,
all competing factions, radical or moderate, invariably called them-
selves “rebels” and often dismissed their rivals as “conservatives.”
By 1969 when Mao decided to put the mass movement to an end,
some rebels had already become part of the newly established power
structure and served on the revolutionary committees at local and
provincial levels, and a number of them, such as Wang Hongwen,
were even elected to the Central Committee at the Ninth National
Congress of the CCP. Yet, some others became targets of the Ferret
Out the “May 16” campaign, the Rectify the Class Ranks campaign,
and the One Strike and Three Antis movement largely due to their
involvement in prolonged factional violence and in activities that the
central leadership deemed politically extreme and destructive.
RECTIFY THE CLASS RANKS. Commonly known as “Rectify
Ranks” (qingdui), this was a campaign conducted by the revolution-
ary committee at various levels to investigate and uncover class
enemies—traitors, spies, capitalists, “Kuomintang dregs,” capitalist-
roaders within the CCP, and those of the “Black Five Categories”
without—who had supposedly infiltrated the revolutionary camp
and messed up class ranks. As an important step toward accomplish-
ing the tasks of the Cultural Revolution, “struggle, criticism, and
reform,” as Mao Zedong conceived them, the Rectify Ranks cam-
paign began in late 1967; it lasted longer and claimed more lives than
any other movement during the Cultural Revolution.
The term “rectify the class ranks” was first introduced by Jiang
Qing in her talk with the representative of Beijing workers on 27
November 1967. On 21 February 1968, a team made of the person-
nel of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit 8341, Mao’s guards
regiment at Zhongnanhai, moved into the Beijing Xinhua Printing
236 © RECTIFY THE CLASS RANKS
Factory to establish military control. They soon produced the “Expe-
rience of the Military Control Commission at the Beijing Xinhua
Printing Factory in Mobilizing the Masses to Struggle against the
Enemies.” Following Mao’s directive, the CCP Central Committee
(CC) and the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group distributed
the “Experience” nationwide on 25 May 1968 as a model for con-
ducting the Rectify the Class Ranks campaign. Later, both the edito-
rial that the People’s Daily, the Red Flag, and the Liberation Army
Daily jointly carried on 1 January 1969 and the political report of the
CC for the Ninth National Congress of the CCP (April 1969) pub-
licized Mao’s directive on the Rectify Ranks campaign: the campaign
should be “firmly grasped,” said Mao, and yet, at the same time, “give
a way out” for those being investigated; “no one is to be executed;
most are not to be arrested.”
However, despite Mao’s warning against massive and relentless per-
secution, which already implied the existence of the problem, illegal
imprisonment, systematic torture, trial by suspicion, and conviction
by forced confessions were common during the campaign. The almost
routine use of isolation, torture, and particularly the so-called ideo-
logical work that special case personnel under the leadership of the
current power organ the revolutionary committee often forced family
members and relatives to perform on the victims, made this campaign
psychologically the cruelest. It had the highest suicide rate of all
political campaigns and persecuted the largest number of people. For
instance, at Tsinghua University, one of the exemplary “Six Factories
and Two Schools” where Mao’s 8341 security unit sent PLA pro-
paganda teams, 1,228 of its 6,000 staff members were investigated;
in the first two months of the Rectify Ranks campaign, more than 10
people were harassed to death on the Tsinghua campus. According to
official estimate, in the 10 months from February to November 1970,
1.87 million alleged “traitors,” “spies,” and “counterrevolutionaries”
were uncovered in the nation, and more than 284,800 people were
arrested. All together, the number of people affected by the campaign
either as victims or as family members of the victims reached an
unprecedented one hundred million, an eighth of China’s population.
Since its later stages merged with the One Strike and Three Antis
campaign and with the investigation of the so-called May 16 Counter-
revolutionary Clique, the campaign to rectify the class ranks had no
closure until the end of the Cultural Revolution itself.
RED AUGUST ® 237
RED AUGUST (hong bayue). This term refers to a time in late summer
1966 when a series of landmark events in the Red Guard movement
took place while brutal violence against innocent citizens surged,
especially in Beijing. To Red Guards of the time who proudly named
August 1966 as such, it was a month of excitement, empowerment,
and glory, a month of Red Guards, while to many ordinary citizens,
especially the surviving victims of Red Guard violence, “Red August”
meant lawlessness, bloodiness, and terror.
On 1 August 1966, Mao Zedong wrote to Tsinghua Middle School
Red Guards in response to their letter to him and their big-character
poster series entitled “Long Live the Revolutionary Rebel Spirit
of the Proletariat.” Mao reiterated his own words “to rebel is justi-
fied” and expressed strong support for the Red Guard movement.
In the eye of Red Guards, Mao’s writing marked the beginning of a
“red” August. The distribution of Mao’s letter as a party document
on 3 August led to an explosive development of Red Guard organiza-
tions nationwide. The second, and greater, wave of such development
came after Mao inspected over a million Red Guards and “revolution-
ary masses” (mostly students) at a mass rally in Tiananmen Square
on 18 August. His inspection set off a Red Guard traveling campaign
called the Great Networking, in which tens of millions of Red
Guards from the provinces rode on free trains to Beijing to see Mao
and to acquire revolutionary experience while Red Guards in Beijing
traveled to other parts of the country to spread the fire of the Cultural
Revolution.
Mao’s support also inspired Red Guards to expand revolution from
schools to the whole society. Beginning on 19 August, Beijing’s Red
Guards launched on city streets a campaign called “Destroy the Four
Olds.” In a few days, they changed the names of hundreds of streets,
shops, restaurants, hotels, shopping plazas, schools, and hospitals, dis-
missing traditional names as feudalist, capitalist, imperialist, or revi-
sionist and replacing them with proletarian labels. They issued orders
to barbershops, tailor shops, shoe shops, and photo studios to ban any
product or style deemed nonproletarian. Standing on the corners of
busy streets, they would stop any passerby with what they considered
an unacceptable look and punish the person on the spot. Red Guards
even changed the traffic rules (for a short period) so that red—signify-
ing revolution—meant “to go” and green “to stop.” They stood with
traffic police officers at intersections to redirect the traffic, making
238 © RED BOOK OF TREASURES
sure that the color red should prevail. The government endorsed all
these activities.
The war against the “old world” led to the destruction of countless
churches, temples, theaters, libraries, used-book stores, and histori-
cal sites. With the government’s acquiescence, and even support and
assistance, Red Guards ransacked private homes and confiscated
personal belongings of the alleged “class enemies,” especially people
of the so-called Black Five Categories. Brutality against teachers,
school officials, people of the “Black Five Categories,” and the so-
called black gang members became widespread. On 25 August, the
Capital Red Guard Pickets was formed in Beijing’s Xicheng Dis-
trict—and soon in several other districts as well—to exercise control
over the lawless activities and violence committed by the city’s many
independent Red Guard organizations. But, contrary to this intention,
some members of the Pickets themselves set up private courts in their
schools to torture, and even kill, innocent people. According to sta-
tistics from Beijing Public Security Bureau, in a period of 40 days in
late August and September in the city of Beijing alone, 1,772 people
were killed or committed suicide, 33,695 homes were ransacked, and
85,000 people of the “Black Five Categories” were expelled from
Beijing to their hometowns, mostly in poverty-stricken rural areas.
This kind of lawlessness and violence was committed by Red Guards
in other parts of the country as well.
RED BOOK OF TREASURES (hongbaoshu). This was a popular
term during the Cultural Revolution for the four-volume set of the
Selected Works of Mao Zedong. It was also a popular name for the
much shorter Quotations from Chairman Mao. Published in 1951,
1952, 1953, and 1960, the four volumes began to be massively pro-
duced in the initial years of the Cultural Revolution. Over 86.4 million
copies were printed in the year 1967 alone, some of them with red
covers. In late 1960s, the one-volume edition of the Selected Works
came out, wrapped in a red plastic jacket and available in portable
size as well. A bible for the population, the Selected Works became a
common gift item and an object of worship, which contributed much
to the hegemony of Mao Zedong Thought and the personality cult
of the Chairman.
RED FIVE CATEGORIES (hong wulei). A political term widely
used during the Cultural Revolution, the “Red Five Categories” refers
RED GUARDS ® 239
to people from the families of workers, poor and lower-middle class
peasants, revolutionary cadres, revolutionary military personnel, and
revolutionary martyrs. Early Red Guard organizations adopted a
membership policy admitting only those from families of the “Red
Five Categories.” Of the “revolutionary cadre” category, according to
popular definitions made by some Red Guards, those who joined the
CCP before 1938 (before the war of resistance against Japan) or—in
some cases—before 1945 (before the civil war of 1946-1949) were
more authentic or more legitimate revolutionary cadres than late-
comers. With their family background as inherited political capital,
people of the “Red Five Categories” enjoyed considerable political
privilege during the Cultural Revolution. Some of them, proud and
self-righteous, considered their family background to be evidence of
their political identity and therefore saw themselves as natural suc-
cessors to the revolutionary cause and to the communist regime.
RED GUARDS (hongweibing). This is a generic name for the youth
organizations that were formed at the beginning of the Cultural Revo-
lution and served as a major political force for Chairman Mao Zedong
in the battle against traditional culture and the old party establishment
from summer 1966 to summer 1968. The term also refers to the mem-
bers of these organizations. Red Guards shocked the world with their
radical communist idealism, their rebel spirit in defiance of authori-
ties, and their extreme—often violent—social behavior.
The first Red Guard organization was formed on 29 May 1966 by
a dozen students at Tsinghua University Middle School. They chose
the name “Red Guards” to express their vow to be Mao’s guards
fighting against those who, in Mao’s words, conspired to change the
color of communist China. In June and July, the Tsinghua Middle
School Red Guards put out a series of big-character posters entitled
“Long Live the Revolutionary Rebel Spirit of the Proletariat,’
which helped popularize Mao’s words “to rebel is justified” as a
catchphrase of the Red Guard movement. During the same period,
students from other middle and high schools in Beijing also formed
Red Guard organizations, adopting such fashionable names as “Red
Flag,” “East Wind,” or “East Is Red.” On 1 August, Mao, after read-
ing a copy of the posters on rebel spirit, wrote the Tsinghua Middle
School Red Guards a letter demonstrating his “enthusiastic support”
for their “rebellion against the reactionaries.” Mao’s letter was never
posted, but after it was circulated as a party document and made its
240 © RED GUARDS
way to the public in early August 1966, Red Guard organizations
mushroomed in the country. The early Red Guard organizations car-
ried a politically discriminating membership policy in accordance
with a notorious “blood lineage theory,’ admitting only students
from families of the “Red Five Categories.”
On 18 August, Mao, wearing a Red Guard armband on his left
arm, inspected a million Red Guards and revolutionary masses from
the Tiananmen rostrum while Lin Biao, the vice-chairman of the
CCP standing next to Mao, called for a thoroughgoing attack on “old
ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.” As Mao’s inspection
hastened the birth of tens of thousands more new Red Guard orga-
nizations in the country, Lin’s call inspired Red Guards to launch a
“Destroy the Four Olds” campaign against traditional culture, first
in the city of Beijing and then all over the country. The campaign
led not only to severe damage to countless temples, churches, and
cultural and historic relics but also to the youthful rejection of many
traditional values and virtues of Chinese society such as respect for
teachers and older people, loyalty to friends, and humaneness based
on empathy. During this campaign, Red Guard brutality became
widespread against teachers, school officials, and other alleged “class
enemies” old and new.
In the meantime, Mao’s inspections of Red Guards continued. A
nationwide traveling campaign called the Great Networking brought
tens of thousands of Red Guards from all over the country to Beijing
each day whereas Red Guards from Beijing went to the provinces to
stir up revolution there. The Great Networking campaign effectively
energized millions of Chinese youths with fearless rebel spirit to
serve as Mao’s crusaders against his opponents and their alleged fol-
lowers in the central, provincial and local party leadership. As Mao
directed the revolution’s focus from criticizing liberal intellectuals
and a small number of “black gang” members to toppling party
and government officials in October 1966, Red Guard organizations
began to divide into two factions: the Old Red Guards who played
a major role in earlier campaigns now became less enthusiastic since
many of their parents were party officials and had become targets
of the new round of attacks, while the newly emerging rebel Red
Guards, a faction that included many members from non-proletarian
families, were now supported by the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group and replaced the Old Red Guards as Mao’s crusading
RED GUARDS © 241
army against the old party establishment in the campaign to criticize
the bourgeois reactionary line, which eventually led to the downfall
of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.
As the Cultural Revolution developed into its power-seizure
phase in 1967, beginning with Shanghai’s January Storm, factional
conflict among Red Guard organizations (and among other mass
organizations as well) intensified in the country. The fight for a
greater share of power in the new organ of power, the revolutionary
committee, often led to both verbal dispute and physical violence.
To restore order, Mao ordered army troops to intervene in the name
of “supporting the left” and called upon all mass factions to form a
“grand alliance.” And yet, the factional conflict continued to escalate
and became increasingly violent. By late 1967 and early 1968, large-
scale armed confrontations occurred in many places, and the country
was in chaos.
Finally, in July 1968, Mao made a few decisive moves to end
factional violence: after approving nationwide issuance of two pub-
lic notices concerning the armed conflict in two provinces, Mao,
on 27 July, dispatched a workers propaganda team of 30,000 led
by PLA officers to break up a prolonged factional confrontation
known as the “one hundred-day armed conflict on the Tsinghua
campus.” After Red Guards at Tsinghua University opened fire and
killed five and injured hundreds of the propaganda team members,
Mao called an emergency meeting with the leaders of the five most
influential Red Guard organizations in Beijing. At the meeting, the
chairman showed his determination to end the country’s chaos and
informed the Red Guard leaders of his plan to send all students away
from the country’s college campuses. Mao’s decision, along with
the movement of educated youths to go up to the mountains and
down to the countryside, effectively put an end to the Red Guard
movement.
After the exit of this generation of Red Guards from China’s politi-
cal scene, the name “Red Guards” was retained for a youth organi-
zation at middle and high schools under the control of the school
authorities—an ad hoc substitute, in many cases, for the official
Communist Youth League. In August 1978, the Chinese Commu-
nist Youth League announced its decision to abolish the Red Guard
organization. See also MASS RALLY OF 18 AUGUST 1966; MAO
ZEDONG-MEETING WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD LEADERS.
242 © RED GUARDS’ REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY
RED GUARDS’ REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY (hongdaihui).
Born of a need for coordinating activities among Red Guard orga-
nizations, the assembly generally functioned as the headquarters of
participating Red Guard organizations. On 22 February 1967, the
Representative Assembly of the Capital College Red Guards was
established in Beijing with the support as well as the advice of the
central leaders. On 25 March of the same year, middle school Red
Guards in Beijing established their assembly as well. Before long,
such assemblies were formed in many other places in the country at
county, city, regional, and provincial levels. The purpose of estab-
lishing an assembly was to place a certain collective authority over
self-governed, largely independent, poorly disciplined, and often fac-
tionally inclined Red Guard groups so that coordination and a certain
degree of control could be exercised to shape the direction and priori-
ties of the Red Guard movement.
However, factionalism continued to hold the upper hand and under-
mined severely the authority of many assemblies; some of them
ceased functioning before long because of the conflicts between rival
Red Guard organizations. A national representative assembly of Red
Guards was never formed. When the new power organ revolutionary
committee was established as a result of the power seizure move-
ment of 1967, a few positions on the committee were usually given to
the leaders of the local assembly as representatives of the Red Guards.
In 1968 and 1969, when the Red Guard movement came to an end
while the traditional Communist Youth League resumed its function
after the Ninth National Congress of the CCP, Red Guard assem-
blies were gradually phased out.
RED PERIPHERIES (hong waiwei). This is a humiliating name for
those students who willingly and actively participated in the cam-
paigns launched by Red Guards but who were not allowed to join
Red Guard organizations because their family backgrounds were not
of the hardcore “Red Five Categories” though not of the so-called
Black Five Categories, either. These included children of ordinary
teachers, civil servants, free lancers, street vendors, poor urban resi-
dents, middle peasants, and so forth. The term “Red Peripheries” was
used only for a short period in the early phase of the Cultural Revolu-
tion when some Red Guards were actively promoting a blood lineage
theory. This was also the time when Mao Zedong began to voice his
REGULATIONS ON STRENGTHENING PUBLIC SECURITY @ 243
warm support for the Red Guard movement and receive Red Guards
in Tiananmen Square, which accorded a Red Guard high revolution-
ary status with which tens of millions of Chinese youths wanted to
identify themselves. However, most Red Guard organizations at the
time accepted only those with proletarian family backgrounds known
as the Red Five Categories.
Enthusiastic about the revolution and afraid of being viewed
as less revolutionary than Red Guards, some students from non-
proletarian families followed the actions of Red Guards as much as
they could without being accepted as members of the organizations.
These students were often referred by the Red Guards as their “Red
Peripheries” or “Red Exteriors.” When the campaign to criticize the
bourgeois reactionary line started in October 1966, many new Red
Guard or rebel organizations were formed. With admission policies
much less rigid than those of the Old Red Guards, these organiza-
tions opened doors to students with less favorable family backgrounds
though admissions for those from families of the Black Five Cat-
egories remained difficult. By now the term “Red Peripheries” had
become obsolete.
REEDUCATION (Zaijiaoyu). This is a term Mao Zedong used several
times during the Cultural Revolution to refer to what he considered
to be a necessary ideological reform for intellectuals, professionals,
and middle school, high school, and college graduates. In Mao’s
view, they had been book educated and school trained, but their ideas
were often nonrevolutionary, with marks of bourgeois and revision-
ist ideology. Therefore, they needed to live with workers, peasants,
and soldiers, be identified with them, and be reeducated by them, so
as to become proletarian. See also EDUCATED YOUTHS; MAY 7
CADRE SCHOOL; UP TO THE MOUNTAINS AND DOWN TO
THE COUNTRYSIDE.
REGULATIONS ON STRENGTHENING PUBLIC SECURITY
DURING THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVO-
LUTION (1967). Popularly known as the Six Regulations of Public
Security, this document, coded zhongfa [67] 19, was issued nation-
wide by the CCP Central Committee (CC) and the State Council on
13 January 1967. It not only reiterated legal action against common
criminals but also legitimized harsh measures of political repression
244 è RENYI
and social discrimination in the name of public security. Aside from
forbidding various kinds of violent crime and illicit contact with for-
eign governments, the Regulations defines as punishable counterrevo-
lutionary crimes any “slandering on the great leader Chairman Mao
and his dear comrade-in-arms Lin Biao” in the form of sending anony-
mous letters, posting pamphlets, or writing and shouting slogans.
The Regulations also prescribe restrictions for citizens belonging
in a long list of categories of political outcasts. These categories
included those who are labeled landlords, rich peasants, counter-
revolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists, those who are or used
to be reformed through labor, the former backbone members of the
Kuomintang and its affiliated youth league, the former leaders of
cults or religious groups, those who used to serve in the Nationalist
army or government at or above certain levels (which the Regula-
tions specify meticulously), former but “not yet reformed” convicts,
profiteering vendors, and family members of those punished by law.
People in these categories were not allowed to travel to participate in
Great Networking activities, to join mass organizations by changing
their names or falsifying their personal history, to play any backstage
role in any organization, or to establish their own organizations; vio-
lation of any of these regulations is severely punishable. The Regula-
tions led to the persecutions of a large number of innocent people by
both mass organizations and the security agencies at various levels.
Soon after the Cultural Revolution, the CC annulled this document
and then charged the Gang of Four and Minister of Public Security
Xie Fuzi with the crime of formulating such repressive measures.
REN YI. See “SONG OF THE EDUCATED YOUTHS OF
NANJING.”
RESOLUTION ON CERTAIN QUESTIONS IN THE HISTORY
OF OUR PARTY SINCE THE FOUNDING OF THE PEO-
PLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (guanyu jian’guo yilai dang de
ruogan lishi wenti de jueyi). Adopted on 27 June 1981 at the Sixth
Plenum of the Eleventh CCP Central Committee (CC) and cover-
ing the 32 years of CCP rule since 1949, especially the 10 years of
the Cultural Revolution (May 1966—October 1976), this document
represents by far the most comprehensive assessment of the Cultural
Revolution made by the post-Mao CCP leadership. It is also the first
RESOLUTION ON CERTAIN QUESTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF OUR PARTY @ 245
official central document that takes a critical stand, both politically
and theoretically, toward the Cultural Revolution.
The CC considered the Resolution to be both necessary and impor-
tant, so much so that the CC waited more than two years after the
Cultural Revolution to begin the drafting of the document, and it took
more than a year and a half for a writing team led by Hu Qiaomu, a
chief CCP historian and theorist, to finish the project. The stated pur-
pose of the Resolution was to review Mao Zedong’s legacy and con-
clude a highly problematic chapter in the CCP history—“preferably
in broad strokes rather than in detail,’ as Deng Xiaoping suggested—
so that both the party and the nation might be united, leave the past
behind, and look ahead. Of the fairly detailed instructions that he
offered on nine occasions between March 1980 and June 1981, Deng
considered the appropriate assessment of Chairman Mao to be the
most important. On the one hand, Deng said, the Resolution should be
critical of Mao’s mistakes, truthfully and unequivocally; on the other
hand, the legitimacy of the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth CCP
Central Committee (at which President Liu Shaoqi was officially
expelled from the CCP) and the Ninth National Congress of the
CCP (at which a new CCP Constitution was adopted that designates
Lin Biao as Mao’s successor) must be acknowledged, and the banner
of Mao Zedong Thought should not be abandoned; for to abandon
this banner means to deny the “glorious history of our party.”
Embracing Deng’s concern for both the truth of the Cultural
Revolution and the legitimacy of the party leadership under Mao
as the principal guideline, the Resolution deals with two conflict-
ing issues. On the one hand, it names the Cultural Revolution as
the cause for “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses the
party, the state, and the people had suffered since the founding
of the PRC,” criticizes Mao’s ultraleftism as an erroneous ideol-
ogy informing the Cultural Revolution, and recognizes the partial
responsibility of the CCP central leadership for the Revolution.
On the other hand, the Resolution blames Lin Biao, Jiang Qing,
and the two counterrevolutionary cliques led by them for taking
advantage of Mao’s errors, committing crimes behind his back,
attempting to seize power, and so on, and charges them as chief cul-
prits responsible for causing the national disaster. The Resolution
upholds Mao Zedong Thought as the guiding principle of the CCP
while excluding Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the
246 © REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION
dictatorship of the proletariat from Mao Zedong Thought proper
in spite of Mao’s own judgment.
Apparently, the Resolution reflects a dilemma the post-Mao CCP
leadership faced: the leadership gained its legitimacy by following
the will of the people and abandoning Mao’s Cultural Revolution
program, but a thoroughgoing critique of the Cultural Revolution
might again put the legitimacy of the CCP leadership itself in ques-
tion. As a landmark central document intended to bring closure to
the most troubling period of the CCP history, the Resolution clarifies
a number of historical issues to some extent and serves a strategic
purpose, but its value is nevertheless reduced because of its inherent
contradictions.
REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION (jiaoyu geming). Also known as
“educational reform” (jiaoyu gaige), the project was proposed by
Mao Zedong in the late 1950s to make education serve the interest of
proletarian politics and to integrate education with labor and produc-
tion. In a letter to Lin Biao, dated 7 May 1966, Mao demanded that
years of schooling be shortened and that education be revolutionized,
and he called for an end to the “reign of bourgeois intellectuals in our
schools.” These words made the “revolution in education” one of the
most important tasks of the Cultural Revolution. The revolution in
education took such radical steps as abolishing the college entrance
examination system, politicizing educational material for schools at
all levels, recruiting college students only from workplaces and army
units, and reducing college education uniformly to three years. There
was also an invention called “open-door schooling” in which college
students went off campus and took factories and fields as classrooms
where workers and peasants assumed the role of professors. A nation-
wide enforcement of radical measures like these, along with the
official propaganda debasing learning in general, resulted in a drastic
degradation of knowledge at all levels of education and a decline in
educational quality during the Cultural Revolution.
In the early 1970s, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, with broad
support from educational circles, made some efforts to restore nor-
mality to the nation’s chaotic education system, such as reintroducing
entrance exam as a part of the selection process for college admissions
and allowing high school graduates to be directly enrolled in college,
but these efforts were denounced by the ultraleftist faction of the
REVOLUTION IN PEKING OPERA ® 247
CCP central leadership as signs of a massive “right-leaning reversal
of verdicts” and eventually failed. The real reversal of the cultural
revolutionary educational reform did not take place until late 1977, a
year after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when the national col-
lege entrance examination system was reinstalled. See also MAY 7
DIRECTIVE; WORKER-PEASANT-SOLDIER STUDENTS.
REVOLUTION IN PEKING OPERA. The term refers to the reform
efforts to modernize the traditional Chinese music theater Peking
opera (jingju) that started in the early 1960s but later became politi-
cized and radicalized by Jiang Qing. At a CCP Central Committee
work session in September 1963, Mao Zedong called upon artists
in the traditional Chinese theater to “weed through the old to bring
forth the new” (tuichen chuxin) so that characters on stage would not
be just “kings and princes, generals and ministers, talented scholars
and lovely beauties” (diwangjiangxiang caizijiaren). In fact, before
1963, quite a few theatrical companies, not only of Peking opera but
also some other regional operas, had already begun to experiment
with traditional forms and to produce contemporary musical dramas
with revolutionary themes. Following Mao’s 1963 directive, several
troupes created a number of new revolutionary Peking operas includ-
ing Shajia Creek (Shajiabang), Taking Tiger Mountain by Stratagem
(zhiqu weihushan), Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (qixi bai-
hutuan), and The Red Lantern (hongdeng ji).
From 5 June to 31 July 1964, a festival of Peking opera on con-
temporary themes was held in Beijing. Twenty-nine opera troupes
and about 2,000 people participated in the festival and produced 37
theatrical works. Jiang Qing attended this festival and delivered the
speech “On the Revolution in Peking opera,” in which she dismissed
all historical plays as feudalist and bourgeois works and advocated
such propaganda principles as “giving prominence to politics” and
“giving prominence to positive revolutionary figures.” In her effort
to further radicalize the Peking opera reform, Jiang virtually drove
all historical plays and most artists off the stage. When Jiang Qing’s
speech was published in the CCP theoretical organ Red Flag in May
1967, it became a guideline that all artists and writers had to follow.
Under the direction of Jiang Qing, the original Peking opera reform
soon turned into a political movement and became the “revolution in
Peking opera.” Jiang also took advantage of the reform, tempered
248 © REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE
with a few of its early accomplishments, such as Shajia Creek, Tak-
ing Tiger Mountain by Stratagem, and The Red Lantern, and claimed
credit for their creation. During the Cultural Revolution, these plays,
along with a few others, were officially named the eight model dra-
mas, and Jiang became “the great standard-bearer” of revolution in
art and literature.
REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE. This was the name of the new
power organ established after old government and party apparatuses
were abolished in 1967. The 1967 January Storm in Shanghai
marked the beginning of a nationwide power seizure movement in
which mass organizations overthrew party and government authori-
ties and took the governing power in their hands. Encouraged by Mao
Zedong, this movement was carried out systematically at all levels,
including local and provincial government and the leadership of all
the nation’s schools, state institutions and organizations, factories, and
collectively owned communes in the countryside in 1967 and 1968.
The new power organ that was established to replace the old govern-
ing authorities was first named in Shanghai as a “people’s commune,”
but Mao Zedong eventually favored the example of Heilongjiang and
Shandong Provinces with the three-in-one presence of party cadres,
military officers, and representatives of mass organizations in a “revo-
lutionary committee,” which made the new power organ in Shanghai
change its name on 24 February. This name became official when the
CCP organ the Red Flag published an editorial on 10 March 1967
that cited Mao’s directive. The PRC Constitution revised in 1975 and,
again, in 1978, designated the revolutionary committee as the official
organ of power. A decision was made in July 1979 at the Second
Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress that the use of the
revolutionary committee as a name of any governing body be discon-
tinued. See also SHANGHAI PEOPLE’S COMMUNE.
RONG GUOTUAN (1937-1968). Born in Hong Kong, Rong came to
mainland China in 1957 as an outstanding ping pong player. In 1959,
when he won the men’s singles championship at the 25th Table Ten-
nis World Championship Game, he instantly became a national hero,
since this was the very first world championship won by a Chinese in
any international sports event. In 1961, at the 26th World Champion-
ship Game, he led his team to the team title. He was appointed head
coach of the Chinese women’s ping pong team in 1963 and turned it
SECOND PLENUM OF THE CCP NINTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE @ 249
into a world champion team at the 28th World Championship Game.
Suspected of being a foreign agent, Rong was persecuted during the
Cultural Revolution. Rong hanged himself on 20 June 1968, with a
note in his pocket that read, “I am not a spy.” Rong’s name was cleared
by the National Sports Commission in June 1978.
ROTATION OF MILITARY REGION COMMANDERS (Decem-
ber 1973). Following Mao Zedong’s suggestion that commanders
of military regions should rotate because it was not good for anyone
to stay in one place for too long, the Central Military Commission
issued an order on 22 December 1973 to reassign eight military region
commanders by having the current commanders exchange places with
one another.
ROYALISTS (baohuangpai). Also known as “bourgeois royalists.”
See CONSERVATIVES.
=
SCRIPTURE OF COUP D’ETAT (zhengbian jing). See LIN BIAO:
MAY 18 SPEECH.
SECOND PLENUM OF THE CCP NINTH CENTRAL COMMIT-
TEE (23 August-6 September 1970). Also known as the Lushan
Conference, the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee of
the CCP marked a significant turning point in the course of the Cul-
tural Revolution. The plenum was held at the state resort at Lushan,
Jiangxi Province, and presided over by Chairman Mao Zedong. At
the meeting a fissure appeared within the “proletarian headquarters”
newly consolidated at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP. A
power struggle between two groups of leaders—Lin Biao and his
associates on the one hand, and Jiang Qing and her supporters on the
other—took the form of a noisy dispute over two questions: whether
Mao Zedong was a genius and whether the Chinese leadership should
eliminate the position of the president of state. As Mao voiced support
for the Jiang group and denounced Chen Boda (who had been gradu-
ally alienated from Jiang and had become more closely associated
with Lin), making Chen the first victim of his strategic move against
Lin Biao, the downfall of Mao’s handpicked successor began.
250 © SECOND PLENUM OF THE CCP NINTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE
There were three discussion topics on the original plenum agenda:
a revision of the Constitution of the PRC, the nation’s economic
planning, and China’s war-readiness (regarding mainly the potential
threat from the Soviet Union). But these issues were overshadowed
at the meeting by a bizarre drama of power intrigue. At the opening
ceremony, Lin Biao delivered a long speech that he had supposedly
cleared with Mao. In the speech, Lin said that Mao was a genius and
that it should be ordained by the Constitution that Mao be the “head
of the proletarian dictatorship,” referring to the position of the presi-
dent of state that Mao, in the eye of others, either declined to take due
to modesty or simply wished to abolish. On 24 August, a pamphlet
called “Engels, Lenin, and Chairman Mao on Genius,” compiled by
Chen Boda and approved by Lin Biao, was distributed among del-
egates. Knowing that Jiang Qing’s close ally Zhang Chunqiao had
opposed the inclusion of “genius” along with two other modifiers
praising Mao in the revised PRC Constitution, Chen Boda, Ye Qun,
Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo, all Lin Biao’s associates,
stirred up a storm in discussion groups, denouncing those who denied
Mao’s genius and vowing to “uncover” the counterrevolutionaries.
Most delegates enthusiastically embraced the “genius” theory and
supported the request that Mao be president of state, although per-
haps only a few veteran leaders, who also voiced support, acted with
the understanding that the radical faction of the central leadership
was under attack.
The situation took a dramatic turn after Jiang Qing, Zhang Chun-
qiao, and Yao Wenyuan went to see Mao on the morning of 25
August and lodged a complaint against Chen Boda and his comrades.
Mao personally convened an enlarged session of the Politburo to
stop discussion of Lin Biao’s speech and to order Chen Boda to go
through self-examination. Mao also ruled that the issue of installing
the national president not be raised again. On 31 August, Mao wrote
“Some Views of Mine,” in which he dismissed Chen’s theory of genius
as “fabrication,” “sophistry,” and the “tricks of those who claim to but
do not really understand Marx.” During the remainder of the plenum,
the denunciation of Chen continued. Lin Biao’s cohorts disassociated
themselves from Chen and criticized themselves.
The plenum concluded with Mao’s call for ranking cadres to study
Marxism and with the decision of the Central Committee to inves-
tigate Chen Boda’s case. A year later, just before Lin Biao’s fatal
SEPTEMBER 13 INCIDENT ® 251
plane crash (known as the September 13 Incident), Mao was to
define the conflict at the Lushan conference as a “struggle between
two headquarters,” and the “tenth [inner-party] line struggle.” He also
spoke of the activities of the Lin group at the meeting as premedi-
tated, organized, and guided by a program that consisted of a theory
on “genius” and a call to install the national president, despite the
fact that Mao himself had allowed the association of his name with
“genius” to enter previous party documents and that the proposal to
install the national president was supported by almost all the del-
egates at Lushan, including Kang Sheng, the adviser to the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group. See also ELIMINATING THE
OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL PRESIDENT.
SEPTEMBER 13 INCIDENT (1971). Or simply called “9-13,” this
term refers to the plane crash on the morning of 13 September 1971
in Mongolia that killed Lin Biao, Ye Qun, their son Lin Liguo, and
six others as they were fleeing China allegedly after an aborted coup
d’état. The incident became a turning point in the Cultural Revolu-
tion: the downfall of Mao Zedong’s “closest comrade-in-arms,”
who promoted the personality cult of Mao in the early stages of the
Cultural Revolution, whose ascent in the CCP had been celebrated
as a major achievement of the Cultural Revolution, and whose future
as Mao’s successor had been written into the CCP Constitution,
shocked the nation to such an extent that many were disillusioned
by politics and began to think critically of the Cultural Revolution.
However, it took 10 more years for the CCP Central Committee
(CC) to formulate its own judgment on the Cultural Revolution in
connection with Lin Biao’s case: the historic Resolution on Certain
Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the
People’s Republic of China states that the downfall of the Lin Biao
clique “virtually pronounced the failure in both theory and practice
of the Cultural Revolution.”
According to the official version of the September 13 Incident
and of the events leading up to it, Lin Biao aimed to take power by
schemes and intrigues as early as August and September 1970 at the
Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee, also known
as the Lushan Conference. Speaking against Mao’s wish to elimi-
nate the office of the national president, Lin insisted in his opening
speech at the plenum that Mao was a genius and that it should be
252 © SEPTEMBER 13 INCIDENT
ordained by the Constitution that Mao be the “head of the proletarian
dictatorship.” Taking Lin’s speech as a signal for action, Chen Boda
and Lin’s close associates Wu Faxian, Ye Qun, Li Zuopeng, and
Qiu Huizuo stirred up a storm in group sessions denouncing those
who dared to deny Mao’s genius, particularly Zhang Chungiao who
had followed Mao’s wish (largely unknown to others) and insisted
on excluding the word “genius” and two other modifiers in praise of
Mao from the new Constitution. Later, Mao interpreted Lin’s support
for restoring the office of the national president and his insistence on
calling Mao a genius as the political program and the theoretical pro-
gram for power seizure. Although not attacking Lin directly while
condemning Chen and chiding Lin’s cohorts during the Criticize
Chen and Conduct Rectification campaign after the Lushan Con-
ference, Mao considered Lin Biao to be behind the power intrigue:
“Someone couldn’t wait to become president,” he said.
In October 1970, the Investigation and Research Group under the
CCP Office of the Air Force Command, a secret intelligence team
for Lin Biao, was renamed the United Flotilla with Lin Liguo as the
leader or kang-man-de, a self-styled code name simulating the English
“commander.” On 21 March 1971, the core of this group of air force
officers met in Shanghai to assess the political situation regarding Lin
Biao’s position in the CCP leadership and to plot a power seizure for
him. Those attending the meeting, including Lin Liguo, decided to
proceed with their plan by peaceful means for the moment, consider-
ing Mao’s authority and popularity, but at the same time to be pre-
pared for an armed coup. The blueprint for the latter, at Lin Liguo’s
suggestion, was to be called the “571 Project,’ as the pronunciation
of the numbers wu-gi-yi homophonically rhymes with the Chinese
characters for “armed uprising.” Yu Xinye, a key member of the Flo-
tilla, was entrusted with the drafting of the 571 Project Summary,
which he finished on 23 March. Lin Biao was named in the official
history of the CCP as the commanding force behind both the forma-
tion of the United Flotilla and the creation of the 571 Project.
During his southern inspection tour from 14 August to 12 Sep-
tember 1971, Mao Zedong repeatedly talked about the tenth line
struggle in the CCP’s history and the struggle between two head-
quarters, both referring to the power intrigue at the 1970 Lushan
Conference. He voiced strong criticism of Chen Boda and Lin Biao’s
close associates but at the same time warned his audience not to pass
SEPTEMBER 13 INCIDENT ® 253
on his words to Beijing. On 5 and 6 September when Mao’s criticism
finally reached Beidaihe resort where Lin Biao and Ye Qun had been
staying for the summer, Lin and Ye came to the conclusion that at the
Third Plenum of the CCP’s Ninth Central Committee and the Fourth
National People’s Congress, supposedly to be held soon around 1
October 1971, their political career would come to an end. So they,
according to the official version of the event, decided to assassinate
Mao in Shanghai and stage a coup in Beijing. On 7 September, Lin
Liguo told the members of the United Flotilla to be first-degree war-
ready. On 8 September, Lin Biao was said to have given his handwrit-
ten command for an armed coup: “Act according to the order carried
by Comrades Liguo and Yuchi.” (“Yuchi” refers to Zhou Yuchi, Lin
Liguo’s close associate.) Lin Liguo then consulted with the key mem-
bers of the Flotilla and came up with five ways of assassinating Mao
in and near Shanghai. In the meantime, Mao, while in Hangzhou,
must have noticed something suspicious. He made a series of abrupt
changes to his travel schedule and came back to Beijing on the eve-
ning of 12 September.
After the assassination plan failed, Lin Biao allegedly decided
to proceed with the second plan: on 13 September, he and his fam-
ily were to fly south to Guangzhou, where he and Ye Qun were to
meet his generals Huang Yongsheng, Wu Fanxian, Li Zuopeng,
Qiu Huizuo, and others to form another central government for a
divided country of north and south. On the evening of 12 September,
Lin Liguo boarded the aircraft Trident 256 and flew from Beijing to
Shanhaiguan, the city nearest Beidaihe with an airfield. He intended
for his father to use this special plane on his flight the next day to
Guangzhou. At 10:30 P.M., Premier Zhou Enlai received a telephone
call from the office of the security troop unit 8341 communicating a
report from Lin Liheng, Lin Biao’s daughter, concerning the unusual
developments at Beidaihe. A series of decisive moves made by Zhou
upon hearing the report, including a telephone conversation with
Ye Qun, made Lin Biao and Ye Qun believe that they were being
watched. Lin Biao, then, allegedly decided to abandon the second
plan (of flying south to Guangzhou) and adopt the third one: flying
northwest out of the country to Irkutsk in the Soviet Union. Lin and
his followers rushed through the Beidaihe security to Shanhaiguan
airfield in Lin’s bulletproof sedan, and Trident 256, with nine people
aboard, took off at 12:32 A.M. on 13 September.
254 © SHAKING HANDS THE SECOND TIME
After Lin Biao left Beidaihe, Lin Liheng notified Beijing. Zhou
Enlai issued orders to turn on the radar system in north China to
track the path of Trident 256 and to communicate a message to those
onboard the plane that they should return, that he would meet them in
person at any airport. Zhou also reported to Mao Zedong, who report-
edly replied, “Rain will fall, mother wants to remarry. Can’t help it.”
In the meantime, Trident 256 reached China’s border and crossed into
the air space of the Mongolian People’s Republic at 1:50 a.m. Forty
minutes later, the plane crashed to the ground near Undurkhan, report-
edly due to a lack of fuel. The crash killed all of the passengers, eight
men and one woman. On 18 September 1971, the CC issued a circular
concerning Lin Biao’s “renegade escape,” charging him with treason.
More than any other major event in the Cultural Revolution, the
9-13 Incident, along with the events leading up to it, lacks a definitive
account. Various versions and interpretations conflict in significant
ways with the official one summarized above. Some historians argue
that there was no solid and convincing evidence that Lin Biao was
ever interested in the position of president of state, while others, not
necessarily disagreeing with the former on the issue of the president
of state, consider Lin’s promotion of the cult of Mao to be sufficient
evidence of his political ambition and opportunism. Still some oth-
ers argue that Lin, suffering from serious ill health and reluctant to
engage in politics, was forced into a high position by Mao and then
became a victim of Mao’s obsession with power. More specifically
relevant to the 9-13 Incident were the forming of the United Flotilla,
the drafting of the 577 Project Summary, and the plan to assassinate
Mao Zedong. But, in some personal as well as scholarly accounts,
evidence of Lin Biao’s directing all these actions, and even of his
knowledge of them, was at best circumstantial. And finally, as Lin
Liheng reported to Beijing on the night of 12 September, she saw
the trouble at Beidaihe as a problem of kidnapping: Ye Qun and Lin
Liguo plotted together without Lin Biao’s knowledge and eventually
forced Lin Biao to flee the country.
SHAKING HANDS THE SECOND TIME (di’erci woshou). Widely
circulated and hand copied during the Cultural Revolution, this is
a novel about love and patriotism among Chinese intellectuals for
which its author Zhang Yang was arrested and imprisoned. Due to the
popularity of the novel, the persecution of Zhang Yang became one
SHANGHAI MUNICIPAL PARTY COMMITTEE WRITING GROUP ® 255
of the best known wrongs in the later stage of the Cultural Revolu-
tion. Inspired by real-life stories of some foreign-trained scientists
coming back to serve their beloved motherland, Zhang began to
work on a long story about their patriotism in 1964. His writing was
interrupted when the authorities arrested him during the One Strike
and Three Antis campaign in 1970 because he had made critical
remarks about Lin Biao with friends in a reading group in the Hunan
countryside. After his release in December 1972, Zhang resumed
writing and named a 200,000-word manuscript version of his novel
Return. While still in the revision stage, the manuscript was shared by
friends and soon copied by many hands and circulated among edu-
cated youths in many parts of China. The final version of the novel
incorporates numerous stylistic improvements and some additional
subplots from the hands of anonymous readers. The title of the novel
was also changed to Shaking Hands the Second Time.
While the second handshake refers to the reunion of two lovers
after years of separation, the story focuses on the woman, a distin-
guished nuclear physicist trained in the United States, who extricates
herself from various obstructions set up by the U.S. government and
comes back to China, only to find her beloved already married. As
she is about to leave Beijing for the United States, broken-hearted,
Premier Zhou Enlai comes to the airport and persuades her to stay
and work for her native land. In five years, with her contributions,
China successfully detonates its first nuclear bomb. As patriotic as
the story was, the authorities still found its high regard for intel-
lectuals unacceptable and labeled the novel reactionary. Following
Yao Wenyuan’s instruction, the Hunan Provincial Bureau of Public
Security arrested Zhang on 7 January 1975 and attempted to impose a
death sentence upon him. After the downfall of the “Gang of Four,”
Zhang began to appeal his case but was not successful until 1969. In
July that year, a few months after Zhang’s release, Shaking Hands the
Second Time was published and, with 4.3 million copies sold, became
one of the bestsellers in the history of the PRC.
SHANGHAI MUNICIPAL PARTY COMMITTEE WRITING
GROUP. This was a team of writers in the service of the Cultural
Revolution faction of the central leadership. It was controlled by
Xu Jingxian, deputy head of the Shanghai Revolutionary Commit-
tee, who also served as party secretary of the writing group. Zhang
256 ® SHANGHAI PEOPLE’S COMMUNE
Chungqiao and Yao Wenyuan, both originally based in Shanghai and
both having played major roles in turning Shanghai into a cultural
revolutionary base, directed every move of the writing group through
Xu. Along with the Peking University and Tsinghua University
Great Criticism Group, its counterpart in Beijing, the Shanghai
writing team produced numerous articles to publicize Mao Zedong’s
political programs, to promote the interest of the Jiang Qing group,
and to attack—mostly by innuendo and by allusion—the leaders of the
moderate faction, especially Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. These
articles were often carried in major newspapers in Beijing and Shang-
hai under such pennames as Ding Xuelei and Luo Siding and reprinted
immediately by provincial and local papers across China. The team
was disbanded soon after the downfall of the Gang of Four. See also
ALLUSORY HISTORIOGRAPHY; CONFUCIANISM VERSUS
LEGALISM; CRITICIZE LIN AND CRITICIZE CONFUCIUS.
SHANGHAI PEOPLE’S COMMUNE. This was the name initially
adopted by the new organ of power of Shanghai at the suggestion by
Zhang Chungiao after the January Storm of 1967. Zhang called
the Shanghai power-seizure movement the “January revolution” and
apparently based his naming of the new power organ on two sources.
First, in his “Bombarding the Headquarters” (5 August 1966), Mao
Zedong spoke highly of a big-character poster by Nie Yuanzi and
others at Peking University as the “declaration of the Paris Commune
of the 1960s—Beijing Commune.” Second, the “Sixteen Articles,”
adopted at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Com-
mittee on 8 August 1966, designates that power organs established
during the Cultural Revolution should be modeled on the Paris Com-
mune of 1871. Mao, however, never conceived the goal of the Cultural
Revolution as abolishing the supreme leadership of the communist
party. In a conversation with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan in
mid-February 1967, he questioned the place of the party in a com-
mune and indicated his preference for “revolutionary committee” as
the name for the new power organ. Following Mao’s directive, Shang-
hai People’s Commune changed its name to Shanghai Revolutionary
Committee on 24 February.
SHI CHUANXIANG (1915-1975). A nightman (someone whose job
is to clean out neighborhood excrement) and a well-known national
SHIYUNFENG ® 257
model worker, Shi was a deputy to the National People’s Congress
before the Cultural Revolution. Born in a poor peasant’s family in
Shandong Province, Shi became a nightman in Beijing at a young
age. After 1949, his hard work and loyalty to the party earned him
the title of national model worker. Chairman Mao Zedong, Presi-
dent Liu Shaoqi, and some other CCP leaders received him several
times. The picture of Liu Shaoqi’s handshake with Shi at the 1959
National Labor Heroes Conference was carried in the CCP official
organ People’s Daily, which made Shi instantly famous. In the early
months of the Cultural Revolution, Shi, knowing little about the
power struggle in the central leadership, led a conservative mass
organization called the Capital Workers Defense Regiment in Beijing
and took a clear stance to defend Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao was trying
hard to overthrow.
When members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG) began to push the rebel movement forward following
Mao’s battle plan, Chen Boda accused Shi of having been “bought
over by the bourgeoisie,” and Jiang Qing called him a “blackleg.”
In December 1966, during the Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary
Line campaign, Shi’s organization was crushed by the rebels with
strong support from the CCRSG. Shi himself was subject to public
humiliation and brutal physical abuse at many struggle meetings.
Many times he was also paraded through the streets of Beijing on
a truck—tied up, bareheaded, with a placard hanging from his neck
which read “blackleg” or some other denunciatory and insulting title.
His handshake with Liu Shaoqi became criminal evidence against
him. In 1971, Shi was expelled from Beijing to his hometown in a
rural area in Shandong. The ruthless abuse had physically destroyed
Shi: he was paralyzed and was unable to speak. Upon the intervention
of Premier Zhou Enlai, Shi was brought back to Beijing for medical
treatment in 1973. He died in May 1975. Shi Chuanxiang was offi-
cially rehabilitated in 1978.
SHI YUNFENG (1948-1976). A worker at the First Optical Instru-
ment Factory in Changchun, Jilin Province, Shi was executed for
his critical judgment of the Cultural Revolution and his sympathy
for President Liu Shaoqi. During the Cultural Revolution, Shi read
a number of Marxist books and learned a great deal about Chinese
politics from his uncle and other party veterans who were critical of
258 © SINGLE SPARK COMBAT TEAM
the Cultural Revolution. On 26 October 1974, he mailed to 14 CCP
organizations at the provincial, city, and district levels about two
dozen leaflets in which he named the Cultural Revolution an anach-
ronistic and reactionary turmoil. The Revolution was, in his view,
a serious “antiparty incident” since it started with a coup illegally
ousting President Liu Shaoqi and since it violated party principles
in promoting the personality cult of Mao Zedong. Shi also posted
a slogan on a main street of Changchun denouncing the ultraleftists
for causing the disaster of the Cultural Revolution and calling for the
rehabilitation of Liu Shaoqi.
Shi’s protest caught the attention of the leadership in Beijing. Wang
Hongwen and some other central leaders soon sent public security
agents to Changchun to oversee the case. On 24 December 1974,
Shi was arrested on a counterrevolutionary charge. Due to his direct
criticism of Mao, Shi was sentenced to death by the city intermediate
court even after the downfall of the Gang of Four. On 19 December
1976, Shi was executed after a public trial in the form of a mass rally.
In March 1980, the CCP Jilin Provincial Committee pronounced Shi’s
conviction unjust.
SINGLE SPARK COMBAT TEAM (Xingxingzhihuo zhandoudui).
Active only for a brief period of time in late August and early
September 1967, this small student organization was known for its
unequivocal opposition to the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group (CCRSG). The Combat Team was made up of a number of
Old Red Guards and “moderate” rebels at Beijing No. 26 Middle
School. They distributed leaflets at midnight to publicize their politi-
cal views, which were in some ways similar to those of the Capital
Red Guard United Action Committee. They considered the current
state of the Cultural Revolution to be one of political hijacking in
which key members of the CCRSG, especially Jiang Qing, car-
ried out ultraleftist policies for their own political gains in the name
of Chairman Mao Zedong. Regarding college campuses as the
CCRSG’s only base, the Combat Team accused the radical faction
of the CCP leadership of alienating the great majority of “conserva-
tive” workers, peasants, and soldiers who were actually resistant to
the Cultural Revolution. They also detected the conflict between the
CCRSG and Premier Zhou Enlai and supported Zhou. On 6 Septem-
ber 1967, Kang Sheng denounced the Single Spark Combat Team as
SIX FACTORIES AND TWO UNIVERSITIES ° 259
a counterrevolutionary organization. Its key members were arrested
on 12 September. The case against this organization was redressed
after the Cultural Revolution.
SIX FACTORIES AND TWO UNIVERSITIES (liuchang erxiao).
This is a common reference to the institutions to which Chairman
Mao Zedong dispatched personnel of the PLA 8341 Unit, the central
leaders’ guards regiment, to conduct experiments with the tasks of
the Cultural Revolution called “struggle, criticism, reform” so that
models might be set up for the whole country. The six factories were
Beijing Knitting and Weaving General Plant, Beijing Xinhua Printing
Factory, Beijing No. 3 Chemical Factory, Beijing Beijiao Timber Mill,
Beijing February 7 Locomotive Factory, and Beijing Nankou Locomo-
tive and Machinery Plant. The two universities were Peking University
and Tsinghua University.
The experiments began in early 1968 when the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) teams were beginning to be dispatched to the factories.
From mid-1968 to the early 1970s, a series of reports were written
about the ways Mao’s policies were carried out in these institutions,
which came to be known as the “experiences of the six factories and
two universities.’ As accounts of activities to be emulated, some of
the reports were distributed nationwide as documents of the CCP
Central Committee, often with Mao’s comments, including his admo-
nition against torture and his advice to “offer a way out” for intel-
lectuals. And some others were published with striking headlines in
the party organs People’s Daily and Red Flag.
While in some ways having served the purpose of regulating the
otherwise completely haphazard and violent actions of mass organi-
zations across the country, these reported models themselves were
highly problematic. Most of them still emphasized class struggle,
and many examples of implementing moderate policies turned out
to be fake. For instance, the well-known report of Tsinghua Univer-
sity (dated 20 January 1969) that focuses on gentler approaches to
intellectuals demonstrates ways of “reeducating” (as compared to
“denouncing’’) intellectuals and “offering them a way out.” However,
in reality, more than a fifth of the staff members in Tsinghua were
investigated as special cases, 178 of them were named class enemies,
and more than 10 people died of persecution during the first two
months of the Rectify the Class Ranks movement. After the Cultural
260 © SIX REGULATIONS OF PUBLIC SECURITY
Revolution, Tsinghua party committee declared all the persecution
cases wrongful and, at the same time, concluded that the report of
20 January 1969 was falsified. The post-Cultural Revolution Chinese
government came to similar conclusions about most of the so-called
experiences of the six factories and two universities.
SIX REGULATIONS OF PUBLIC SECURITY (gongan liutiao).
See REGULATIONS ON STRENGTHENING PUBLIC SECURITY
WORK DURING THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL
REVOLUTION.
SIXTEEN ARTICLES (shiliu tiao). This was a common reference
to the 16-part “Resolutions of the CCP Central Committee Con-
cerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Adopted at the
Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee on 8
August 1966, the Sixteen Articles, along with the May 16 Circular,
was named a “programmatic document” providing guidelines for the
Cultural Revolution. The document defines the tasks of the Revolu-
tion as “struggle, criticism, reform;” that is, to struggle against the
capitalist-roaders (“those in power within the party who are taking
the capitalist road”), to criticize bourgeois academic authorities and
bourgeois ideology, and to conduct reform in education, literary and
art production, and other social institutions. The document calls on
party leadership at all levels to mobilize the masses and encourage
them to express their views freely by writing big-character posters
and participating in great debates and to expose all “cow-demons and
snake-spirits” (that is, class enemies). This, according to the docu-
ment, is the way of the masses’ self-liberation and self-education.
The Sixteen Articles also names cultural revolution groups, cultural
revolution committees, and cultural revolution congresses as tem-
porary organs of power during the Revolution. They should be mod-
eled on the Paris Commune of 1871 and established through general
elections under the leadership of the CCP. The document laments the
failure of a great number of leaders to understand the Cultural Revolu-
tion and calls for the removal of capitalist-roaders and the seizure of
power by leftist forces. On 9 August, the day after its passage at the
plenum, the Sixteen Articles appeared on the front pages of all major
newspapers in the country with banner headline in bold red characters.
Since the May 16 Circular was distributed internally at certain levels
SIXTY-ONE TRAITORS CLIQUE ° 261
of party leadership and was yet to be made public, the Sixteen Articles
became the first published official document laying out Mao Zedong’s
radical policies as guidelines for the Cultural Revolution.
SIXTY-ONE TRAITORS CLIQUE. The case of the so-called Sixty-
One Traitors Clique was framed by Kang Sheng and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) not only to bring down
ranking officials including Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, and Liu Lantao but
also to incriminate President Liu Shaoqi.
In 1936, Ke Qingshi, head of the Organization Department of the
CCP’s North China Bureau, suggested to Liu Shaoqi, representative
of the CCP Central Committee (CC) at the Bureau, that the CCP
members captured by the Kuomintang and currently imprisoned at
the Beiping Branch of the Military Men’s Introspection House be
asked to sign the Announcement Renouncing Communism so that
they could be released and work for the party. Liu Shaoqi and the
North China Bureau approved Ke’s proposal and reported to the CC
accordingly. Zhang Wentian, general secretary of the CCP, and the
CC approved it as well. After Bo Yibo and his fellow prisoners acted
upon the instructions from the CC and obtained their release, they
received work assignments from the CC in due course. In 1945, at
the Seventh National Congress of the CCP, the Credentials Commit-
tee ruled in the cases of 12 delegates and two alternates among the
61 that they were not to be affected by this experience and that they
met the qualifications for delegates.
In August 1966, Kang Sheng, who was actually on the Credentials
Committee at the Seventh Congress and therefore knew first hand the
truth of the case, ordered the Task Force on the Special Case of Peng
Zhen to investigate this clear and long-settled matter. In the meantime,
with Kang Sheng’s support, some Red Guards in Nankai University
“uncovered” a “clique of sixty-one traitors” as they searched through
pre-1949 newspapers of Beiping (as Beijing was called at the time).
On 16 September 1966, Kang Sheng sent Mao Zedong photocopies
of the newspapers that carried the anticommunist announcements.
Kang wrote that he had long been suspicious of the decision Liu
Shaoqi had made 30 years before, and that now evidence showed that
the decision was indeed anticommunist. Members of the CCRSG,
Jiang Qing, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu, soon joined Kang Sheng to
incite the Red Guards to probe further the case of the 61.
262 © SNAIL INCIDENT
Zhou Enlai, on the other hand, tried to persuade both Mao and
the Red Guards to do otherwise. Regarding the CCP Northwest
Bureau’s request for a ruling on a Red Guard inquiry about the
release of Liu Lantao, first secretary of the Northwest Bureau, from
the Kuomintang prison, Zhou wrote Mao on 24 November 1966,
suggesting that the CC admit that it knew this case and that the case
was already resolved. Mao then wrote, “Handle the case accord-
ingly,’ and Zhou acted immediately upon Mao’s ruling by wiring
the Northwest Bureau on behalf of the CC. Two days later, a similar
request came from the Jilin provincial party committee concerning
Zhao Lin, acting first secretary of Jilin Province and one of the 61.
To protect Zhao, Zhou Enlai responded personally by wire to the Jilin
Normal University Red Guards on 30 November, stressing the CC’s
full knowledge of Zhao Lin’s release from prison and advising them
not to make announcements or do interrogation at mass meetings and
not to distribute pamphlets or to paste up slogans.
Despite Zhou’s effort, Mao changed his original stand on this matter
and sided with Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, and their supporters. On 16
March 1967, with Mao’s approval, the CC issued the “Instructions on
Materials Concerning Such Self-Confessing Traitors as Bo Yibo, Liu
Lantao, An Ziwen, and Yang Xianzhen.” The “Instructions” ruled that
“Liu Shaoqi, with consent of Zhang Wentian and behind Chairman
Mao’s back, planned and decided upon the action of self-confessing
and betrayal taken by Bo Yibo and others.” Further attempts were made
to incriminate Liu Shaoqi. With specific instructions from Kang Sheng,
the Nankai Red Guards tried to force Zhang Wentian to make false
confessions and place all the responsibility on Liu. Zhang’s refusal led
to a 523-day virtual house arrest. An Ziwen was asked three times to
provide evidence that Liu Shaoqi was a traitor. After his third refusal,
An, who was already in jail then, was put in shackles. The instigation
of Kang Sheng and company along with the ruling of the CC on the
case of the “Clique of Sixty-One Traitors” led to a nationwide witch-
hunt to “ferret out traitors,” which resulted in widespread persecution.
On 26 December 1978, with the CC’s approval of an investigative
report filed by its organization department, the case of the 61 was
finally redressed, and its victims were rehabilitated.
SNAIL INCIDENT (woniu shijian) (1973-1974). As the United
States—China relations were beginning to be normalized thanks to
SOCIALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENT ® 263
the mutual efforts of both governments, the Fourth Machine Ministry
proposed to the CCP Central Committee (CC) in 1973 that China
import a color kinescope production line from the United States.
Upon the approval of the CC, the Fourth Machine Ministry contacted
the Corning Corporation and dispatched a 12-member fact-finding
team to the United States at the end of the year. During their visit,
each member of the delegation received a fine glass snail, a Corning
product, as a souvenir. In February 1974, more than a month after the
delegation’s return, a young cadre at the Fourth Machine Ministry
wrote Jiang Qing about the glass snails. Jiang personally came to the
Fourth Machine Ministry on 10 February and talked about the “snail
incident” as an insult to China because the choice of the gift implied
that China was moving forward at a snail’s pace. Jiang also suggested
that a protest be lodged at the newly established U.S. Liaison Office
in Beijing, that the glass snails be returned, and that the projected
acquisition of a color kinescope production line be cancelled.
In the week that followed, mass rallies denouncing the U.S. were
held at the Fourth Machine Ministry and two other ministries, and
tremendous pressure was put on Premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou instructed
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to investigate and clarify the matter
and then consented to the conclusion of the investigative report, which
was to be approved by Mao Zedong as well, that the snail is a fond
image in the eye of Americans and that the Corning Corporation’s
reception of the Chinese delegation was warm and friendly. With
Zhou’s instruction, the Politburo also met and decided to stop issuing
the script of Jiang Qing’s 10 February speech at the Fourth Machine
Ministry and to recall those that had already been issued. With these
concrete steps taken by Zhou, the disturbance caused by the so-called
snail incident was soon quieted.
SOCIALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENT (1962-1966). Also
known as the “Four Cleans” (siging) movement, this was a nation-
wide campaign following a radical line of class struggle and political
education initiated by Mao Zedong at the trend-setting Tenth Ple-
num of the CCP Eighth Central Committee in September 1962, in
response to some CCP leaders’ remedial approach to the disastrous
consequences of the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. The
movement started in late 1962. Its middle stage—the fourth year of
the projected seven years—merged with the beginning of the Great
264 © SOCIALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENT
Proletarian Cultural Revolution (which was once called the Socialist
Cultural Revolution). Its focus on the struggle against the “capitalist-
roaders” became the focus of the Cultural Revolution though the
main site of the struggle shifted in 1966 from rural areas and local
governments to the cities and higher levels of the CCP leadership.
The Socialist Education Movement had its local beginnings as a
campaign against family farming and official corruption in the prov-
inces of Hebei and Hunan and then was launched as a nationwide
campaign to “clean up accounts, warehouses, assets, and work-points”
(hence the “Four Cleans”) in communes and county-level government,
along with the urban “Five Antis” (against corruption, profiteering,
waste, decentralism, and bureaucracy) as a sideline. In 1963, the CCP
issued two documents commonly known as the “Early Ten Articles”
(May 1963) and the “Later Ten Articles” (September 1963) to guide
the movement. The “Early Ten Articles” includes Mao’s warning that
in the absence of class struggle “landlords, rich peasants, counterrevo-
lutionaries, bad elements, cow-demons and snake-spirits” would all
come out, and corrupted officials would collaborate with enemies,
which would inevitably lead to a “counterrevolutionary restoration”
on a national scale in the near future. In November 1963, government
workers as well as college professors and students were organized into
work teams and sent to the countryside to help carry out the campaign.
Leaders of these work teams included ranking officials such as Chen
Boda and Wang Guangmei, wife of President Liu Shaoqi. Wang
Guangmei’s work report, the “Taoyuan Experience,’ induced Liu
Shaoqi’s remark that the party branch at the Taoyuan production bri-
gade of Luwangzhuang Commune in Hebei Province was “basically
not communist.” Liu passed the report to Mao. It was later distributed
among party members as a work model for the Socialist Education
Movement.
From 15 December 1964 to 14 January 1965, the CCP Politburo
held a work meeting to assess the ongoing Socialist Education Move-
ment. At one of the few sessions he attended, Mao criticized Liu
Shaoqi for complicating and therefore obscuring the main issue of the
campaign with the so-called overlapping contradictions while failing
to acknowledge the contradiction between socialism and capitalism as
the essence of class struggle in the Socialist Education Movement. At
Mao’s suggestion, the Politburo adopted a document entitled “Some
Current Problems Raised in the Socialist Education Movement,” also
“SONG OF THE EDUCATED YOUTHS OF NANJING” ® 265
known as the “Twenty-Three Articles,’ to override all the previous
documents. The “Four Cleans” is redefined in this document as the
“purification of politics, economics, organization, and ideology.” The
key differences between Mao and Liu are reflected in Article Two,
“The Nature of the Campaign,” which includes the statement that the
“focus of this movement is to punish those in power within the party
who take the capitalist road.” The Article also states, “Of capitalist-
roaders some are in the foreground; some in the background. . .. Even
in the central government there are those who are against socialism.”
For the first time since the Socialist Education Movement began,
capitalist-roaders were named as the main target. The same point was
to be emphasized in the party guideline for the Cultural Revolution,
the Sixteen Articles.
By the end of 1965, the Socialist Education Movement had been
carried out in about a third of the counties and communes in the
nation. During the first half of 1966, members of “Four Cleans” work
teams were called back to the cities to participate in the Cultural
Revolution. The Socialist Education Movement ended without an
official closure.
“SONG OF THE EDUCATED YOUTHS OF NANJING” (nanjing
Zhigingzhige). This is a song about the pensive mood of the edu-
cated youths in the countryside for which its author/composer Ren
Yi was persecuted. A student of Nanjing No. 5 High School, Ren
went to work in a rural area of Jiangsu Province at the end of 1968.
In May 1969, at the request of his friends in the village, Ren, a guitar
player, composed a song dedicated to educated youths, based on an
earlier melody, and put down Nanjing No. 5 High School students
as the collective author. Originally consisting of three verses and
entitled “My Hometown,” the song soon spread across China and
became so popular among educated youths in the countryside that
the title was changed by its singers in different places to “Song of the
Educated Youths” with their own place name. The song also began
to have dozens of different versions developed and modified by its
singers; the longest one had seven verses. Present in most of these
versions were the themes of parting sorrows and homesickness, of
love and friendship, and of the harshness and uncertainty of life.
In just a few months after its original creation, the song had become
so well known that Radio Moscow broadcast a choral version of it in
266 ® SONG SHUO
August 1969 with the title “Song of the Educated Youths of China.”
The attention of a “revisionist” country soon brought misfortune to
the original author of the song. On 19 February 1970, largely due to
the pressure from Jiang Qing, Zhang Chungqiao, and Yao Wenyuan,
Ren was arrested by the local authorities. Charged with the crime
of “composing a reactionary song and sabotaging the movement
of educated youths going up to the mountains and down to the
countryside,’ Ren was sentenced to 10 years in prison on 3 August
1970. In August 1978, the district court that had sentenced him finally
pronounced him not guilty but still judged his song as “representing
a strong petty bourgeois sentiment.”
SONG SHUO (1921-1969). Deputy head of the university depart-
ment of the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee and a major target of
what Mao Zedong called the first Marxist-Leninist big-character
poster by Nie Yuanzi and others, Song Shuo was an early victim of
the Cultural Revolution. A native of Zhejiang Province, Song joined
the CCP in 1945 while an organizer of the underground student
movement in Beijing. After 1949, he served as deputy head of the
university department of the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee and
party secretary of Beijing Industrial University. In 1964, during the
Socialist Education Movement, when Peking University President
Lu Ping and his school party committee were under attack by the
socialist education work team and by a number of philosophy depart-
ment faculty including Nie Yuanzi, the CCP Beijing Municipal Com-
mittee led by Peng Zhen stepped in to support Lu Ping and to put
down Nie and her colleagues; to assist Lu, the municipal committee
sent Song Shuo to Peking University and made him a leading mem-
ber of the socialist education work team.
Largely because of Song’s involvement in this political conflict on
the campus of Peking University, Nie and her six philosophy depart-
ment colleagues attacked him in the big-character poster “What are
Song Shuo, Lu Ping, and Peng Peiyun Really Doing in the Cultural
Revolution,” which was posted on 25 May 1966. This poster accuses
Song, Lu, and Peng of conspiring with the Beijing municipal com-
mittee to suppress the revolutionary ideas and activities of the masses
and mislead the ongoing Cultural Revolution on campus. On 2 June
1966, a People’s Daily commentary names Song a member of the
Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique. On 3 June, the newly
SS FENGQING INCIDENT ° 267
organized CCP Beijing Municipal Committee announced a decision
to remove Song Shuo from office. Song, then, became a main target
of endless struggle meetings and incarceration. He died of lung can-
cer on 29 October 1969. His name was cleared in 1979 by the CCP
Beijing Municipal Committee.
SPRING SEEDLING (chunmiao). Directed by Xie Jin and others
and produced by Shanghai Film Studio in 1975, Spring Seedling was
the first feature film set in the Cultural Revolution. Its release was
celebrated by the ultraleftist-controlled official media but criticized
by Deng Xiaoping, whose judgment of the film became his liabil-
ity during the campaign to counterattack the right-deviationist
reversal-of-verdicts trend. The film was adapted from a play about a
barefoot doctor fighting against a revisionist line in health care and
seizing power in a commune hospital. To make insinuations against
Deng Xiaoping, however, Xu Jingxian, a leader of the CCP Shang-
hai municipal committee and a close ally of the Jiang Qing group,
instructed the film crew to change the character of the old hospital
director from a problematic, error-making, and yet ultimately savable
cadre into an “unrepentant” capitalist-roader. When the film was
being previewed by party leaders before its public release, Deng was
said to have pronounced it “ultraleftist” and left in the middle of the
preview session. After Deng was dismissed from office for the sec-
ond time in January 1976, the writing groups of the Gang of Four
criticized his view on the film in several articles. But, eventually, the
post-Cultural Revolution Chinese leadership concurred with Deng’s
view and dismissed Spring Seedling as the first conspiratorial film
made under the influence of the Gang of Four.
SS FENGQING INCIDENT (fenggqinglun shijian) (1974). The
maiden voyage of the SS Fengging, a Chinese-made 10,000-ton
oceangoing freighter, was taken by Jiang Qing and her supporters
as an opportunity for making insinuations against Zhou Enlai and
Deng Xiaoping for promoting a “worship of foreign things” and
adopting a “slavish comprador philosophy.” The aggressiveness of
the attack led to a direct confrontation between Deng Xiaoping and
Jiang Qing at a Politburo meeting on 17 October 1974 and eventu-
ally to Mao Zedong’s admonition to Wang Hongwen not to follow
Jiang Qing.
268 © SS FENGQING INCIDENT
In early 1974, as the Shanghai branch of the China Oceangoing
Transportation Company, a state agency under the Ministry of Trans-
portation, was checking the SS Fengqing upon delivery, their ques-
tions were interpreted as a sign of “worshipping things foreign.”
After the freighter departed from the port of Shanghai on 4 May, and
especially as it sailed past the turbulent waters of the Cape of Good
Hope, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chungqiao complained about what
they considered to be less-than-adequate news coverage and decided
to make the SS Fengging’s homecoming a huge political event—an
occasion for both celebration and attack. The ship arrived on 30 Sep-
tember, but, concerned that the coverage of the 1 October National
Day celebrations might overshadow that of the SS Fengqing, Yao
Wenyuan made arrangements so that there would be no news report
about the ship’s homecoming until 9 October. On 12 October, the
Shanghai Liberation Daily and Wenhui Daily carried long articles
celebrating the successful completion of the SS Fengqing’s first voy-
age. These articles characterized the development of shipbuilding in
modern Chinese history as a series of struggles between those who
worship Confucianism and foreign things and patriots who oppose
Confucianism. Aiming to implicate Zhou Enlai by way of allusory
historiography, the authors of these articles named a number of
historical personages from the Qing officials Zeng Guofan and Li
Hongzhang to the denounced communist leaders Liu Shaoqi and
Lin Biao as pursuers of “a slavish comprador philosophy.” “As to
shipbuilding,” the authors wrote, “they held that building ships was
not as good as purchasing them and that purchasing was not as good
as chartering. They all carried out a policy of national betrayal.”
On 14 October, Jiang Qing and her followers received a long report
on Li Guotang and Gu Wenguang, two cadres from Beijing with
assignments onboard the SS Fengging during its first voyage. Accord-
ing to the report, during the voyage Li and Gu expressed reservations
about the ultraleftists’ criticism of the State Council and Ministry of
Transportation policy of shipbuilding and purchasing; they considered
the combination of building and purchasing as both practical and nec-
essary and refused to characterize it as a policy of “national betrayal.”
Jiang Qing singled out Li Guotang, deputy political commissar of the
SS Fengqing crew, along with the Ministry of Transportation and the
State Council, as targets of her “proletarian indignation” and wrote
furious comments, with which Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and
STRUGGLE AGAINST ® 269
Wang Hongwen invariably concurred. Due to the comments from the
Gang of Four, Li and Gu were struggled against at mass rallies, and
the “Li-Gu incident” was termed a “reactionary political incident.”
In the meantime, Jiang Qing brought the issue to the Politburo.
At a Politburo meeting on the evening of 17 October, Jiang and her
supporters pressed Deng Xiaoping for an opinion on the SS Feng-
qing incident. Deng said the issue required further investigation that
was actually being undertaken. In response to Jiang Qing’s further
question of whether he was for or against criticizing a “slavish
comprador philosophy,’ Deng retorted: How could the Politburo
members cooperate, since you impose your views on others? Should
everyone write down an opinion in agreement with yours? The four
of the Jiang group met after the Politburo meeting and decided that
Wang Hongwen fly to Changsha, Hunan, to relate to Mao their ver-
sion of the Politburo meeting before Deng Xiaoping could give his.
The purpose of the trip, according to Wang’s later confession, was
to prevent Deng from becoming the first deputy premier, since such
had long been Zhou Enlai’s wish and since Mao had just made a pro-
posal earlier in October that Deng be given that important position in
charge of the central government’s daily affairs while Premier Zhou
was in the hospital for cancer treatment. In his conversation with
Mao the following day, Wang Hongwen described the 17 October
Politburo meeting as another Lushan Conference of 1970 (in which
the Jiang Qing group was under attack). Wang also informed Mao of
Zhou Enlai’s frequent meetings with Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying,
Li Xiannian, and others and offered his suspicion that these meet-
ings might concern personnel issues to be finalized in the forthcoming
Fourth National People’s Congress. Much to Wang’s disappoint-
ment, Mao did not side with the Jiang Qing group this time as he
did at the Lushan Conference; instead, he advised Wang to talk more
with Premier Zhou and Marshall Ye, to be careful about Jiang Qing,
and not to follow her. These words from Mao sufficiently put the SS
Fenggqing Incident to an end.
STRUGGLE AGAINST (dou or pidou). A commonly used term dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution, especially in its early stages, to “struggle
against” someone means to denounce and criticize the person pub-
licly in a group meeting or at a mass rally. “Struggle meeting,” the
name of such a gathering, derives from the verbal phrase “struggle
270 © STRUGGLE, CRITICISM, REFORM
against.” In addition to verbal harassment, a struggle meeting often
involved physical abuse of the victims. See also JET PLANE STYLE;
VIOLENT STRUGGLE.
STRUGGLE, CRITICISM, REFORM (dou pi gai). This is a brief
reference to the tasks of the Cultural Revolution proposed by the CCP
Central Committee in August 1966. See SIXTEEN ARTICLES.
STRUGGLE MEETING (duozhenghui or pidouhui). This is the
name for any group meeting or mass rally at which people labeled
“class enemies” were “struggled against” during the Cultural Revo-
lution. The victims at such a meeting were usually forced to stand with
heads hung or kneel down on the edge of a raised platform facing the
crowd. They were often forced to hang a big sign board from the neck
with a denunciatory label written on it and with the victim’s name
crossed out in red ink. On some occasions, there were guards standing
behind them and holding their arms in a humiliating and painful posi-
tion called the “jet plane style.” Sometimes, the victims were forced
to wear humiliating attire, as in the case of Wang Guangmei, wife of
President Liu Shaoqi, among 300 alleged class enemies and “cow-
demons and snake-spirits” at a rally of 300,000 people. Accusatory
speeches were read aloud at struggle meetings, with intermittent
slogan-shouting. The victims were often subjected to brutal physical
abuse at such meetings. In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution,
the army belt with a bronze buckle was the Red Guards’ favorite
instrument of torture for such occasions. There were numerous cases,
especially in summer and autumn 1966, in which victims committed
suicide after a struggle meeting.
SUMMARY OF THE SYMPOSIUM CONVENED BY COM-
RADE JIANG QING AT THE BEHEST OF COMRADE LIN
BIAO ON THE WORK OF LITERATURE AND ARTS IN
ARMED FORCES (Lin Biao tongzhi weituo Jiang Qing tongzhi
Zhaokai de budui wenyi gongzuo zuotanhui jiyao). This is one of
the key documents with which Mao Zedong made a foray into the
field of literature and the arts so as to launch the Cultural Revolution.
At the request of Jiang Qing in Mao’s name, Lin Biao endorsed
her proposal to hold a symposium on 2-20 February 1966 with four
ranking officers in charge of the work of literature and the arts in the
“SUSPECTING ALL” è 271
armed forces. During the 19 days of the symposium, Jiang watched
films with the participants, took them to dramatic performances, led
the study sessions of Mao’s works concerning literature and the arts,
and conducted discussions and interviews. The summary report of the
symposium, which was twice revised by Chen Boda, Zhang Chun-
qiao, and two other officials and three-times edited by Mao himself,
reflects Jiang Qing’s harsh judgment on China’s literary and art pro-
ductions since 1949. The final version of the Summary was issued by
the CCP Central Committee on 10 April 1966 to the provincial and
ministerial party committees.
According to the Summary, almost all of the literary and artistic
works created in the first 16 years of the PRC were politically prob-
lematic because they were dictated by an “anti-party and anti-socialist
black line in opposition to the thought of Chairman Mao, a black line
that combines bourgeois literary theory and modern revisionist literary
theory with the so-called Literature and Arts of the 1930s.” This was
the first time that such a completely negative assessment of the state of
literature and the arts appeared in an official document. More specifi-
cally, the Summary enumerates the Eight Black Theories dominating
the field of literature and arts, which were to become guidelines in the
ensuing militant attacks upon writers and artists during the Cultural
Revolution. In contrast to such slandering of the majority of writers
and artists, the Summary celebrates the rise of “modern revolutionary
Peking operas,” products of Jiang Qing’s “experimental fields.” The
flattering of Jiang Qing in the Summary as an inspiring reader of Mao
Zedong Thought and an experienced worker in the fields of art and
literature served to prepare her rise on China’s political scene during
the Cultural Revolution.
“SUSPECTING ALL” (huaiyi yigie). Also worded with an additional
phrase as “suspecting all, overthrowing all,” the slogan was embraced
by many Red Guards in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.
The story of Karl Marx’s conversations with his daughter in which
the father names “Suspect all” as his favorite motto made the slogan
popular among rebellious youths. In summer and fall 1966, several
big-character posters were written by both Old Red Guards and
rebels to promote thoroughgoing skepticism as a guiding principle of
the mass movement. Tao Zhu, then number four in rank in the CCP
central leadership, voiced conditional endorsement for the slogan in
272 © “SWEEP AWAY ALL COW-DEMONS AND SNAKE-SPIRITS”
step with Chairman Mao Zedong’s call upon the masses to dismantle
old party and state apparatuses. Since revolutionary committees
were beginning to be established as new organs of power in early
1967, however, CCP leaders began to talk about the slogan in their
public speeches as anarchistic and “Left in form but Right in essence.”
According to a speech Zhang Chunqiao gave on 1 February 1967, it
was a Strategic decision of the CCP central leadership not to denounce
the slogan earlier because, at that time, a negative response to the slo-
gan from the central leadership might have been used by those still in
power as an excuse to suppress the ongoing mass movement. Later in
the year, in an article published in the 8 September 1967 issue of the
People’s Daily, Yao Wenyuan took Tao Zhu’s earlier remark out of
context and charged him with the crimes of using the slogan to turn
the spearhead of the mass movement against Mao. With the publica-
tion of this article, “suspecting all” as a popular slogan was officially
outlawed.
“SWEEP AWAY ALL COW-DEMONS AND SNAKE-SPIRITS”
(hengsao yiqie niuguisheshen). Written under the direction of Chen
Boda, head of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG) and leader of the work group for People’s Daily, and also
revised by Chen himself, this notoriously titled piece was a People’s
Daily editorial published on 1 June 1966, which served publically
to inaugurate the Cultural Revolution. While attempting to explain
the ideological and cultural spheres as the main battleground of class
struggle after the proletariat took power and to define the Cultural
Revolution as such a battle, the article specifies in the beginning
paragraphs “bourgeois experts, scholars, and academic authorities”
as major enemies (referred to as “cow-demons and snake-spirits’’)
to be swept away. The editorial also calls on the masses to crusade
against “old ideas, old cultures, old customs, and old habits” of the
exploiting classes. These terms were introduced for the first time
and soon became known as the “Four Olds” in popular vocabulary.
As one of the most influential pieces of political writing during the
Cultural Revolution, this editorial made Chinese intellectuals (teach-
ers, writers, and artists), instead of party officials (dangquanpai) as
specified in the CCP document May 16 Circular, initial targets of
violent attacks by the Red Guards and, with its condemnation of
the “Four Olds,” caused unprecedented damage to traditional culture.
TAN HOULAN ° 273
The official endorsement of the term “cow-demons and snake-spirits”
served to dehumanize the targets of the campaign and contributed to
the widespread abuse of innocent people.
zT-
TAN HOULAN (1937-1982). One of the well-known “five Red Guard
leaders” in Beijing, Tan was head of the mass organization Jinggang
Mountain Commune at Beijing Normal University and a prominent
leader of the Capital College Red Guards’ Representative Assembly
during the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Wangcheng, Hunan Province, Tan joined the CCP in
1958. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, she was a student
of political education at Beijing Normal University. Because of her
opposition to the work group at Beijing Normal, she was named a
reactionary student during the Anti-Interference campaign initiated
by the Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping leadership in late June and
early July 1966. With support from the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group (CCRSG), her name was eventually cleared. Then Tan
founded a nationally influential rebel student organization, the Jing-
gang Mountain Regiment (which later changed its name to Jinggang
Mountain Commune) ather university. The organization, with Tan as its
leader, soon became a major mass force at the service of Mao Zedong
and the CCRSG in their offensive against the so-called capitalist-
roaders during and after the Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary
Line campaign in late 1966 and early 1967.
Following instructions from Qi Benyu, of the CCRSG, Tan led
more than 200 Red Guards to Qufu, the hometown of Confucius in
Shandong Province, in November 1966 to sweep away the “Four
Olds” there. They held anti-Confucian mass rallies of 100,000 people
on 28 and 29 November. Together with local student rebels, they
destroyed thousands of tombs, stone tablets, ancient books, and valu-
able calligraphies and paintings. The historic Confucian Homestead,
Confucian Temple, and Confucian Cemetery were all vandalized. In
the chaotic years of 1967 and 1968, Tan and her organization were
closely associated with such ultraleftist party officials as Wang Li,
Guan Feng, Qi Benyu, and Lin Jie and deeply involved in nation-
wide factional violence and in the campaign to “ferret out the small
274 © TAN LIFU
handful [of capitalist-roaders] in the army.” They also closely fol-
lowed the orders of the radical officials to attack such ranking party
and state leaders as Tan Zhenlin and Luo Ruigqing. For her achieve-
ments as a student leader, Tan was named head of the Revolutionary
Committee of Beijing Normal University and appointed a member
of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary
Committee in 1967.
However, Tan’s downfall began in summer 1968 when Mao decided
to put an end to the Red Guard movement. On the early morning of
28 July 1968, Mao met with the five Red Guard leaders, including
Tan Houlan. At the meeting, Mao sent a strong signal to Tan and
others that they should exit China’s political stage. Shortly after Mao’s
reception, a Workers Propaganda Team and a PLA Propaganda
Team were sent to Beijing Normal University to take over power from
Tan and rebel students. Tan was taken into custody by the propaganda
teams from 1970 to 1975. In 1978, after the downfall of the Gang of
Four, the Beijing Public Security Bureau ordered the arrest of Tan on
a counterrevolutionary charge. Tan was released on bail for medical
treatment of cancer in summer 1981. In June 1982, five months before
her death, the Beijing People’s Prosecutor’s Office announced that, on
the grounds of Tan’s sincere confessions of her crimes, it would not
bring a suit against her. See also MAO ZEDONG—MEETING WITH
THE FIVE RED GUARD LEADERS.
TAN LIFU (1945-). Son of a ranking official, Tan was a leader of Red
Guards at Beijing Industrial University and a strong supporter of
the work group policy adopted by the central leadership under Liu
Shaoqi in summer 1966. Tan was also the most notorious advocate of
the blood lineage theory in the early stages of the Cultural Revolu-
tion. Shortly after the couplet “If the father is a hero, the son is a real
man; if the father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard” appeared at
Beijing middle schools, Tan enthusiastically embraced the couplet as
a manifestation of truth as well as a revolutionary slogan.
In the big-character poster “Words Prompted by the Antithetical
Couplet” (12 August 1966) which Tan coauthored with Liu Jing,
also a son of a ranking official, Tan suggested that the couplet as a
creation of the masses based on experience be adopted as the party’s
class line. On 20 August 1966, Tan gave a long speech at a debate
about the fate of the work group at Beijing Industrial University. In
TAN ZHENLIN ° 275
the speech, Tan called on Red Guards and students with a proletar-
ian family background to struggle against those from “bad” families,
whom he referred to as “sons-of-dogs,” “reactionary students,” and
“Rightists.” Tan’s naming of his fellow students as targets of the
Revolution served well to divert the focus of the political movement
and protect the work group and party officials, which went contrary
to the battle call Mao Zedong made early in the month for “bom-
barding the headquarters” within the party.
Already a key member of the Preparation Group of the Cultural
Revolution Committee of Beijing Industrial University largely due
to his earlier support for the work group and to his political activism,
Tan now became a political star: his 20 August speech was printed and
distributed in cities and towns across China by work groups and party
establishments at various levels and was used as a tool by work groups
and party officials for switching the main targets of the movement from
capitalist-roaders within the party to traditional class enemies of the
so-called Black Seven Categories and their children. Consequently,
political persecution and physical abuse of people, especially teachers
and students, with a “bad” family background, surged nationwide, and
“Tan Lifu” became a terrifying and infamous name. In October 1966,
Mao launched a campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line,
in which the blood lineage theory became one of the main targets of
criticism; Tan himself was named a reactionary student.
TAN ZHENLIN (1902-1983). Vice-premier in charge of agriculture
and a close associate of Premier Zhou Enlai, Tan was known for his
volcanic rage against members of the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group (CCRSG) during the February Adverse Current
of 1967. A native of Youxian, Hunan Province, Tan Zhenlin joined
the CCP in 1926 and served in various ranking positions in the Red
Army in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He conducted guerilla war-
fare against the Nationalist forces in the south after the Red Army
marched north. Later he became a division commander in the New
Fourth Army during the war of resistance against Japan and deputy
political commissar of the Third Field Army during the civil war of
the late 1940s. After 1949, Tan became governor of Zhejiang and
then of Jiangsu. He also became third secretary of the CCP East
China Bureau. Tan was transferred to Beijing in 1954, elected to the
CCP Politburo in 1958, and appointed deputy premier in 1959.
276 ® TANG WENSHENG
The most outspoken and the most quick tempered of all Zhou
Enlai’s cabinet members, Tan Zhenlin was annoyed by the politically
ambitious Jiang Qing in the early days of the Cultural Revolution
and called her the “[Empress] Wu Zetian of today’s China.” On 16
February 1967, at a top-level briefing session in Huairen Hall at the
CCP headquarters in the Zhongnanhai compound, Tan—furious with
Zhang Chunqiao and other members of the CCRSG—accused them
of persecuting veteran cadres. Calling the Cultural Revolution “the
cruelest struggle in party history,’ he vowed to fight the ultraleftists
through to the end even if the cost was imprisonment and death. The
next day, Tan wrote Lin Biao a letter reiterating his stand against
the cultural revolutionaries and venting his rage. On the night of 18
February, Mao Zedong convened part of the Politburo to a meeting,
during which he sharply criticized the veteran officials who had pro-
tested against the Cultural Revolution at the Huairen Hall briefing.
In the subsequent political campaign against the February Adverse
Current, Tan was singled out as the leader of the rebellious veteran
cadres and “struggled against” by the masses. At mass rallies, Jiang
Qing often called for Tan’s downfall. Of the marshals and deputy pre-
miers who spoke out on 16 February, Tan was the only one to be put
on a capitalist-roader list with Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Peng
Zhen, and others in a number of 1968 CCP official documents. Also
in 1968, Tan was sent to Guangxi to do manual labor.
At the end of 1972, Zhou Enlai, taking a hint from Mao, arranged
to move Tan Zhenlin back to Beijing. Tan was officially “liberated”
(jiefang) in May 1973. But any titles and positions given to him from
this point on were mostly ceremonial, including vice-chairman of
the standing committee of both the fourth (1974) and fifth (1978)
National People’s Congress and vice-chairman of the CCP Advisory
Committee (1982). Tan was formally rehabilitated by the CCP Cen-
tral Committee in January 1980. He died on 30 September 1983.
TANG WENSHENG (1943- ). A young diplomat and English inter-
preter, Tang was one of Mao Zedong’s liaisons at the Politburo in
the early 1970s and deputy head of the North America and Oceania
Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the later years of the
Cultural Revolution.
Born in New York City in 1943 and known by her English name
Nancy Tang, Tang was a daughter of the overseas CCP veteran Tang
TAO ZHU œ 277
Mingzhao. When her parents returned to China in 1950, they brought
the seven-year-old Tang Wensheng with them. Upon graduation from
the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages in 1965, Tang became an
English interpreter at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the early years
of the Cultural Revolution, Tang was a staunch conservative, sup-
porting Minister Chen Yi and Premier Zhou Enlai and opposing the
rebels and the so-called May 16 Counterrevolutionary Clique. Tang
was soon chosen by the premier as his chief English interpreter. At the
end of 1970 when Chairman Mao Zedong received the American jour-
nalist Edgar Snow, Tang began serving as Mao’s main English inter-
preter, while her colleague and friend Wang Hairong was the note
taker. Assisting Mao in his diplomatic activities, Tang was involved in
some of the most important events in the foreign affairs of the PRC
during the Cultural Revolution, including much of the work that even-
tually led to normalization of United States—China relations.
Due to her convenient access to Mao, Tang also became deeply
involved in top-level CCP politics. Leaders of all factions within the
central leadership sometimes had to depend on her, as well as on her
friend and ally Wang Hairong, for communications with Mao. At the
Tenth National Congress of the CCP (24-28 August 1973)—just two
years after she joined the CCP—Tang entered the Central Committee
(CC) as an alternate member. In 1974, she was appointed deputy head
of the North America and Oceania Department of the Ministry of For-
eign Affairs. As one of the new power-holders at the ministry, she was
also involved in the persecution of a number of innocent cadres and
government workers during a series of political campaigns.
After Mao’s death in 1976, Tang remained in office; she retained
her seat in the CC as an alternate member in August 1977 at the
Eleventh National Congress of the CCP. However, not long after the
Eleventh Congress, she was taken into custody and put under inves-
tigation. Tang was reassigned as deputy editor-in-chief of the China
Daily, the official English newpaper, in 1984 and then became direc-
tor of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Railways. Since
1999, she has been deputy chair of the All-China Federation of the
Returned Overseas Chinese.
TAO ZHU (1908-1969). Promoted to the Standing Committee of the
CCP Politburo at Mao Zedong’s suggestion, Tao ranked fourth in the
party central leadership at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth
278 © TAO ZHU
Central Committee (1—12 August 1966). He assisted Premier Zhou
Enlai in tending to daily affairs of the state and carried out certain
moderate measures during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution
before he was pronounced the nation’s “biggest royalist” and number
three capitalist-roader after Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.
A native of Qiyang, Hunan Province, and a member of the fifth
graduating class of the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy, Tao
Zhu joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1926. In 1927, he partic-
ipated in the Nanchang Uprising as a company commander. In 1930,
he led a well-known operation in Xiamen, Fujian Province, to rescue
Communists from a Kuomintang prison. Tao was arrested by the
Kuomintang in 1933 and was imprisoned until the beginning of the
war of resistance against Japan in 1937. Tao went to Yan’an in 1940
and held various ranking positions in charge of political and ideo-
logical work in the army. In 1948, Tao represented the CCP and the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) negotiating with the Kuomintang
general Fu Zuoyi for the PLA’s peaceful takeover of power in Bei-
jing. From 1949 to 1965, Tao was a top CCP official in southeastern
China whose positions included governor of Guangdong Province,
first secretary of the CCP South China Bureau, and political com-
missar of the Guangzhou Military Region. A man of letters, Tao also
published in this period two collections of essays on self-cultivation
in the spirit of communist ideals.
Tao was appointed deputy premier of the State Council in 1965. At
the enlarged Politburo sessions in May 1966, he was made executive
secretary of the CCP Central Committee (CC) Secretariat and director
of the CCP Propaganda Department (replacing Lu Dingyi). He also
became an advisor of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group
(CCRSG). With these positions, and as a member of the Politburo
Standing Committee after August, Tao Zhu worked more closely with
Zhou Enlai than with the ultraleftists in the CCRSG: on the one hand,
he talked frequently with representatives of mass organizations and
offered instructions on the Cultural Revolution as Mao intended it; on
the other hand, he helped design and enact policies to minimize the dis-
ruptive impact of the Cultural Revolution on the nation’s economy. Tao
also made attempts to protect a number of people, including the well-
known historian Professor Chen Yinque and a member of the CCRSG,
Wang Renzhong, against attacks from the masses; he was sometimes
confrontational in his meetings with Red Guards and rebels.
TENTH NATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE CCP è 279
Eventually, Tao alienated himself from the CCRSG. On 4 Janu-
ary1967, Jiang Qing attacked Tao Zhu in a public speech. On 8 Janu-
ary, Mao spoke against Tao at a meeting of central leaders, accusing
him of being dishonest, of carrying out the Liu-Deng political line, and
of promoting Liu’s and Deng’s public image. Tao was then dismissed
from office and brought down as “China’s biggest bourgeois royalist,”
“counterrevolutionary two-face,” “traitor,” along with a host of other
pejorative labels. In September 1967, Mao approved publication of
Yao Wenyuan’s article “On Two Books by Tao Zhu,” which made Tao
the highest CCP leader officially denounced at the time—before Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were denounced but yet to be named
by official media. Tao was both physically and mentally abused at
“struggle meetings.” He was sent to Anhui province in October 1968
when he became gravely ill. He died on 30 November 1969.
On 24 December 1978, the CC held a memorial service for Tao
Zhu to redress the case and to clear Tao’s name.
TENTH NATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE CCP (24-28 August
1973). Held in Beijing about two years after the downfall of Mao
Zedong’s handpicked successor Lin Biao, the Tenth National Con-
gress was a meeting of 1,249 delegates representing 2.8 million mem-
bers of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A few days before the
meeting, on 20 August 1973, the Central Committee (CC) approved
“An Investigative Report on the Counterrevolutionary Crimes of the
Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique” and expelled from the party Lin Biao,
Chen Boda, Ye Qun, Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng,
and Qiu Huizuo, all of whom except Lin and Chen were newly elected
into the Politburo at the First Plenum of the Ninth National Congress
of the CCP. However, the Tenth Congress refused to reflect on grave
errors of the Ninth Congress and of the party’s Cultural Revolution
policies in general; on the contrary, it affirmed the “correctness of both
the political and the organizational lines of the Ninth Congress.”
At the meeting Zhou Enlai, on behalf of the CC, delivered the
political report, which was drafted mostly by Zhang Chunqiao and
Yao Wenyuan and approved by Mao. The report denounced Lin Biao
and his cohorts for carrying out antiparty activities behind the façade
of Mao worship. It also acknowledged that China was still a poor
developing country and needed to build a stronger socialist economy.
Yet the report also criticized a draft version of the Ninth Congress
280 © TENTH PLENUM OF THE CCP EIGHTH CENTRAL COMMITTEE
political report, allegedly written by Chen Boda following Lin Biao’s
instructions but dismissed by Mao; the draft version was said to have
embraced Liu Shaogqi’s economism. The report thus contradicted
Zhou’s recent effort against ultraleftist policies and reaffirmed Mao’s
notion of class struggle and intraparty struggle which, according to
the report, “will last for a long period of time and will occur again ten
times, twenty times, thirty times.”
The second item on the Congress agenda was Wang Hongwen’s
report on the revision of the CCP Constitution. In the draft version of
the Constitution he submitted, and later adopted by the Congress, the
words in the Ninth Congress-approved Constitution identifying Lin
Biao as Mao’s “close comrade-in-arms and successor” were deleted.
Additions included Mao’s recent call upon party members to “go
against the tide,” a clear indication of Mao’s concern that the trend had
increasingly favored ending and negating the Cultural Revolution.
With Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Tan Zhenlin, Zhao Ziyang, and
a few other “old government” officials elected into the CC, moder-
ate and pragmatic elements in the party leadership gained some
ground at the Tenth Congress. At the opening of the Congress, Deng
Xiaoping was also elected member of the presidium. On the other
hand, the Tenth Congress saw further consolidation of power of the
cultural revolutionaries closely associated with Jiang Qing: Zhang
Chunqiao was elected general secretary of the Congress and became
member of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee. Kang Sheng
was promoted to vice-chairman of the CC. And months before the
Congress, Mao recommended Wang Hongwen to take charge of the
CCP Constitution revision group and later to chair the Congress Elec-
tion/Preparation Committee (both Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying were
under Wang’s leadership in this committee). At the First Plenum of
the CCP Tenth Central Committee held immediately after the Con-
gress, Wang was elected a member of the Politburo Standing Com-
mittee and one of the five vice-chairmen of the CC. The meteoric rise
of Wang, who was on his way to becoming a member of the “Gang
of Four,” was a major part of Mao’s plan to select, test, and train
another successor after the fall of Lin Biao.
TENTH PLENUM OF THE CCP EIGHTH CENTRAL COM-
MITTEE (24-27 September 1962). The first plenum of the CCP
Central Committee (CC) after the great famine of 1959-1962 (com-
THIRD COMMAND POST ® 281
monly known by the euphemism of “three years of natural disasters”
or “three difficult years”) that claimed 20 million lives, this meet-
ing marked a crucial transition in party policies from pragmatic
approaches rectifying the mistakes of the late 1950s Great Leap For-
ward to a radical ultraleftist line emphasizing class struggle. At the
meeting, those who supported remedial measures, such as allowing
contract production and private plots in the countryside in the early
1960s, were criticized for “taking the capitalist road.” Two commit-
tees were formed to investigate the “verdict-reversing attempts” of
the Peng Dehuai and Xi Zhongxun “antiparty cliques.” The Plenum
Bulletin contains a statement that Chairman Mao Zedong carefully
edited and revised concerning the long-lasting struggle between pro-
letarian and bourgeois classes and between socialist and capitalist
courses in postrevolution period.
The statement specifies the capitalist tendencies of a small portion
of the Chinese population and the pressures from imperialist coun-
tries as evidence of class struggle and of the danger of the restoration
of capitalism. Inevitably, it warns, both domestic and foreign bour-
geois influences will find their way into the ruling communist party
and foster revisionism (an implicit reference to the post-Stalin Soviet
liberalization) within the party. Although the economic guideline of
“readjustment, consolidation, substantiation, and upgrading,” for-
mulated by Li Fuchun and Zhou Enlai and adopted at the previous
plenum, was upheld, and although the proposal from Liu Shaoqi and
others about the “priority of economy” was accepted, Mao’s “reaf-
firmation of class struggle” at the Tenth Plenum set the tone for Chi-
nese political life in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution.
The statement concerning class struggle anticipated the late 1960s
formulation of Mao’s theory of continuing revolution under the
dictatorship of the proletariat. And the slogan “Never forget class
struggle” as a summary of the Bulletin was to become a rallying cry
during the Cultural Revolution.
THIRD COMMAND POST (sansi). This was short for the “Capital
College Red Guards Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters” (shoudu
dazhuan yuanxiao hongweibing zaofan zong silingbu). Perhaps the
most influential Red Guard alliance in Beijing’s Red Guard move-
ment, this citywide conglomerate was formed on 6 September 1966.
In order to differentiate itself from two existing college Red Guard
282 © THREE-FAMILY VILLAGE ANTI-PARTY CLIQUE
headquarters in Beijing, the coalition referred to itself as the “Red
Third Command Post (hong sansi); or “Third Command Post.” Orga-
nizations in this alliance were generally of a school of Red Guards
known as “rebels.” Their members, especially the early members,
had resisted the work groups and their policies in the early phase of
the Cultural Revolution and had therefore been repressed by those in
power, including school party committees and work groups. Another
distinctive characteristic of these organizations was their critical
stand toward the blood lineage theory promoted by some Old Red
Guards who accepted only students from the families in the Red
Five Categories to be members of their organizations. The leaders of
the Third Command Post included Kuai Dafu, of Tsinghua Univer-
sity, and Wang Dabin, of Beijing Geological Institute.
After a slow beginning due to the pressure from rival Red Guard
organizations, the alliance and its member organizations grew quickly
in October 1966 when the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reac-
tionary line started, and, with the support of the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), the Third Command Post
became a major battling force in the campaign. It also became well
known as the first mass coalition openly denouncing President Liu
Shaoqi on the streets of Beijing in October 1966 when Liu was still
in power in the public eye. With the endorsement from the CCRSG
and with their own relatively inclusive policy toward students from
politically less privileged families, many member organizations of
the alliance turned their minority status quickly into a dominant one
among competing organizations in their institutions, which made
the Third Command Post the largest Red Guard force in Beijing and
the most influential one in the country till the end of the Red Guard
movement in late 1968.
THREE-FAMILY VILLAGE ANTI-PARTY CLIQUE (sanjiacun
fandang jituan). This was the charge that cultural revolutionaries
within the CCP Central leadership brought against Deng Tuo, culture
and education secretary of the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee and
editor-in-chief of the Beijing party committee’s official journal the
Frontline, Wu Han, historian and deputy mayor of Beijing, and Liao
Mosha, director of the Department of the United Front of the CCP
Beijing Municipal Committee, in spring 1966 for the alleged con-
THREE-FAMILY VILLAGE ANTI-PARTY CLIQUE ® 283
spiracy of the three in making insinuations in their writings against
socialism and party leadership.
From 1961 to July 1964, Deng, Wu, and Liao coauthored a col-
umn called “Notes from a Three-Family Village” (sanjiacun zhaji)
in the Frontline. During this period, each of them contributed about
20 essays to the column. These pieces, often short, are wide-ranging
in topic and sometimes address the ills of the times either directly
or by embedding criticism in their discussion of history, philosophy,
culture, and literature. The column was well received by readers.
On 10 November 1965, after much preparation, the cultural revo-
lutionaries published Yao Wenyuan’s article “On the New Historical
Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” in Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily.
The article, approved by Mao Zedong and soon to become the “blast-
ing fuse” of the Cultural Revolution, accused Wu Han, the author of
the historical play, of using a story of the past to criticize the pres-
ent. Without knowing Mao’s firm support for Yao, Peng Zhen, first
secretary of Beijing municipal party committee, refused to reprint the
article in the city’s newspapers. He, as head of the Five-Person Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group, also led the Group in preparing a
policy guide—to be known as “the February Outline’”—to keep the
criticism of Wu Han and others within the realm of academia. With
the approval of the CCP Central Committee, the document was dis-
seminated to the entire nation in February 1966. Considering Peng’s
actions to be attempts to stop the progress of the Cultural Revolution,
Mao launched a major offensive against Peng Zhen and his Beijing
party committee. On several occasions in March 1966, Mao harshly
criticized the Beijing party committee, the Five-Person Group, and the
“Notes from a Three-Family Village,” prompting the cultural revolu-
tionaries to take action.
On 8 May 1966, the Liberation Army Daily and the Guangming
Daily carried articles attacking the “Notes from a Three-Family Vil-
lage.” Two days later, the Shanghai newspapers Wenhui Daily and
Liberation Daily published Yao Wenyuan’s article “On Reactionary
Nature of the Three-Family Village’s Evening Chats at Yanshan and
Notes from a Three- Family Village.” A massive nationwide campaign
against the three immediately followed. On 18 May, shortly after the
campaign started, Deng Tuo committed suicide. And, with their free-
dom lost, Wu and Liao were subject to brutal physical abuse by the
284 © “THREE LOYALTIES AND FOUR LIMITLESSNESSES”
masses at numerous struggle meetings. Wu died in prison in October
1969. Liao, also imprisoned, was the only survivor of the three. In
1979, the post-Mao Beijing party committee pronounced the verdict
of the Three-Family Village Anti-Party Clique unjust.
“THREE LOYALTIES AND FOUR LIMITLESSNESSES” (san-
zhongyu siwuxian). This was a common reference to two slogans
popular at the height of the personality cult of Chairman Mao
Zedong in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution: “Be loyal to
Chairman Mao, to Mao Zedong Thought, and to Chairman Mao’s
proletarian revolutionary line” and “Love, believe, worship, and be
loyal to Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong Thought, and Chairman Mao’s
proletarian revolutionary line without limit.”
THREE OLD PIECES (laosanpian). This was a popular reference
to the three essays of Mao Zedong that Lin Biao promoted in the
1960s as the main course for a “revolution of consciousness” and a
shortcut to studying Marxism-Leninism. The pieces are “In Memory
of Norman Bethune” (1939, a tribute to the Canadian communist Dr.
Bethune who died helping the Chinese fight the Japanese invaders);
“Serve the People” (1944, a funeral speech in memory of Zhang Side,
an altruistic communist soldier); and “The Foolish Old Man Who
Removes the Mountains” (1945, an essay on perseverance). In his talk
to ranking military officers on 18 September 1966 about “bringing
the study of Chairman Mao’s works to a new stage,” Lin Biao spoke
of the “Three Old Pieces” as works not only suitable for soldiers but
also necessary for officers to read as well; they are “easy to understand
but difficult to apply” and need to be taken as “mottoes.” Lin Biao’s
words were widely publicized by official media, especially in “Take
the “Three Old Pieces’ as a Required Course for Nurturing the New
Humanity of Communism” by the editorial department of the People’s
Daily (28 October 1966) and “The “Three Old Pieces’ as Mottoes for
a Revolutionary” by the editorial department of the Liberation Army
Daily (3 December 1966). The three essays, then, became part of the
core material for the “daily reading” (tiantiandu) of the masses. As
a result of repeated study, many, especially elementary and middle
school students, learned the Three Old Pieces by heart. The popular-
ity of these pieces also helped promote the personality cult of Mao
during the Cultural Revolution.
THREE TRIPS TO TAOFENG ° 285
THREE PROMINENCES (santuchu). This is a reference to the
formula coined by Jiang Qing for artists to follow in their creative
work: give prominence to positive characters among all characters;
give prominence to main heroes among positive characters; and give
prominence to the central character among main heroes. See also
EIGHT MODEL DRAMAS.
THREE TRIPS TO TAOFENG. The Jin opera (local opera of Shanxi
Province) Three Trips to Taofeng was named a “big poisonous weed”
and became a target of criticism nationwide in early 1974 for its alleged
attempt to overturn the Liu Shaoqi verdict and negate the Cultural
Revolution. Coauthored by artists at the provincial Cultural Bureau
of Shanxi and based on a true story told in the report, “A Horse,”
in the 25 July 1965 issue of the People’s Daily, the opera portrayed
good peasants: farmers of one production brigade offered apologies,
abundant compensation, and further production assistance to another
brigade after the former cheated the latter on a horse deal. When the
opera was staged in Beijing in late January and early February 1974,
Yu Huiyong, a close associate of Jiang Qing in the Ministry of Cul-
ture, attacked the opera on two accounts: First, “Taofeng” replaced
yet suggested “Taoyuan,” the place where not only the original true
story was said to have taken place, but also Wang Guangmei, wife
of Liu Shaoqi, led a work team conducting the Socialist Education
Movement in the mid-1960s; therefore, according to Yu, the authors
must have intended to reverse the verdict against Liu Shaoqi. Second,
with no depiction of class conflict, the opera advocated Liu Shaoqi’s
theory on the extinction of class struggle.
On 28 February, a long critique of the opera by a writing team,
with Yao Wenyuan’s editorial touches and Jiang Qing and Zhang
Chungqiao’s approval, appeared in the People’s Daily. The article
was carried in 32 major newspapers across the nation. Its views were
echoed in more than 500 pieces of criticism. More than 30 pieces of
fiction and drama were labeled “copies of Three Trips to Taofeng” and
criticized. Titles with “tao” (peach) or “ma” (horse) in them became
suspect. Xie Zhenhua, first party secretary of Shanxi Province was
verbally abused by Jiang Qing and Wang Hongwen and denounced
by the masses in his provincial capital. The main author Jia Ke was
dismissed from his official post at the provincial Cultural Bureau. And
the young critic Zhao Yunlong from Shanxi was harassed to death
286 © TIAN HAN
because of his unpublished article that was mildly critical of Jiang
Qing’s ideas of literature and arts. The literary inquisition and the
political persecution related to Three Trips to Taofeng were part of the
movement that the Jiang Qing group had attempted to mount against
an alleged “return of the black line” in literature and arts. The case of
Three Trips to Taofeng was in fact fabricated: Taoyuan was not the
place where the real story took place, as Yu Huiyong suggested, and
therefore the Wang Guangmei connection was completely false.
TIAN HAN (1898-1968). Playwright, president of the China Asso-
ciation of Dramatists, and vice-president of the China Federation of
Literary and Art Circles, Tian Han was attacked during the Cultural
Revolution both for his play writing and for his being one of the Four
Fellows allegedly antagonistic to, and ridiculed by, the revered mod-
ern Chinese writer Lu Xun in the 1930s.
Born in Changsha, Hunan Province, Tian Han was educated in nor-
mal schools in both Changsha, China, and Tokyo, Japan, and estab-
lished himself as a playwright in Shanghai in the 1920s. He joined
the League of Leftist Writers in 1930 and became a member of the
CCP in 1932. The song “March of the Volunteers” (yiyongjun jinx-
ingqu), which Tian Han wrote in 1934 for a film, was so popular and
spiritually uplifting as to become the national anthem of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.
After the founding of the PRC, Tian was given a number of ranking
administrative and honorary positions. In the meantime, Tian contin-
ued to write plays and operas, mostly based on historical or legendary
material. One of these works finally caused problems for him: the
historical drama Xie Yaohuan was named a “big poisonous weed”
in a long article published in the People’s Daily on 1 February 1966.
Tian Han was considered reactionary because, along with Wu Han,
Tian was said to be “pleading in the name of the people” (weimin qing-
ming) against the CCP’s mistakes and misrule. During the Cultural
Revolution, Tian’s association with Zhou Yang, Xia Yan, and Yang
Hansheng in the 1930s, dismissed by the sharp-tongued Lu Xun as the
“Four Fellows,” became a crime. Tian Han was struggled against by
the masses and abused both verbally and physically. He was impris-
oned without due process of law. Tian died in prison on 10 December
1968. A memorial service was held by the China Federation of Liter-
ary and Art Circles in April 1979 to clear Tian Han’s name.
TIANANMEN INCIDENT ° 287
TIANANMEN INCIDENT (1976). Also known as the Tiananmen
Square Incident, the gathering of millions of people at Tiananmen
Square during the traditional Qingming festival season in early April
1976 was at once an outpouring of grief over the death of Premier
Zhou Enlai and a mass protest against the cultural revolutionaries
within the CCP leadership—namely the Jiang Qing group supported
by Chairman Mao Zedong. Branded “counterrevolutionary” by the
CCP central leadership at the time but formally redressed two years
after the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Incident, as part of a
broader April 5 Movement in urban China, not only pronounced the
bankruptcy of the Cultural Revolution but also marked the first time
that ordinary citizens came together and challenged the regime.
The death of Zhou Enlai on 8 January 1976 caused profound sorrow
in the nation. Most people sympathized with the premier as he pushed
for China’s modernization program but was constantly abused by the
cultural revolutionaries within the central leadership. Sorrow turned
into indignation when orders came from the party leadership restrict-
ing mourning activities. In late February, citizens of Beijing, Shanghai,
and other major cities were beginning to conduct mourning activities
in defiance. People were further enraged when the Wenhui Daily, a
newspaper controlled by Jiang Qing and her supporters in Shanghai,
attempted twice in March to defame the late premier by insinuation.
On 28 March, college students and teachers at Nanjing University
first turned a mourning ritual into an openly political act challeng-
ing the ultraleftists in Beijing. The spirit and the strategy of what
was to be known as the Nanjing Incident soon spread to other cit-
ies, including Beijing. In late March and early April, despite orders
from the central leadership forbidding mourning, people in Beijing
streamed into Tiananmen Square and gathered around the Monu-
ment of People’s Heroes. By official estimate, more than two million
people visited the square on the Qingming Festival Day (4 April in
1976) alone. Scrolls with highly charged elegies commemorating
Zhou and denouncing Jiang Qing and her supporters were hanging
on wreaths and from trees. Political statements were composed as
poems and were posted on the base of the Monument and on lamp
posts and tree trunks. Some people were giving political speeches or
chanting poems, while others were listening and applauding. Such a
broad sharing of sorrow and spontaneous political engagement was
unprecedented in China’s recent history.
288 © TIANANMEN POEMS
In the meantime, the central leaders were preparing for a crack-
down. Plainclothes police were sent to the square to take pictures,
copy poems, and record speeches. The Politburo, led by Hua Guo-
feng, met on the evening of 4 April and came to the conclusion that
what was taking place at the center of Beijing was a premeditated
and well-organized counterrevolutionary act. With Mao’s approval,
8,000 police and militia men and 200 vehicles were deployed in the
early morning of 5 April to clear the square of all wreaths, scrolls,
and flowers, and 57 citizens guarding the wreaths at the square were
arrested.
During the day on 5 April, some citizens came back to the square
and demanded the return of the wreaths and the release of their
comrades. Clashes occurred between civilians and the police. Some
police vehicles were turned over and burnt. The Workers Militia
Headquarters near the square was also set on fire by the angry crowd.
In the evening, Chairman of Beijing Revolutionary Committee Wu
De’s speech was repeatedly broadcast at Tiananmen Square labeling
the event at the square as reactionary and urging people to leave.
Late that evening, more than 200 citizens remaining in the square
were severely beaten and were taken away by the combined force
of police, militia men, and PLA soldiers. On the evening of 7 April,
the Politburo met and, at Mao’s proposal, passed two resolutions:
that Hua Guofeng be appointed the first deputy chairman of the CCP
Central Committee (CC) and the premier of the State Council and
that Deng Xiaoping, whose name was mentioned in association with
the “counterrevolutionary event” at Tiananmen Square, be dismissed
from his posts in both the party and the state. In the weeks that fol-
lowed, extensive investigations and arrests took place in Beijing and
other cities.
At the Third Plenum of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee
held in December 1978, the official reassessment was made that the
“Tiananmen Incident of 1976 was entirely a revolutionary event,” and
the decision was reached that the earlier erroneous resolutions of the
CC be withdrawn.
TIANANMEN POEMS. An anthology of poems posted or chanted at
Tiananmen Square during the April 5 Movement (1976), the Tianan-
men Poems was edited by Tong Huaizhou and published in 1978 by
“TO REBEL IS JUSTIFIED” © 289
People’s Literature Press. Tong Huaizhou, the penname adopted by
the 16 faculty members at Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute
who collected the poems, puns on “sharing memories [of Premier]
Zhou” and strikes the major theme of the poems. The 1978 edition
was based on a widely distributed and enormously popular two-
volume Revolutionary Poems edited by the same group and unof-
ficially published in 1977. The collection includes literary pieces in a
variety of poetic forms, such as classical and modern poems, songs,
elegiac couplets, and memorial speeches.
In addition to paying homage to the late Premier Zhou Enlai,
many of these works are an outlet of rage of the authors against the
ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership, especially Mao Zedong’s
closest followers and Zhou’s political enemies Jiang Qing, Zhang
Chungqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, who are referred to in these poems
as “careerists,” “conspirators,” “monsters,” and “demons.” The offi-
cially repressed and privately censored resentment of the populous
toward the Cultural Revolution finds its expression for the first time,
which also marks a turning point for Chinese literature and art dur-
ing the turbulent decade. Despite the government’s repressive mea-
sures, including orders to search for and confiscate the Tiananmen
poems, these highly political and emotional pieces were treasured
by readers and were secretly preserved and circulated throughout
China. Eventually, the post-Mao leadership rehabilitated the Tianan-
men Incident in December 1978—soon after the publication of the
Tiananmen Poems.
“TO REBEL IS JUSTIFIED” (zaofan youli). A popular slogan of the
Red Guards and rebels during the Cultural Revolution, these words
were first pronounced by Mao Zedong in a speech he delivered in
Yan’an on 20 December 1939 to mark the 60th birthday of Joseph
Stalin: “The manifold theories of Marxism in the end come down to
one sentence: ‘to rebel is justified’ . . . Following this theory, we revolt,
we struggle, and we build socialism.” The CCP organ People’s Daily
first published this quotation on 5 June 1966, which inspired consider-
able enthusiasm and violence of the Red Guards in their attacks upon
the Black Seven Categories and Four Olds in the first wave of the
Cultural Revolution. In autumn and winter 1966, during the campaign
to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line, the four-character slogan
290 © TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY 4-14 FACTION
developed into an eight-character couplet: “Revolution is no crime
(geming wuzui); to rebel is justified,’ and became even more popular.
It was chanted everywhere in China by rebels at struggle meetings
against capitalist-roaders.
TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY 4-14 FACTION. See ZHOU QUAN
YING.
TWELFTH PLENUM OF THE CCP EIGHTH CENTRAL COM-
MITTEE (13-31 October 1968). Also known as the “Enlarged
Twelfth Plenum,” the meeting was held in Beijing to expel Liu Shaoqi
from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and to make preparations
for the Ninth National Congress of the CCP. The legitimacy of the
plenum organization was highly questionable under the existing CCP
Constitution: A majority of the Central Committee (CC) members
and alternate members having been denounced and criticized by this
time, only 40 of the 87 living CC members and 19 of the 86 living
alternate members were allowed to attend the plenum. Ten of the
19 attending alternate members had to be selected to fill the vacan-
cies as full members so that the total number of delegates from the
Eighth Central Committee would be more than 50%. The plenum was
enlarged to include non-CC members that made up over 57% of the
delegates; they were granted the right to vote as well.
In his opening speech, Chairman Mao Zedong called upon the dele-
gates to assess the Cultural Revolution, while his own words made any
critical judgment virtually impossible: “this Great Cultural Revolution
is entirely necessary and extraordinarily timely in strengthening the
proletarian dictatorship, preventing the restoration of capitalism, and
building socialism.’ As the question of assessment became the focus of
small group discussions, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and their close asso-
ciates seized the opportunity to attack the top-ranking leaders Chen
Yi, Ye Jianying, Li Fuchun, Li Xiannian, Xu Xiangqian, and Nie
Rongzhen as major forces in the anti-Cultural Revolution “February
Adverse Current” of 1967. Zhu De, Chen Yun, and Deng Zihui were
also attacked for their “consistent right deviation.’ The Plenum Com-
muniqué celebrated the defeat of the February Adverse Current and
of the “evil wind” of spring 1968—allegedly stirred up by military
generals Yang Chengwu, Yu Lijin, and Fu Chongbi to reverse the
TWO NEWSPAPERS AND ONE JOURNAL @ 291
verdict on the February Adverse Current—as a great victory of Mao’s
proletarian revolutionary line over the bourgeois reactionary one.
The CC Special Cases Investigation Group led by Zhou Enlai and
controlled by Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Xie Fuzhi submitted “An
Investigative Report on the Crimes of the Traitor, Spy, and Renegade
Liu Shaoqi.” The report consisted of forced confessions, fabricated
evidence, and deliberate contrivances of accusatory material. This
document and the motion that Liu Shaoqi be permanently expelled
from the CCP were passed at the plenum. All delegates supported the
motion but Chen Shaomin, the only CC member who refused to raise
her hand when votes were taken. A proposal was made that Liu be put
on public trial and that Deng Xiaoping, the “number two capitalist-
roader,” be expelled from the party as well. But the proposal was not
adopted due to Mao’s disapproval.
Because all major newspapers carried the Plenum Communiqué
after the meeting adjourned, Liu Shaoqi was identified officially for
the first time with “China’s Khrushchev” and the “biggest capitalist-
roader within the Party,” two charges that official organs had so
far frequently cited without mentioning the name of the accused.
The downfall of Liu Shaoqi was a decisive victory for Mao over
what he called “bourgeois headquarters.” The CCP, in Mao’s judg-
ment and in the words of the Plenum Communiqué, was “finally
ready, ideologically, politically, and organizationally, for the Ninth
Congress” and for a drastic overhaul of the party leadership and the
party constitution.
TWO NEWSPAPERS AND ONE JOURNAL (liangbao yikan). This
was acommon reference to the newspapers the People’s Daily (Renmin
ribao) and the Liberation Army Daily (Jiefangjun Bao) and the journal
Red Flag (Hong Qi), three periodicals that frequently carried joint-
editorials articulating instructions of the central leadership as guide-
lines for the ongoing Cultural Revolution. The People’s Daily is the
official paper of the CCP and has been the party’s most effective
propaganda tool since its initial publication on 15 May 1946. Dur-
ing all political campaigns, including the Cultural Revolution, its
editorials were often published with the approval of Chairman Mao
Zedong, and sometimes even written by Mao himself. The Libera-
tion Army Daily is the official publication of the Central Military
292 è ULANFU
Commission—initially a weekly (1956-1958) and then a daily paper.
The paper began as early as 1961 to carry on its front page quota-
tions of Mao, which were to be assembled into the Quotations from
Chairman Mao. A harbinger of the hegemony of Mao Zedong
Thought even before the Cultural Revolution, the paper continued
to play an important role throughout. The Red Flag has been the
official theoretical journal of the CCP Central Committee since June
1958. It usually publishes articles of considerable length articulat-
ing the party’s political programs and policies. During the Cultural
Revolution, all three publications were under the tight control of the
radical faction of the CCP leadership.
-U-
ULANFU (1906-1988). The top Mongolian official of the CCP, Ulanfu
was first party secretary of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region,
a member of the Politburo, vice-premier of the State Council, and
chairman of the Nationalities Affairs Committee. He was brought
down and imprisoned in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution
for his alleged “regional nationalism.” He was also accused of leading
an “antiparty, antistate clique of the new Inner Mongolia People’s
Revolutionary Party.”
Born in the Tumet Banner of the Bayan Tala League in Inner Mon-
golia, Ulanfu distinguished himself as a revolutionary student leader
in the early 1920s. After he joined the CCP in 1925, Ulanfu went
to Moscow to study Marxism at the Sun Yat-sen University. Upon
returning to China in 1929, he worked underground in western Inner
Mongolia for some time and then was appointed to a number of lead-
ing positions in the CCP ethnic minorities front, including political
commissar of the Independent Mongol Brigade of the National Army,
provost of the Yan’an Nationalities Institute, chairman of the National-
ities Affairs Committee of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region
Government, chairman of the People’s Government of the Inner Mon-
golia Autonomous Region, and commander and political commissar
of the Inner Mongolia Self-Defense Army. He was elected an alternate
member of the Central Committee (CC) at the Seventh National Con-
gress of the CCP in 1945. After the founding of the People’s Republic
of China (PRC), Ulanfu was appointed first party secretary of the
UNDERGROUND READING MOVEMENT ® 293
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and second secretary of the CCP
North-China Bureau. He entered the Politburo as an alternate member
at the Eighth National Congress of the CCP in 1956.
Ulanfu was one of the first victims among CCP provincial leaders
at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. Since he strongly opposed
Han chauvinism and insisted on the uniqueness, and hence the real
autonomy, of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region before 1966,
the Beijing leadership accused him of promoting “regional national-
ism” and called him a “revisionist” and “ethnic splittist.” Based on this
judgment and under the guidance of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping,
the CCP North-China Bureau held a special meeting from 22 May
to 25 July 1966 to denounce Ulanfu. At the meeting, Liu and Deng
criticized Ulanfu in harsh terms for his refusal to carry out the party’s
class struggle policies in Inner Mongolia and accused him of creating
an “independent kingdom.” On 27 July, two days after the meeting,
the Bureau adopted a resolution to dismiss Ulanfu from office, pend-
ing approval of the CC. On 27 January 1967, the CC issued a docu-
ment (coded zhongfa [67] 31) transmitting the North-China Bureau’s
July 1966 report concerning Ulanfu’s mistakes. Ulanfu was now
named the biggest capitalist-roader in Inner Mongolia, and his long
imprisonment began. In 1968, during the Rectify the Class Ranks
movement, the cultural revolutionaries in the central leadership fab-
ricated evidence of a “new Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary
Party.” Ulanfu was named the leader of this organization and accused
of opposing the CCP and betraying the state. Widespread violence
and brutality in the campaign to uncover the “new Inner Mongolia
People’s Revolutionary Party” was the cause of over 16,000 deaths.
Ulanfu returned to China’s political scene in 1973 when he regained
his CC membership at the Tenth National Congress of the CCP. In
1975, he was elected vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress.
After his formal rehabilitation in 1979, Ulanfu was appointed to sev-
eral prominent positions in the central leadership, including member-
ship in the Politburo, Vice-President of the PRC, and vice-chairman
of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Ulanfu died on
8 December 1988.
UNDERGROUND READING MOVEMENT (dixia dushu yun-
dong). This refers to the widespread phenomenon of youths reading
banned books during the Cultural Revolution, especially after 1967
294 è UNDERGROUND READING MOVEMENT
when students’ initial enthusiasm about the revolution was reced-
ing and when the movement of educated youths going up to the
mountains and down to the countryside began. Due to the fact that
almost all books—except works of Mao Zedong and officially sanc-
tioned Marxist and revolutionary authors—were branded “‘feudalist,
bourgeois, and revisionist” at the time and therefore were restricted
in all library collections and were inaccessible to the public, private
collections that survived the Destroy the Four Olds movement in
the early days of the Cultural Revolution became the only source of
books outside the official canon. These books came to be circulated
among friends and sometimes even copied by hand to reach more
readers. Urban youths from the same school but sent to different rural
areas often managed to stay in touch and exchange books by getting
together while on furlough visiting their parents in the cities and by
paying one another visits in the countryside.
Prominent among the books they shared were the popularly named
“grey books and yellow books,” two series of recent foreign works
in translation, including books on Nazi Germany and Stalinist and
post-Stalin “revisionist” Russia, which were internally published
for restricted circulation before the Cultural Revolution. Readers of
the Cultural Revolution generation were particularly drawn to them
because they found in these books revealing parallels of the current
Chinese situation.
In late 1960s and early 1970s, quite a number of reading and cor-
respondence groups were formed in Beijing, Shanghai, and some
provinces. Members of these groups exchanged books and engaged
in discussion and debate over political issues of their shared interest.
Well known among these groups were the Baiyangdian poet school
and two groups censored by the government during the One Strike
and Three Antis campaign as the Hu Shoujun Clique (at Shang-
hai’s Fudan University) and the Fourth International Counter-
revolutionary Clique (a network of readers and correspondents
based in Beijing with pen pals in Shanghai and Shanxi Province).
Despite government suppression, however, the readership of the so-
called feudalist, bourgeois, and revisionist books continued to grow
as the poverty of culture deepened over the years and became more
keenly felt. And books of this kind, especially those about Germany
and Russia in the 1930s, stimulated readers as they struggled to free
“UNITED ACTION” @ 295
themselves from the shackles of official ideology and groped for a
critical perspective on the Cultural Revolution.
UNINTERRUPTED REVOLUTION (buduan geming). This was
Mao’s theory guiding the Cultural Revolution. See CONTINUING
REVOLUTION UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PRO-
LETARIAT.
“UNITED ACTION” (liandong). This was an abbreviated name for
the Capital Red Guard United Action Committee, whose members
were mostly children of ranking CCP officials. Comprised of society’s
elites, the United Action Committee was known for its members’
conceited, arrogant, and sometimes violent behavior, and bold actions
to challenge the authority of the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group (CCRSG). This organization was formed on 5 December 1966
by a group of Old Red Guards from a number of middle and high
schools in Beijing. Many of these Old Red Guards came from fami-
lies of CCP officials and were founding members of the earliest Red
Guard organizations in the country’s capital. They believed that a Red
Guard organization should only admit students from politically privi-
leged families of the Five Red Categories, that the primary task of
the Cultural Revolution was to ensure the country’s power stay in the
hands of “red descendents,” and that they themselves, as red descen-
dents, were to be tempered by experience during the Cultural Revolu-
tion so as to be prepared to succeed to the power in the future.
In the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, these Old Red Guards
were enthusiastic in waging battles against the “revisionist line” in
education and in attacking allegedly antisocialist intellectuals, “black
gang” members in the old Beijing municipal government, and tradi-
tional “class enemies” of the Five Black Categories. However, when
Mao Zedong directed the revolution to aim at those in power as the
main targets, the Old Red Guards lost their passion for the revolution
and hence lost support from the CCRSG. At this point, a new school
of Red Guards known as rebels took their place as fearless warriors.
In this new political development, their parents were under attack,
and their status as red descendents was lost. Feeling betrayed by the
revolution, especially by the radical faction of the central leadership
the CCRSG, the leaders from a dozen Old Red Guard organizations
296 © UNITED STATES-CHINA RELATIONS
in Beijing met on 27 November to analyze current political trends and
discuss strategies in response to these trends. A proposal was made
at this meeting that a committee be formed to coordinate actions for
Beijing’s Old Red Guards.
Soon after the United Action Committee was formally established
on 5 December, its members put out big-character posters on the
walls around Tiananmen Square and in several busy intersections in
Beijing protesting the purge of high-ranking officials and attacking
the radical CCRSG. In these posters, they criticized the CCRSG for
carrying out a “new bourgeois reactionary line” and called for the
restoration of Mao Zedong Thought as it was before the Cultural
Revolution. They also clashed with the CCRSG-supported rebels
on several occasions. These actions led to the detention of several
members of the United Action Committee, which in turn triggered
the move of the organization to storm the offices of the Ministry of
Public Security several times in December 1966 and January 1967.
Their open challenge to the cultural revolution faction of the central
leadership both in word and in deed provoked further reactions from
the authorities. On 17 January 1967, the United Action Committee
was named a reactionary organization. Most of its members were
soon put in prison. On 22 April, Mao Zedong, having met consider-
able protest from veteran leaders, ordered the release of all United
Action Committee members.
UNITED STATES-CHINA RELATIONS. Relations between the
United States and China underwent a dramatic change during the Cul-
tural Revolution as both governments’ perceptions of the international
geopolitics changed, especially in regard to the commonly felt threat
from the Soviet Union. U.S. President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to
China in February 1972 and the signing of a joint communiqué (known
as the “Shanghai Communiqué”) officially ended an era of hostility
and conflict that had existed between the two nations since 1949.
Hostility between the two countries since the founding of the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Korean War continued into the
mid-1960s: the U.S. was denounced by China as the world’s number-
one imperialist power, although a “paper tiger,” as Mao Zedong put
it, while China was considered by the U.S. as part of the East Bloc
sharing a communist ideology with the Soviet Union. As the China-
Soviet debate, a theoretical prelude to the Cultural Revolution,
UNITED STATES-CHINA RELATIONS @ 297
intensified, and as the relations between the two countries drastically
deteriorated, China began to call the USSR a superpower of “social
imperialism” and its leadership a “new tsar.” In Mao’s theory of three
worlds, the Soviet Union, along with the United States, was part of
the First World. In the beginning years of the Cultural Revolution,
Beijing considered both the United States and the Soviet Union as its
enemies. Toward the end of the 1960s, however, Moscow’s increas-
ingly heavy military buildup on the China-Soviet border on the one
hand and the friendly signals from Washington on the other made the
Chinese leaders reconsider their geopolitical strategies.
Subtle diplomatic gestures indicating willingness to normalize
relations between China and the United States were made by the U.S.
in 1969 soon after President Nixon took office: while armed conflicts
were taking place on the border between China and the Soviet Union,
President Nixon was requesting assistance from President Yahya Khan
of Pakistan and President Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania for mediat-
ing contact between the U.S. and China. In early 1970, ambassador-
level talks between the U.S. and China resumed in Warsaw, and in
late 1970, as Nixon was beginning to refer to China as the People’s
Republic, Chairman Mao Zedong, already acquainted with Nixon’s
intention that came through both the Romanian and the Pakistani
channels, received the American author and journalist Edgar Snow
both in public and in private and told him that Nixon was welcome
to visit Beijing in any capacity he chose. In March 1971, the Nixon
administration lifted restrictions on travel to China by U.S. citizens.
In April of the same year, improvising what was soon to be known as
ping-pong diplomacy, Mao approved the issuing of an invitation to
the U.S. ping-pong team to visit China after the World Championship
Game in Japan, and Premier Zhou Enlai gave an exceptionally warm
reception to all members of the team.
With the help of President Yahya Khan, Nixon’s National Security
Advisor Henry Kissenger made two secret visits to Beijing—in July
and October 1971. These two trips prepared President Nixon’s state
visit to China on 21-28 February 1972. Nixon met Mao and talked
with Zhou Enlai. On 27 February, the two countries issued a joint
communiqué, with both sides embracing the prospects of normal-
izing relations. The most crucial statement in the communiqué was
the U.S. acknowledgement that there was only one China and that
Taiwan was part of China. In 1973, liaison offices were set up in both
298 © UPTOTHE MOUNTAINS AND DOWN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
Beijing and Washington. Scientific and trade ties were soon estab-
lished. In 1979, three years after the Cultural Revolution, the PRC
and the U.S. finally established formal diplomatic relations.
UP TO THE MOUNTAINS AND DOWN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
(shangshan xiaxiang). Officially known as “the movement of the
educated youths going up to the mountains and down to the country-
side,” the descriptive phrase refers to the nation’s unprecedented mas-
sive relocation of urban and suburban middle-school and high-school
graduates during the Cultural Revolution, especially between 1968
and 1969 when the Red Guard generation—the middle- and high-
school old three classes (/aosanjie) of 1966, 1967, and 1968—along
with the middle-school class of 1969, left the city for the countryside.
Ideologically, the movement was supposedly part of Mao Zedong’s
Cultural Revolution project to temper book-educated youths against
the corrupting influence of the city-dwelling bourgeoisie and to bridge
the gap between the city and the country, between mental and manual
labor. Economically, though without official acknowledgement at the
time, this program might have been the government’s response to
the enormous nationwide employment crisis caused by the ongoing
Revolution.
Beginning spontaneously from the grassroots and supported by Mao
and the central and local governments in the mid-1950s, urban and
suburban youths’ moving to and settling down in the countryside actu-
ally preceded the Cultural Revolution. But it did not become a nation-
wide exodus until late 1968 when the turbulent initial stage of the
Cultural Revolution, of which urban youths had been the major force,
was coming to an end while there was still no college or employment
available for them in the cities. The movement gained momentum after
the People’s Daily published, on 22 December 1968, Mao’s directive
calling on “educated youths to go to the countryside to receive reedu-
cation from the poor and lower-middle peasants.” The year 1969 saw
more urban youths move to the countryside than in any other year,
while 1980, four years after the official termination of the Cultural
Revolution, marked the end of the movement. By then, the number of
youths who had gone to the countryside had reached 17 million.
There were two very different kinds of relocation for youths from
cities. One kind was working on a state-owned farm: on the gigantic
quasi-military farms called “production-construction corps” (jianshe
URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT ° 299
bingtuan) in such frontier provinces and minority autonomous regions
as Heilongjiang, Yunnan, and Inner Mongolia, new farm workers from
cities earned a low but guaranteed monthly salary and were entitled,
theoretically at least, to free health care and family leave. The other
kind was “joining a production team” (chadui): in a usually poverty-
stricken area of the country, youths from cities joined local peasants
in a collectively owned production unit and had to manage to survive
on their own, as local peasants did, without help from the state. The
second kind of settlement was much harder for middle and high
school graduates.
Out of desperation for his son’s hardship as he joined a produc-
tion team in the countryside, a schoolteacher named Li Qinglin, of
Fujian Province, wrote Mao Zedong on 20 December 1972, detailing
his son’s hard life in the countryside on the one hand and exposing
the corruption of officials (whose children were able to leave the
countryside and return to the city because of their parents’ connec-
tions) on the other. A brief but sympathetic response that Mao wrote
on 25 April 1973 led to a special State Council work meeting in June
1973 and the passage of new state policies that, among other things,
allowed one child in the family to stay with the parents in the city and
instituted state financial support for urban youths in the countryside.
In August 1973, the CCP Central Committee authorized a nationwide
issuance of the State Council work meeting report, and a People’s
Daily editorial called for the protection of the educated youths in
the countryside and the punishment of those who abused them. To a
certain extent, the new policies and propaganda helped improve the
living conditions and the political environment of the urban youths in
the countryside. But the improvement could not reverse the “going-
back-to-the-city trend” (fanchengfeng) that was in the forming. By
1980 when the nation’s urban youth relocation program was aban-
doned, most of those who went to the countryside earlier had already
returned to their home cities.
URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT (9 January 1967). This was a public
notice signed by 32 mass organizations in Shanghai to denounce
“economism’—a series of materialistically motivated activities
prompted by the demands that contract and temporary workers made
in late 1966 for pay raises, job security, and other benefits that regular
state employees enjoyed. The announcement assumes the authority of
300 © VIOLENT STRUGGLE
the law and government and prescribes 10 measures against the esca-
lating chaos caused by the economic malpractices of both the rebel-
ling workers and the managing government officials. These measures
include upholding Mao Zedong’s dictum to “grasp revolution and
promote production,” forbidding workers’ networking (chuanlian)
activities, postponing solutions to the problems of wages and benefits
until the end of the Cultural Revolution, and punishing those who
dare to oppose the revolution and sabotage production. The last mea-
sure is an authorization for the Shanghai municipal party committee
and bureau of public security to carry out the measures prescribed in
the announcement itself and charge whoever violates these measures
with the crime of sabotaging the Cultural Revolution.
Following Mao’s instruction, the CCP Central Committee, the State
Council, the Central Military Commission, and the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group sent the collective author of the announce-
ment a congratulatory telegram on 11 January 1967, in which these
mass organizations are praised for “taking the destiny of the proletar-
ian dictatorship and the destiny of the socialist economy firmly in
[their] own hands.” The joint authorship of a congratulatory note, or of
any document, by the four top agencies of Beijing was unprecedented.
Given such prestige, Shanghai, already both the vanguard and the
stronghold of ultraleftism, was on its way to becoming a model for
power seizure that Mao was establishing for the whole nation.
iV
VIOLENT STRUGGLE (wudou). The term refers to a common
practice, conducted mostly by Red Guards, of physically abusing
citizens denounced as class enemies in the early stages of the Cul-
tural Revolution. Victims were usually beaten at struggle meetings,
in their own homes when the residence was being searched and
ransacked by Red Guards, and on the street through which they were
forced to parade, with tall hats on their heads and huge placards hang-
ing from their necks identifying them as criminals. The broad leather
belt with a bronze buckle was the Red Guards’ favorite instrument of
torture at the time; it was used as a whip. Physical abuse and public
humiliation led to numerous deaths nationwide. During a period of
40 days from late August through September 1966, 1,772 innocent
people died of torture or suicide in the city of Beijing alone.
WANG DABIN œ% 301
“Wudou,” the Chinese original for “violent struggle,’ also means
“violent conflict” in another context. See also ARMED CONFLICT.
-W-
WANG DABIN (1944- ). One of the well-known “five Red Guard
leaders” in Beijing, Wang was head of the mass organization East-
Is-Red Commune at the Beijing Geological Institute and a prominent
leader of the Capital College Red Guards’ Representative Assem-
bly during the Cultural Revolution.
In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, Wang followed his
schoolmate Zhu Chengzhao to oppose the work group sent by the
Ministry of Geology. In August 1966, Zhu, Wang, and a few other stu-
dents formed a rebel organization called the “East-Is-Red Commune”
at the Beijing Geological Institute. At this time and during the cam-
paign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line, Mao Zedong and
the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) supported
the East-Is-Red Commune and used the organization as an effective
force in their offensive against the so-called capitalist-roaders within
the party. In December 1966, Wang Dabin and Zhu Chengzhao fol-
lowed the instructions from Qi Benyu, of the CCRSG, and led a team
to Chengdu, Sichuan Province, to kidnap Marshal Peng Dehuai.
However, after talking with Peng and reading much classified material
about the Lushan Conference of 1959, Zhu began to see problems in
party politics and the CCRSG. Because Zhu and his inner circle were
planning an offensive against the CCRSG, Wang leaked the informa-
tion to the central leaders. Zhu was soon taken into custody, and Wang
was named head of the East-Is-Red Commune and later became head
of the Revolutionary Committee of the Beijing Geological Institute.
He was also appointed as a member of the Standing Committee of
the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee. In 1967 and 1968,
Wang and his organization were deeply involved in nationwide fac-
tional violence and in the campaign to “ferret out the small handful [of
capitalist-roaders] in the army.”
Wang’s downfall began in summer 1968 when Mao decided to
end the Red Guard movement. In the early morning of 28 July 1968,
Mao held a meeting with the five Red Guard leaders, including Wang
Dabin. At the meeting, Mao sent a strong signal to Wang and oth-
ers that they should exit China’s political stage. Shortly after Mao’s
302 ® WANG DONGXING
reception, a Workers Propaganda Team and a PLA Propaganda
Team were sent to the Beijing Geological Institute to take over power
from Wang and rebel students. In 1978, Wang was arrested and
sentenced by the Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court to 9 years in
prison for instigating counterrevolutionary activities and framing and
persecuting innocent people. See also MAO ZEDONG: MEETING
WITH THE FIVE RED GUARD LEADERS.
WANG DONGXING (1916- ). Mao Zedong’s trusted top-level
security chief, Wang was promoted to the CCP Politburo during the
Cultural Revolution. He played a key role in bringing down the Gang
of Four shortly after Mao’s death but was forced to give up his active
political duties in 1980 due to his literal adherence to Mao’s legacy.
A native of Yiyang, Jiangxi Province, a member of the CCP from
1932, and a veteran Red Army officer in the Long March, Wang
was made a major general in 1955. On 11 November 1965, Wang,
while bearing the chief responsibility for the security of the central
leadership, especially that of the Zhongnanhai compound, replaced
Yang Shangkun as director of the general office of the CCP Central
Committee (CC). During the Cultural Revolution, Wang, along with
Xie Fuzhi, minister of public security, had control over the release
of personal files of the central leaders. From 1968 on, Wang served
as chief of both the CC Security Bureau and the PLA General Staff
Security Bureau.
At the Second Plenum of the CCP Ninth Central Committee
held in Lushan, Jiangxi Province, in August and September 1970,
Wang misread Mao’s intention in proposing to eliminate the office of
the national president and offered support for Lin Biao and Chen
Boda when both spoke against the proposal, implicitly attacking
Zhang Chunqiao. After Mao denounced Chen Boda and criticized
Lin Biao’s associates, Wang Dongxing began to criticize himself at
the general office of the CC and also at the gatherings of the 8341
central security troop unit, of which Wang himself was in charge.
From 14 August to 12 September 1971, Wang accompanied Mao on
his southern inspection, during which Mao spoke well of Wang’s
self-criticism and trustworthiness while making insinuations against
Lin Biao. An alternate member of the Politburo since 1969, Wang
became a regular member in 1973 at the First Plenum of the CCP
Tenth Central Committee.
WANG-GUAN-QI AFFAIR ® 303
After Mao’s death in September 1976, Wang Dongxing worked
closely with Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying to purge the Gang of
Four. His role as security chief in this episode was acknowledged
when he was elected vice-chairman of the CCP and a member of the
Politburo Standing Committee at the First Plenum of the CCP Eleventh
Central Committee in August 1977. However, Wang did not consider
the purge of the Jiang Qing group as the first step the CCP leadership
took in reversing Mao’s Cultural Revolution policies in general, and
he insisted on being literally faithful to Mao’s legacy. In 1977, he sup-
ported Hua Guofeng in promoting a slogan called “two whatever’s”
(adhere to whatever directives Mao had given and whatever decisions
Mao had made), and in 1978, he challenged Deng Xiaoping’s reform-
ist dictum, “Practice is the only test for truth.’ Wang also objected to
the CC’s reversal of verdict on the Tiananmen Incident and opposed
the reinstatement of those veteran leaders who had been dismissed or
denounced by Mao, such as Chen Yun, Peng Zhen, and Bo Yibo.
Wang’s opposition to rehabilitation and reform met with so much
critical reaction from ranking cadres in the central leadership that he
had to conduct self-criticism at the Politburo sessions in late 1978 and
resign from his position as vice-chairman of the CCP in early 1980.
At the Twelfth National Congress of the CCP (September 1982),
Wang was elected an alternate member of the CC. In 1985, and again
in 1987, he was elected to the CC’s Advisory Committee. His 1997
memoir on Mao’s conflict with Lin Biao, recording and interpreting
past events from a strictly Maoist perspective, provoked considerable
criticism from historians.
WANG-GUAN-QI AFFAIR (1967-1968). The detention and inves-
tigation of the cultural revolutionaries Wang Li and Guan Feng in
August 1967 and of Qi Benyu in January 1968 was a strategic move
Mao Zedong made to pacify the protesting senior party officials and
military leaders and hence a major setback for Mao’s own ultraleftist
policies during the Cultural Revolution.
Known as the “Three Littles” of the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group (CCRSG) in charge of propaganda, broadcasting, and
newspapers/periodicals, Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu were
among the most active members of the group. In the early stages of the
Cultural Revolution, their writing and speeches contributed greatly to
the prevalence of leftist extremism, including Red Guard violence. In
304 © WANG-GUAN-QI AFFAIR
1967, encouraged by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing and with the approval
of Mao, Wang, Guan, Qi, and some other members of the CCRSG
began to press the military to adopt Mao’s Cultural Revolution policies:
they called on the masses to “ferret out a small handful [of capitalist-
roaders] inside the army,” which met strong resistance from the rank
and file of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). They also began to
make similar radical moves in the area of foreign affairs, including
Wang Li’s notorious 7 August speech in which Wang supported the
rebels’ demand to “collar” Foreign Minister Chen Yi (here Wang was
actually rephrasing Mao’s instructions) and backed their effort to seize
power at the Ministry. As a result, the party committee office of the
Foreign Ministry was soon shut down by the rebels. Chaos in foreign
affairs was further intensified when Red Guards stormed the office of
the British Chargé in Beijing on 22 August. Weighing revolutionary
chaos against stability and order, Mao decided to sacrifice Wang and
his two close comrades to keep order and to pacify protesting PLA
officials and senior party leaders soon after he received an accusatory
report from Premier Zhou Enlai. Following Mao’s specific instruc-
tions, Zhou called a meeting on 30 August 1967 to announce Mao’s
order that Wang and Guan “take a leave and criticize themselves.” Qi
Benyu was detained later—on 13 January 1968. On 26 January, all
three were sent to the prison at Qincheng.
Their downfall was made known to the public for the first time
on 24 March 1968 by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing as they addressed an
audience of some 10,000 military officers. Both spoke vehemently
against their three former followers. According to Jiang, the three had
been working for Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Tao Zhu ever
since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Wang, Guan, and Qi,
then, became “chameleons” and “crawling insects” in public propa-
ganda. Officially, they were known as the Wang-Guan-Qi Anti-Party
Clique. In 1980, a court in Beijing named Wang Li and Guan Feng
accomplices of the Lin Biao and the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary
cliques. They were officially expelled from the CCP at the same time.
In November 1983, Qi Benyu was tried and convicted of specific
instances of slandering and persecuting innocent people and inciting
the masses to violence and destruction, including the destruction of
the Confucian Temple in the hometown of Confucius. Qi was sen-
tenced to 18 years in prison.
WANG GUANGME! ® 305
WANG GUANGMEI (1921- ). Wang suffered severely from public
humiliation, physical abuse, and 12 years of imprisonment during
the Cultural Revolution largely because she was the wife of Presi-
dent Liu Shaogqi, the so-called number one capitalist-roader in the
country.
A native of Tianjin, Wang graduated from Furen University in
Beijing in 1943 as a student of physics. In January 1946, she was
hired as an interpreter for the CCP delegation to the Beiping Military
Coordinating Bureau, an organization consisting of representatives
of the Kuomintang (the Nationalists), the CCP, and the United States
to oversee the implementation of the truce agreement between the
Nationalist and the Communist armies. Wang went to Yan’an in
October of the same year and became an interpreter for the CCP Cen-
tral Military Commission. In 1948, she joined the CCP and married
Liu Shaoqi in August. After the founding of the PRC, Wang worked
for the General Office of the CCP Central Committee (CC) as a per-
sonal secretary of Liu.
In November 1963, Wang joined the work team dispatched by the
CCP Hebei Provincial Committee to the Taoyuan production bri-
gade in Funing County to lead the Socialist Education Movement
there. At a meeting held by the CCP Hebei Provincial Committee in
July 1964, Wang, as deputy team leader, presented a report on the
team’s work experience at Taoyuan. Upon recommendation by Liu
Shaoqi and approval by Mao Zedong, the report was disseminated
nationwide in September 1964 as a party-sanctioned exemplar for
the ongoing political movement. In the early stage of the Cultural
Revolution, Wang, again, became a member of the central leader-
ship’s task force the work group: on 19 June 1966, Liu sent Wang
Guangmei as an advisor to the work group at Tsinghua University,
where clashes between students and the work group had occurred.
Before long, Kuai Dafu and a few others at Tsinghua who had tried
to drive the work group off campus were denounced as “antiparty
students” until Mao pronounced the work group policy repressive
after his return to Beijing and ordered the withdrawal of all work
groups on 29 July.
Wang’s activities as an advisor to the work group at Tsinghua
and her earlier involvement in the Socialist Education Movement
at Taoyuan soon became the targets of criticism by Red Guards;
306 © WANG HAIRONG
they were used to implicate Liu Shaoqi as well in the Criticize the
Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign. The Tsinghua Red Guards,
led by Kuai Dafu and encouraged by the Central Cultural Revolu-
tion Small Group (CCRSG), spearheaded a national campaign to
demonize Liu Shaoqi. As a part of the campaign, the Red Guards
denounced Wang’s work group activities at Tsinghua and condemned
her Taoyuan report as an antiparty and anti-socialist “poisonous
weed.” On 10 April 1967, the Tsinghua Red Guards, with full support
of the CCRSG, forced Wang, along with 300 “black gang” members,
including Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Bo Yibo, and Jiang Nanxiang, to
attend a mass rally on the university campus and subjected all of them
to public humiliation and physical abuse. Wang was forced to stand in
front of a crowd of 300,000 people, wearing a necklace of ping-pong
balls, a pair of high-heel shoes, and an embarrassingly small old silk
dress. The sensational Red Guard tabloids with large photographs
and cartoons of Wang were freely distributed on the streets of Beijing
the day after the rally and quickly circulated nationwide.
In September 1967, Wang was formally arrested though she had
been detained separately from her husband since 18 July after a
violent struggle meeting in Zhongnanhai compound, the residential
quarters of top CCP officials. Wang spent the next 12 years in prison.
The last time she saw her husband was 5 August 1967 at a struggle
meeting held in their own home by the rebels in Zhongnanhai. At the
Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (13-31
October 1968), Liu was named a “traitor, spy, and renegade” and
expelled permanently from the CCP. He died on 12 November 1969.
Wang did not learn about the death of her husband until several years
later. In 1969, Kang Sheng and Jiang Qing attempted to bring a
death sentence against Wang, but their effort was deterred by Mao.
Wang was released from prison and rehabilitated in 1979. She was
appointed head of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Chinese Acad-
emy of Social Sciences in the same year. In February 1980, the CC
formally rehabilitated her husband Liu Shaoqi. In 1983, Wang was
elected a member of the Standing Committee of the Sixth Chinese
People’s Political Consultative Conference.
WANG HAIRONG (1938- ). A young diplomat, Wang was a ris-
ing star on China’s political scene as Mao Zedong’s liaison at the
Politburo in the early 1970s. Wang was also appointed head of the
WANG HAIRONG œ% 307
Protocol Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and deputy
foreign minister during the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Changsha, Hunan Province, and a granddaughter of
Mao Zedong’s cousin Wang Jifan, Wang was a student of foreign
languages at the Beijing Teachers’ College in the early 1960s. On the
eve of the Cultural Revolution, Wang became known for her conver-
sations with Mao concerning school education, which were to inspire
Red Guards in rebellion against their teachers and the so-called revi-
sionist line in education at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
Upon completion of her short-term training in English at the Beijing
Institute of Foreign Languages in 1965, Wang was assigned work at
the General Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the early
stages of the Cultural Revolution, Wang was a staunch conservative
supporting Minister Chen Yi and Premier Zhou Enlai and opposing
the rebels and the so-called May 16 Counterrevolutionary Clique.
Because of her special relationship to Mao, Wang had the privilege
of entering Zhongnanhai and conversing with Mao, which lent much
authority to her voice in the mass movement.
At the end of 1970 when Mao received the American journalist Edgar
Snow, Wang Hairong started to serve as a note taker for Mao, while her
close friend and political ally Tang Wensheng was Mao’s chief Eng-
lish interpreter. Wang was appointed head of the Protocol Department
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1971 and later was promoted to
the position of deputy minister. Assisting Mao in his diplomatic activi-
ties, Wang and Tang were involved in China’s most significant events
in foreign affairs during the Cultural Revolution, including major steps
toward normalization of United States—China relations.
The convenient access to Mao also led to Wang and Tang’s deep
involvement in top-level CCP politics. On the one hand, leaders of
all factions within the central leadership, including Zhou Enlai, Deng
Xiaoping, Kang Sheng, and the Jiang Qing group later to be known
as the Gang of Four, sometimes had to depend on them for com-
munications with Mao. On the other hand, Mao used them as liaisons
between himself and the Politburo. With the great privilege of attend-
ing a number of CCP Politburo meetings, Wang and Tang earned the
nickname “probationary Politburo members.” Assuming positions as
Mao’s spokespersons and closely following Mao’s shifting attitudes
toward different factions of the central leadership, Wang and Tang
were known to have insulted not only the cultural revolutionaries of
308 © WANG HONGWEN
the Jiang Qing group but also the moderate leaders such as Zhou Enlai
(at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 25 November—5 December
1973), and Deng Xiaoping (in 1975 during the campaign to counter-
attack the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend). On their
way to positions of power at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they were
also involved in the persecution of a number of innocent cadres and
government workers in a series of political campaigns.
After Mao’s death in 1976, Wang was dismissed from office and
put under investigation. Then, after a few years of training at the
Central Party School, Wang was reassigned as deputy head of the
Consultant Section of the State Council in 1984.
WANG HONGWEN (1934-1992). A rebel leader turned vice-chairman
of the CCP and a member of the Gang of Four, Wang enjoyed a
meteoric rise to power and became the third highest ranking leader
and a candidate for Mao Zedong’s successor after the downfall of
Lin Biao.
A native of Changchun, Jilin Province, Wang was a Korean War
veteran and joined the CCP in 1953. When the Cultural Revolution
broke out in 1966, Wang was a security officer at a textile factory in
Shanghai. In late 1966, Wang, as a leader of the Shanghai mass orga-
nization Workers Command Post, was involved in both the Anting
Incident (a transportation crisis on 20 November) and the Kangping
Avenue Incident (factional violence on 30 December). Wang fol-
lowed Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan closely in Shanghai’s
January Storm of 1967 to take power from the municipal govern-
ment. In February 1967, Wang became vice-chairman of the newly
formed Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Later in the year, Wang
orchestrated a bloody factional battle known as the August 4 Inci-
dent in the Shanghai Diesel Engine Factory. In 1969, he was elected
to the Ninth Central Committee of the CCP.
In September 1972, Wang Hongwen was transferred to Beijing at
Mao’s suggestion. He was given the privilege of attending the meet-
ings of the Politburo, the State Council, and the Central Military
Commission. Also at Mao’s suggestion, Wang was put in charge of
revising the CCP Constitution. At the Tenth National Congress of
the CCP (August 1973), Wang was made vice-chairman of the CCP
and a member of the Politburo. He ranked number three in the CCP
leadership, after Mao and Zhou Enlai. In 1974, while Premier Zhou
WANG LI @ 309
was hospitalized for cancer treatment, Wang was entrusted for a short
period of time with the responsibility of managing the daily affairs of
the central government.
Already closely associated with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan
in Shanghai, Wang Hongwen soon became part of the inner circle of
the Jiang Qing group after he came to Beijing. In October 1974, Wang
flew to Changsha, Hunan Province, to brief Mao on the SS Fengqing
Incident and the subsequent confrontation between Jiang Qing and
Deng Xiaoping at a Politburo meeting. Wang’s mission for the Jiang
group was to attack Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping so as to prevent
Deng from becoming first deputy premier at the forthcoming Fourth
National People’s Congress, but Mao responded with an admonition
that he stay closer to Zhou Enlai than Jiang Qing. Mao was appar-
ently disappointed in Wang; eventually he chose Hua Guofeng as his
successor instead of Wang Hongwen. In the meantime, Wang stayed
close to the Jiang group and became a member of the Gang of Four.
He continued to pay close attention to the cultural revolutionary
base Shanghai, and in 1975, the year of success for Deng Xiaoping’s
overall rectification program, Wang told his supporters there that the
Shanghai militia should be prepared for a guerilla war.
On 6 October 1976, within a month of Mao’s death, Wang was
arrested in Beijing as a member of the Gang of Four. Due to his for-
mal ranking in the central leadership (as vice-chairman of the CCP),
he was listed as the first of the four in the 14 October news release
about their arrest. In July 1977, Wang was formally dismissed from
all his official posts and expelled from the party. On 23 January 1981,
Wang was sentenced by a special court of the Supreme People’s Court
of the PRC to life imprisonment on a number of charges including
plotting to subvert the government and instigating a military rebel-
lion. Wang Hongwen died on 3 August 1992.
WANG LI (1921-1996). Mao Zedong’s radical theorist, deputy editor-
in-chief of the CCP official organ the Red Flag, deputy head of the
CCP Foreign Liaison Department, and a member of the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), Wang was dismissed
from office in August 1967 as a member of the Wang-Guan-Qi Anti-
Party Clique.
A native of Huai’an, Jiangsu Province, Wang Li joined the CCP in
1939 while working for the CCP in the Nationalist Northeast Army.
310 © WANGLI
In the 1940s, Wang held various regional posts responsible for propa-
ganda work in Shandong Province under the CCP East-China Bureau.
Between 1953 and 1955, he served as an adviser to the Vietnamese
Communists in the area of propaganda and education. In 1958 Wang
was appointed to the editorial board of the Red Flag. He soon became
one of the CCP’s leading writers on the theoretical and political issues
of the international communist movement. In the first half of the 1960s,
Wang actively engaged in theoretical writing in the China-Soviet
Debate. Under the leadership of Kang Sheng, Wang took part in the
drafting of the “nine commentaries” criticizing Soviet revisionism and
in the negotiations with Soviet leaders as a member of the CCP delega-
tion to Moscow in 1962. During this period, Wang was promoted to
deputy editor-in-chief of the Red Flag and deputy minister of the CCP
Foreign Liaison Department. In 1964, Wang began to attend meetings
of the Politburo Standing Committee as a nonvoting delegate.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Wang actively
engaged in the drafting of a number of significant political docu-
ments, including the May 16 Circular; its appendix “Chronology of
the Two-Line Struggle at the Cultural Front from September 1965 to
May 1966;” and the 2 June 1966 People’s Daily commentary “Hail
the First Big-Character Poster from Peking University.” On 28 May
1966 when the CCRSG was formed, Wang became a member of the
group. During the campaign to criticize the bourgeois reactionary
line in late 1966 and early 1967, Wang and other CCRSG members
pushed the rebel movement forward against the old party establish-
ment. In 1967, it was partly through Wang’s formulation, which Mao
Zedong appreciated and approved, that Mao’s Cultural Revolution
theory became a theory of continuing revolution under the dicta-
torship of the proletariat: on 18 May 1967, to mark the anniversary
of the passage of the May 16 Circular, the People’s Daily and the Red
Flag carried a joint editorial entitled “A Great Historical Document”
which, written by Wang Li and revised by Mao, published the phrase
“revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat” for the first time
and called Mao’s theory represented by this phrase “the third great
landmark in the development of Marxism.”
In July 1967, the central leadership sent a delegation, of which
Wang was a member, to Wuhan to resolve factional conflicts. Because
Wang expressed support for the local rebel faction, members of
the conservative mass organization Million-Strong Mighty Army
WANG RENZHONG œ% 311
and soldiers of the Wuhan Military Region took him by force and
interrogated him at a mass rally on 20 July 1967, which came to be
known as the July 20 Incident. Upon his return to Beijing, Wang
received a hero’s welcome from Lin Biao and other central leaders.
In the meantime, interpreting what he considered to be Mao’s inten-
tion, Wang, along with Guan Feng and Qi Benyu, attacked Foreign
Minister Chen Yi and began to interfere with foreign affairs: in a
speech he gave on 7 August 1967, Wang supported the rebels’ effort
to seize power at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—a radical move
about which Premier Zhou Enlai soon lodged a complaint to Mao.
With the support of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing and with the approval
of Mao, Wang, Guan, Qi, and some other members of the CCRSG
also began to press the military to adopt Mao’s Cultural Revolution
policies: in their public speeches and in several articles they wrote
for official media, they called on the masses to “ferret out a small
handful [of capitalist-roaders] inside the army,’ which met strong
resistance from the rank and file of the PLA.
To keep order in foreign and military affairs, to reassure Zhou
Enlai, and to pacify military leaders, Mao soon decided to remove
Wang and his colleagues from power and named them the Wang-
Guan-Qi Anti-Party Clique. At the end of August 1967, Wang Li and
Guan Feng were detained. On 26 January 1968, the two, along with
Qi Benyu, were imprisoned.
In 1980, a court in Beijing named Wang an accomplice of the
Lin Biao and the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary cliques. He was
officially expelled from the CCP at the same time. Wang remained
imprisoned until January 1982. After his release, Wang wrote about
the early stages of the Cultural Revolution in Witnessing History: The
Memories of the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: 1993) and Wang
Li’s Reflections (Hong Kong: 2001), both of considerable value as an
insider’s accounts of China’s recent history. Wang died of cancer on
21 October 1996. See also WANG-GUAN-QI AFFAIR.
WANG RENZHONG (1917-1992). A native of Jingxian, Hebei
Province, and a member of the CCP from 1933, Wang served after
the founding of the PRC as first party secretary of Hubei Province,
first secretary of the CCP Mid-South Bureau, and political com-
missar of the Wuhan Military Region. On 28 May 1966, when the
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) was formed,
312 © WANG SHENYOU
Wang was named deputy director of the group. On 16 July 1966, he
escorted Mao Zedong in the latter’s much publicized swim in the
Yangtze River. Wang’s lack of enthusiasm for the ultraleftist cause
of Mao, however, eventually led to his downfall: as he stayed in the
southern city of Guangzhou in the fall of 1966 recuperating from an
illness, Jiang Qing and some other members of the CCRSG, espe-
cially Guan Feng and Qi Benyu, offered support to some mass orga-
nizations in Wuhan in their attack on Wang. On 8 September 1967
when the People’s Daily carried an article by Yao Wenyuan criticiz-
ing Tao Zhu, Wang Renzhong was implicated; he was referred to
as Tao’s man and a counterrevolutionary revisionist. In 1978, a year
after the purge of the Gang of Four, Wang began to assume important
leadership positions again. He was appointed first party secretary of
Shaanxi Province. Later he served as head of the CCP’s propaganda
department and vice-premier of the State Council. He was a member
of the CCP’s Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Central Committee.
Wang Renzhong died in Beijing on 16 March 1992.
WANG SHENYOU (1946-1977). An outspoken critic of the radical
policies Mao Zedong had engineered since the 1950s, Wang was
persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and was executed by the
post-Mao government in 1977. A student of East-China Normal
University, he was branded a reactionary and was imprisoned for two
years in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution because he sym-
pathized with the early targets of the revolution, such as Wu Han and
Deng Tuo, and because he wrote his dissenting views into his diary
and named the Cultural Revolution as a movement doomed to bring
China backward. After his release, Wang was forced to do manual
labor on campus and at a May 7 Cadre School. During a period of
eight years under surveillance, Wang read widely and studied Marxist
works and economics and wrote friends and family members about
what he learned and thought.
In September 1976, after he resisted the attempt of his supervisor
from the workers’ propaganda team to take away a long letter he was
writing to his girlfriend, Wang was arrested again. While in prison, he
was ordered to write out the same letter as his “confession.” The result
was an article of 60,000 words in several chapters, in which Wang,
from what he believes to be an authentic Marxist perspective, offers
a comprehensive critical assessment of China’s economic and foreign
WANG XIAOYU œ% 313
policies and political programs since the collectivization movement of
the mid-1950s. While acknowledging Mao’s achievements as a leader
of Chinese revolution before 1949, Wang criticizes Mao for ignoring
China’s historical and economic conditions and deviating from Marx-
ism in his Great Leap Forward and People’s Commune policies which
resulted in a human disaster in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. He
was also sharply critical of Mao’s political campaigns, including the
Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, the Anti-Right-Deviationist Cam-
paign of 1959, the Socialist Education Movement of the mid-1960s,
and the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, and his criticism engages
Mao on a theoretical front as well. For instance, citing Engels on the
importance of productivity and a strong economic base, Wang consid-
ers Mao’s blueprint of social transformation—the establishment of a
commune and elimination of division of labor for contemporary China,
as laid out in Mao’s May 7 Directive—to be a utopian dream divorced
from historical reality and deviating from socialism. On the other hand,
Wang speaks highly of Marshal Peng Dehuai, who was dismissed
from office in 1959 for writing Mao about the problems of the Great
Leap Forward policies. Much of Wang’s view is echoed, though with
much euphemism, in the Resolution on Certain Questions in the
History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic
of China, which the CCP Central Committee adopted in 1981.
Wang’s private letter, however, was judged by the post-Mao gov-
ernment to be a reactionary piece against Mao. On 27 April 1977, 6
months after the downfall of the Gang of Four, Wang was executed
after a public trial, at which he learned the sentence for the first time
but was not allowed to defend himself. For the reversal of the Wang
verdict, the leaders of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee met
19 times and debated among themselves. In the 1980s, they eventually
approved a low-key statement to redress the Wang Shenyou case.
WANG XIAOYU (1914-1995). One of the few provincial party
leaders who supported the rebels in the early stages of the Cultural
Revolution, Wang became head of the Shandong Provincial Revolu-
tionary Committee in 1967 and a member of the CCP Central Com-
mittee (CC) in 1969 but was eventually dismissed from office for his
involvement in armed factional conflict in Shandong.
A native of Yidu, Shandong Province, Wang joined the CCP in 1938
and worked in the rural area of northern Shandong for a long period
314 © WANG XIUZHEN
of time. Wang was appointed deputy chief-prosecutor of Shandong
Province in 1954. He was named a Rightist during the Anti-Rightist
campaign and demoted until 1964 when his case was redressed. When
the Cultural Revolution broke out, Wang reported to the Central Cul-
tural Revolution Small Group that some party officials in Qingdao
were planning to mobilize workers and peasants against the rebel
students who were bombarding the city leadership. For this report,
Wang was praised by Mao Zedong and then emerged as a rising star
on China’s political scene. During the January Storm of 1967, Wang,
following secret instructions from Kang Sheng, organized rebels to
seize power in Qingdao.
On 3 February 1967, Wang became head of the newly-established
Shandong Provincial Revolutionary Committee. He gathered more
power later on as head of the CCP core group of the Shandong Revo-
lutionary Committee and first political commissar of the Jinan Mili-
tary Region. Shortly after he took these leading positions, however,
Wang became deeply involved in widespread factional violence in the
province. He also persecuted a large number of innocent cadres and
ordinary citizens who did not side with him. Of particular importance
was Wang’s conflict with local military leaders, which was a main
reason for his downfall: in May 1969, barely a month after he became
a member of the CC at the Ninth National Congress of CCP (1-24
April 1969), the central leadership named him a bourgeois careerist.
Two years later, Wang was dismissed from office and was taken into
custody. Wang was formally expelled from the CCP in 1979.
WANG XIUZHEN (1935-). A leader of rebel workers in Shanghai and
a close associate of Zhang Chunqiao, Wang was a member of both
the Ninth and the Tenth Central Committee (CC) of the CCP, a deputy
head of Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, and a secretary of the
CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee. In late 1976, she was removed
from power as a “remnant of the Gang of Four in Shanghai.”
A native of Liaoyang, Liaoning Province, and a provincial model
worker, Wang joined the CCP in 1952. In 1956, she was enrolled in
the Shanghai School of Textile Industry. Upon graduation, she began
to serve as a technician at the Shanghai Thirtieth Textile Factory. At
the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Wang was the first worker
at the factory to write big-character posters criticizing the factory
party leadership and the work group. In the early stages of her career
WATER MARGIN APPRAISAL ° 315
as an activist and rebel leader, she met Wang Hongwen, a security
officer at the Shanghai Seventeenth Textile Factory. They worked
together to found the Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Rebel Head-
quarters, commonly known as the Workers Command Post, and to
organize campaigns against the municipal authorities headed by First
Secretary Chen Pixian and Mayor Cao Diqiu. Wang was involved
in the Anting Incident of November 1966, during which she met
Zhang Chungqiao. After the incident was resolved with the official
acknowledgment of the Workers Command Post by Zhang and the
central leadership, Wang became a loyal follower of Zhang and the
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG).
During Shanghai’s power seizure movement known as the Janu-
ary Storm, Zhang Chungiao named Wang Xiuzhen a deputy head
of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Later, Wang and other
leaders of the Committee, including Ma Tianshui and Xu Jingxian,
helped Zhang persecute his critics, especially those involved in the
two incidents of the Bombarding Zhang Chunqiao campaign. Wang
and her associates also brought false charges against Cao Diqiu, Wei
Wenbo, and other senior officials in Shanghai. Later, Wang and other
followers of the Gang of Four in Shanghai became deeply involved
in the power conflict in Beijing and attacked Deng Xiaoping and
other party veterans.
In October 1976 when the Gang of Four were detained in Bei-
jing, Wang and other “Gang remnants” plotted an armed rebellion
in Shanghai, but the plan was aborted. As soon as Hua Guofeng
and the central leadership took full control of Shanghai, Wang was
arrested. She was dismissed from office and expelled from the CCP.
On 21 August 1982, the Shanghai Supreme Court convicted Wang of
several counts of counterrevolutionary crimes and sentenced her to
17 years in prison.
WATER MARGIN APPRAISAL (ping shuihu) (1975-1976). A
political movement in the final stage of the Cultural Revolution, the
reading and critiquing of the classical Chinese novel Water Margin
was defined by official media as a political education for the masses
against revisionism and capitulationism, but the real, yet unnamed,
purpose of the campaign was to make insinuations against Zhou
Enlai and Deng Xiaoping as “capitulators within the party” betray-
ing Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution program.
316 © WORK GROUPS
The campaign was initiated by some comments Mao made on Water
Margin on the evening of 14 August 1975 to Lu Di, a reading com-
panion from Peking University. Mao considered Water Margin to be
good as a negative example for teaching the masses about capitulators.
In the novel, Song Jiang, chief of the outlaws at Liangshan, renamed
Chao Gai’s Hall of Brotherhood the Hall of Righteous Loyalty and
encouraged the outlaws to accept amnesty and serve the emperor. In
just three hours after he read Mao’s comments on Water Margin the
next day, Yao Wenyuan wrote Mao a letter with a campaign plan,
which Mao soon approved. Then, variant editions of the novel were
published, major newspapers and periodicals were crowded with
articles on Water Margin, and the masses were required to study and
discuss the subject. To clarify the unsaid, Jiang Qing told her support-
ers at the Ministry of Culture in late August 1975 about the “practical
significance” of Mao’s comments: “The crucial point in reviewing this
novel is that Chao Gai was made a mere figurehead. Now in our Party,
some people attempt to make Chairman Mao a figurehead.” Jiang
made further insinuations so aggressively in a speech she gave in Sep-
tember that Mao ordered that her speech script not be distributed.
Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai were known for their different
responses to the movement of the Water Margin appraisal. Deng said at
a meeting of provincial leaders, “What is the Water Margin appraisal?
The Chairman read the 71-chapter version in three months. After that,
the Chairman made these comments. But some people are making
a big deal out of this and playing intrigues.” Zhou, who was dying
of cancer, took the issue much more seriously. Just before a surgical
procedure on 20 September 1975, Zhou carefully reviewed and signed
the transcriptions of the report on the Kuomintang-fabricated Wu Hao
Affair that he presented at Mao’s suggestion at a high-level meeting in
June 1972. And just as the nurse wheeled him into the operation room,
Zhou said loudly, “I am loyal to the party and loyal to the people. Iam
not a capitulator.’ In the meantime, the Water Margin appraisal move-
ment continued until the death of Mao Zedong in fall 1976.
WORK GROUPS (gongzuozu). Also known as the Cultural Revolu-
tion work groups, these were teams of party officials and government
workers dispatched to colleges, middle schools, and some govern-
ment institutions in early June 1966 to direct the Cultural Revolution
movement. After the Cultural Revolution was publicly launched
WORK GROUPS © 317
on 1 June 1966 with the publication of the People’s Daily editorial
“Sweeping Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits” and the
nationwide broadcasting of a big-character poster by Nie Yuanzi
and others at Peking University, the masses, especially students in
Beijing who had already been engaged in the criticism of municipal
party officials and the so-called reactionary academic authorities,
were quickly mobilized and began to challenge the authorities in their
own institutions. In the face of the fast-developing mass movement,
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were in charge of the CCP
affairs while Chairman Mao Zedong was away from Beijing, called
an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee and made a
decision at the meeting to dispatch work groups on a mission to guide
the movement, and contain fires, at schools and some government
institutions in Beijing. (The work group approach had been adopted
by the CCP before for the purpose of directing political campaigns.)
With Mao’s approval, the newly restructured CCP Beijing Munici-
pal Committee first sent out a work group to Peking University on 4
June. Soon many more work groups were dispatched to other places
in Beijing. Party leadership in other cities also began to deploy
work groups, following Beijing’s example. With minimum instruc-
tions from the central leadership, these teams tended to support, if
not totally side with, the CCP authorities of a given institution and
attempted to keep the mass movement under the control of the party.
They also made an effort to contain violence. In some institutions,
conflicts developed between work groups and the students who con-
sidered the operation of the work groups as repressive. Some students
who challenged the work groups’ authority in their institutions were
condemned as “antiparty diehards” and subject to mass criticism in
struggle meetings. Conflicts also developed in the central leadership
between the radical members of the Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group (CCRSG), who wanted to have work groups with-
drawn, and the Liu-Deng leadership, which chose to hold on to the
decision made by the Politburo.
Upon returning to Beijing on 18 July 1966, Mao sided with the
CCRSG and dismissed Beijing’s political scene as cold and desolate.
Speaking at a party meeting on 21 July, Mao criticized the work group
policy as repressive and obstructing the ongoing political movement.
Following Mao’s instruction, the Beijing party committee held a
meeting of 10,000 people on 29 July and announced its decision to
318 © WORKER-PEASANT-SOLDIER STUDENTS
withdraw all work groups. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou
Enlai made self-criticism at the meeting for their roles in dispatching
work groups. Later Mao denounced the work groups for carrying out
a bourgeois reactionary line, which became the main target of criti-
cism in a nationwide campaign in October 1966. See also PEKING
UNIVERSITY CULTURAL REVOLUTION BULLETIN NO. 9.
WORKER-PEASANT-SOLDIER STUDENTS (gong-nong-bing
xueyuan). The term refers to college students admitted between
1970 and 1976 when colleges required of their applicants at least
two years of work experience or military service and recruited stu-
dents from factories, farms and communes, and military units, basing
admission decisions on “recommendations by the masses, approval
by the leadership of the applicant’s work unit, and review by the col-
lege.” The official propaganda in the first half of the 1970s named
this nontraditional way of selecting college students as an important
achievement of the “revolution in education.” The practice was
delegitmized in late 1977 when the traditional system of entrance
examinations was restored for testing college applicants.
The idea of “revolution in education” came from a series of remarks
Mao Zedong made at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, including
his letter to Lin Biao, dated 7 May 1966 and later known as May 7
Directive, in which Mao called for radical reforms to end “the bour-
geois intellectuals’ reign in our schools.’ He thought that students
should learn to be workers, peasants, and soldiers while engaging in
criticizing the bourgeoisie. Following Mao’s directive, the Ministry
of Education issued a document on 13 June 1966, proposing that the
current bourgeois college admissions system relying on test scores be
abolished and that a new enrollment system based on recommenda-
tions and selections be adopted. The central leadership approved the
document and decided that the college recruitment work be post-
poned for half a year. In fact, there were no college admissions for
four years. When colleges finally began to admit students again in
1970, they had already had Mao’s new directive to follow: “There still
should be colleges,” Mao wrote in what was to be known as the July
21 Directive in 1968. “I am referring mainly to schools of science and
technology. But . . . students should be selected from the workers and
peasants with practical experience, study for a few years in college,
and then go back to the work of production.” The recruitment began at
WORKERS COMMAND POST @ 319
selected schools in October 1970 and expanded nationwide in 1972.
There was no entrance examination. To be admitted, the applicants
only needed popular support and leadership approval from their work
units as well as the approval of the college recruiting team.
According to government instructions concerning college admis-
sions issued in the early 1970s, the main task of the worker-peasant-
soldier students was “attending the college, running the college, and
reforming the college with Mao Zedong Thought.” Professors, on
the other hand, had a very limited role to play in their students’ edu-
cation, since the professors were to be reformed. One of the “newly
emerging things” in education was called “open-door schooling”:
students and teachers would go to factories or to the countryside
with a project and learn from workers and peasants there. Qualifica-
tions for entering students were supposed to include a middle-school
education (the first nine years of education) or the equivalent, but,
without standard entrance examinations to test students, their levels
of education varied greatly and were mostly quite low.
In the face of these problems, Zhou Enlai suggested in 1972 that
some high school students should be allowed to enter college without
two years of labor, and the State Council issued a document in April
1973 suggesting that college applicants’ examination scores be consid-
ered in addition to the recommendations from their work units. These
attempts to restore order and quality in education invariably failed
due to the much stronger counter measures and political campaigns
launched by the radical faction of the party leadership against the
“reversal of trend in education.” The real reversal did not take place
until August 1977 when Deng Xiaoping, who had just been reinstated
and had offered to take charge of the affairs of education and scien-
tific research, called for a work meeting on college admissions. Late
1977 saw the first nationwide college entrance examination since the
beginning of the Cultural Revolution, officially ending the nontesting
of worker-peasant-soldier students for college admissions. See also
REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION; ZHANG TIESHENG.
WORKERS COMMAND POST (gongzongsi). This is short for
“Shanghai Workers’ Revolutionary Rebel Command Post” (Shang-
hai gongren geming zaofan zongsilingbu). Being the first cross-
industry rebel organization of factory workers in the country and
having close connections with the cultural revolution faction of the
320 © WORKERS INSURRECTION JOURNAL
central leadership, this organization was the stronghold of ultraleft-
ism in Shanghai and became well-known for its decisive role in
Shanghai’s power seizure movement the January Storm.
In late 1966 when a proposal to establish a cross-industry mass
organization in Shanghai was rejected by both the Shanghai munici-
pal party committee and Beijing’s central government, rebel leaders,
including Wang Hongwen, then a security officer at a textile factory
in Shanghai and later a member of the Gang of Four, mobilized
2,000 workers on a train ride to Beijing to appeal their case, and their
protest at Anting Station near Shanghai led to a transportation crisis.
With the support of Zhang Chunqiao, deputy head of the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), and the approval of
Chairman Mao Zedong, however, the Workers Command Post even-
tually gained legitimacy as a cross-industry mass organization and
became loyal to Zhang and his radical comrades in Beijing. Again
with the support of Zhang, the Workers Command Post crushed the
Red Defenders Battalion, a mass organization and the political rival
of the Workers Command Post in Shanghai, in a bloody confronta-
tion, known as the Kangping Avenue Incident, at the end of 1966.
In January 1967, Zhang Chungiao and Yao Wenyuan went to
Shanghai and directed the Workers Command Post, now the dominant
mass organization in Shanghai, in a power-seizure effort to topple the
municipal party committee and gain control of the city government,
an effort applauded by Mao. When the new power organ Shanghai
People’s Commune (later changed to Shanghai Revolutionary Com-
mittee) was established, Zhang and Yao became the top two officials,
and a number of Workers Command Post leaders, including Wang
Hongwen, were given important positions as well. Wang was eventu-
ally transferred to Beijing and became vice-chairman of the CCP in
August 1973. See also ANTING INCIDENT.
WORKERS INSURRECTION JOURNAL (gongren zaofan bao). A
newspaper published by the Workers Command Post (gongzongsi)
of Shanghai and one of the longest-lasting mass organization publica-
tions in the country, the Insurrection Journal started on 28 December
1966 and ended on 15 April 1971, with a total publication of 445
issues. Founded at the high tide of the campaign to criticize the
bourgeois reactionary line, the paper declared in its first issue a
critical stance against the power establishment of the CCP’s Shanghai
WORKERS PROPAGANDA TEAM ® 321
municipal committee and the CCP East-China Bureau. It became one
of the three major newspapers in eastern China after rebels seized
power in Shanghai during the January Storm, the other two being
the official Liberation Daily and Wenhui Daily. In its quasi-official
status after the Shanghai power seizure, the Journal operated in step
with the CCP’s political moves and was distributed via post offices
and bookstores across China. Soon after its restoration, however, the
CCP Shanghai municipal committee issued a document on 9 April
1971 concerning the ways of improving journalistic publications. In
compliance with the requirements of this document, the publication
of the Workers Insurrection Journal came to an end.
WORKERS PROPAGANDA TEAM (gongxuandui). This is short
for the “Workers Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team” ( gongren
Mao Zedong sixiang xuanchuan dui). Formed initially for the purpose
of leading the Cultural Revolution in its “struggle, criticism, reform”
phase in educational institutions, the first such team was dispatched
by Mao Zedong on a much more urgent mission and was therefore
unusually large: On 27 July 1968, a “Capital Workers Mao Zedong
Thought Propaganda Team” consisting of 30,000 factory workers led
by PLA officers entered the campus of Tsinghua University to stop
a factional battle known as the one hundred-day armed conflict
between two rival Red Guard organizations. After the team took
over the campus, it became the new authority there. On 25 August,
the CCP official organ the Red Flag published Yao Wenyuan’s article
“On the Supreme Leadership of the Working Class,” publicizing for
the first time Mao’s directive concerning the workers propaganda
team: “The proletarian education reform must be led by the working
class. . . . Workers propaganda teams will stay in schools, partici-
pate in the ‘struggle, criticism, reform’ movement, and lead schools
forever.” While previewing the draft version of Yao’s article, Mao
also added: “Workers and PLA soldiers should be dispatched to all
places where there is a concentration of intellectuals, whether they be
schools or other institutions, so that the monopoly by intellectuals in
these institutions shall be broken.” On the same day, the CCP Central
Committee (CC), the State Council, the Central Military Commission,
and the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group issued a circular
announcing the decision of the central leadership to dispatch workers
propaganda teams to all schools in urban areas. As this decision was
322 © WORKERS’ REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY
being implemented in the cities, Poor Peasants Management Com-
mittees were established in the countryside for the same purpose.
Workers and PLA propaganda teams were also dispatched to research
institutions and some government agencies.
These teams were instrumental in stopping factional fighting, restor-
ing order, and establishing authorities to end chaos. As schools began
to function more or less normally, however, the propaganda teams
became much less effective, and often times obstructive and mislead-
ing, in managing these institutions not just because of their character-
istic adherence to a line of political propaganda but also because of
team members’ general lack of education and expertise. In the later
years of the Cultural Revolution, many teams diminished greatly in
size and played no significant role in running the institutions they were
assigned to. In November 1977, the CC approved a proposal by the
Ministry of Education to withdraw workers propaganda teams from all
schools in the country. See also PLA PROPAGANDA TEAM.
WORKERS’ REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY (gongdaihui). This
was an organization established in the early phase of the Cultural
Revolution to replace the official labor union when the union was
accused of following a capitalist and revisionist line and forced out
of power. Under the influence of the Red Guard movement, so many
workers’ rebel organizations were established that the leaders of
these organizations considered it necessary to have an overarching
organization—an assembly—to coordinate their activities. Again,
with the Red Guards’ representative assembly as a model, the
workers’ representative assembly was established in many cities and
provinces as headquarters for rebel organizations. A national repre-
sentative assembly, however, was never formed. Some assemblies
ceased functioning when factional battles broke out among their
constituencies. After the power-seizure movement swept across the
country in 1967, a few positions representing workers in the newly
established revolutionary committee were often given to the leaders
of the local assembly. The assembly continued to represent workers
until the official labor union resumed its function after the Ninth
National Congress of the CCP in 1969.
WU DE (1913-1995). Born in Fengrun, Hebei Province, Wu joined
the CCP in 1933 and became a leader in the labor movement and
WU FAXIAN ° 323
also in the CCP underground organization in North China. After the
founding of the PRC, Wu was appointed deputy minister of fuels
and industry. In 1952, he became mayor and deputy party secretary
of Tianjin. From 1955 to 1966, he was the top CCP official in Jilin
Province. After the downfall of Peng Zhen and his Beijing party
committee at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4-26 May 1966, Wu
was transferred to Beijing and appointed second secretary of the reor-
ganized CCP Beijing Municipal Committee. He was made deputy
head of the newly established Beijing Revolutionary Committee in
1967 and filled the vacancies left by the death of Xie Fuzhi in 1972
as head of the Beijing Revolutionary Committee and first party sec-
retary. In 1973, Wu became a member of the Politburo.
In 1976, Wu actively supported the cultural revolutionaries within
the central leadership in cracking down on the April 5 Movement.
At the Politburo meeting held on the evening of 4 April, he spoke of
Deng Xiaoping as an inspiration for the protesting masses at Tianan-
men Square. On the evening of 5 April, a statement by Wu denounc-
ing what was happening at the Square was repeatedly broadcast to
the crowd there. The mass protest was suppressed by force later in
the evening and was condemned as a counterrevolutionary act by the
central leadership in the following days. Wu’s role in the notorious
Tiananmen crackdown made him so unpopular, especially among
citizens in Beijing, that he was referred to by many as “No Virtue,”
which is pronounced in Chinese as wu de, exactly like his name.
After the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, Wu remained in high
positions until December 1978 when the post-Mao leadership for-
mally rehabilitated the Tiananmen Incident at the Third Plenum
of the CCP Eleventh Central Committee. In the same month, Wu
was dismissed as first party secretary of Beijing. In February 1980,
he was removed from the Politburo. In April of the same year, Wu
resigned as vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National
People’s Congress. In 1982, however, he was given a membership
in the Advisory Committee of the CCP Central Committee. Wu died
on 29 November 1995.
WU FAXIAN (1915-2004). A close associate of Lin Biao and popu-
larly known as one of Lin’s “four guardian warriors,’ Wu Faxian was
commander of the air force of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
(1965-1971), deputy chief of the general staff of the PLA, and deputy
324 © WU FAXIAN
head of the Central Military Commission Administrative Group
(1967-1971).
Born in Yongfeng, Jiangxi Province, Wu joined the Red Army in
1930 and became a member of the CCP in 1932. He participated in
the Long March as a regimental political commissar and remained
in the armed forces for the rest of his political career. During both the
war of resistance against Japan and the civil war of the late 1940s,
Wu was a ranking political officer under Lin Biao. In 1955, Wu was
made lieutenant general. Nominated by Lin Biao in the capacity of
defense minister, Wu succeeded General Liu Yalou as commander of
the air force in 1965 after Liu’s death.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Wu was attacked by
the rebels within the armed forces. Lin Biao intervened and protected
him. Lin named him, along with Li Zuopeng and Qiu Huizuo, a
leader of the “proletarian revolutionaries of the armed forces.” Wu, in
the meantime, helped Lin fight his political enemies: fabricating evi-
dence and offering false testimonies, Wu was instrumental in bring-
ing down Marshal He Long and General Luo Ruiqing, both attacked
by Lin Biao. In 1967, Wu was appointed deputy chief of general
staff of the PLA and deputy head of the Central Military Commis-
sion Administrative Group. At the Ninth National Congress of the
CCP (1969), Wu was elected to the Central Committee (CC) and the
Politburo. On 17 October 1969, Wu promoted Lin Liguo, son of Lin
Biao, from the position of an office secretary to deputy director of
both the air force command’s general office and its combat division.
He also told his subordinates that all matters of the air force must be
reported to Lin Liguo. The authority and the privilege thus accorded
allowed Lin Liguo to form his United Flotilla, a special intelligence
and operation team made of diehard Lin Biao loyalists, and carry out
within the air force such alleged subversive activities as the drafting
of the 571 Project Summary.
At the Lushan Conference of 1970, the conflict between the Jiang
Qing faction and the Lin Biao faction surfaced. Wu joined Chen
Boda, Li Zuopeng, Qiu Huizuo, and Ye Qun in attacking Zhang
Chungqiao and supporting a proposal not to eliminate the position of
the president of state. Backing Zhang Chungiao and the Jiang Qing
group, Mao singled out Chen Boda as the main target of criticism
and also told other supporters of Lin Biao, including Wu, to conduct
self-criticism. In April 1971, the CC held a meeting reviewing the
WU HANe 325
ongoing Criticize Chen and Conduct Rectification campaign. Wu’s
written self-criticism, along with those of Huang, Ye, Li, and Qiu,
was discussed at the meeting. In his summary report representing the
view of the CC, Premier Zhou Enlai criticized Huang, Wu, Ye, Li,
and Qiu for following a wrong political line and practicing faction-
alism. After the alleged plot against Mao’s life failed in September
1971, Wu was at first cooperative with Lin Biao in his further moves.
But on the night of 12 September and the early morning of 13 Sep-
tember, as Lin Biao was known to be fleeing the country, Wu turned
against Lin and cooperated with Zhou Enlai. He reportedly suggested
shooting down the Trident 256 that carried Lin Biao, Ye Qun, and Lin
Liguo, a proposal rejected by Zhou.
After the September 13 Incident, Wu Faxian was detained, and
his involvement with Lin Biao’s alleged coup attempt was placed
under investigation. On 30 August 1973, the CC issued a resolution
concerning the “Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique.” As a member of the Lin
group, Wu Faxian was dismissed from all his official positions and
was permanently expelled from the CCP. On 25 January 1981, Wu
Faxian was sentenced to 17 years in prison for organizing and lead-
ing a counterrevolutionary clique, plotting to subvert the government,
and bringing false charges against innocent people.
WU GUIXIAN (1938- ). A native of Henan Province and a national
model worker at the Northwest No. 1 Textile Factory in Xianyang,
Shaanxi Province, before the Cultural Revolution, Wu was one of
the few ranking leaders in the central government promoted from
the grassroots during the Cultural Revolution. She became an alter-
nate member of the Politburo in August 1973 after serving as deputy
director of the Revolutionary Committee of Shaanxi Province for
five years. In January 1975, she was appointed vice-premier of the
State Council. In late 1977, a year after the downfall of the Gang of
Four, Wu was dismissed from Beijing. She later became deputy party
secretary of the Northwest No. | Textile Factory.
WU HAN (1909-1969). Historian, writer, and deputy mayor of Bei-
jing, Wu Han was the author of the historical play Hai Rui Dismissed
from Office and the coauthor of the journal column Notes from a
Three-Family Village, the two most prominent targets of criticism in
the preparation stage of the Cultural Revolution.
326 © WUHAN
Born in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, Wu joined the faculty of Tsin-
ghua University in 1934, specializing in the history of the Ming
Dynasty (1368-1644). As a ranking member of the China Democratic
League, Wu was also known for his active engagement in contempo-
rary politics. After 1949, Wu was elected to the Standing Committee
of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and took
a number of culture- and education-related administrative positions,
including director of the Beijing Cultural and Educational Commis-
sion and member of the Scientific Research Planning Committee of
the State Council. He joined the CCP in 1957. While carrying out his
administrative duties, Wu continued to write both as a scholar and as
an educator promoting cultural literacy. He was popular as editor-in-
chief of a number of history series for a general audience.
In late 1959 and 1960, against the background of the CCP’s disas-
trous Great Leap Forward policies, Wu wrote several articles in praise
of Hai Rui (1514-1587), a legendary upright official of the Ming
Dynasty, to support Mao Zedong’s call for the kind of outspokenness
and truthfulness exemplified by Hai Rui. Upon invitation from the
Peking Opera Company of Beijing, Wu also wrote Hai Rui Dismissed
from Office for the stage, highlighting a spirit of “pleading in the
name of the people” represented by the protagonist. In 1961, at the
request of the journal Frontline, the official organ of the CCP Beijing
municipal committee, Wu joined Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha in co-
authoring a column called “Notes from a Three-Family Village.” In his
contributions, Wu showed himself to be an acute and critical observer
of manners and morals, and his criticism did not spare officials.
On 10 November 1965, the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Daily
carried Yao Wenyuan’s article “On the New Historical Drama Hai
Rui Dismissed from Office” which accuses Wu Han of disparaging
the present with a story of the past. In late December, Mao spoke
favorably of Yao’s article and talked about what he perceived as the
“vital part” of Wu’s play: a parallel between Hai Rui’s dismissal and
Marshall Peng Dehuai’s (by Mao for Peng’s criticism of the Great
Leap Forward policies). On 20 March 1966, speaking at an enlarged
Politburo session, Mao named Wu and Jian Bozan, another histo-
rian, “Communist Party members opposing the Communist Party.”
With these devastating remarks from Mao and the political campaign
launched in May 1966 against the so-called Three-Family Village
Anti-Party Clique, Wu Han’s fate was sealed. After the Cultural
WU HAO AFFAIR ® 327
Revolution broke out, Wu was repeatedly struggled against and
physically abused by the masses. In 1968, Wu was arrested for alleg-
edly betraying the party. On 11 November 1969, he died in prison.
Because of Wu’s alleged crimes, his wife Yuan Zhen was subject to
“reform through labor” and died on 18 March 1969. Their daughter
Wu Xiaoyan suffered a mental breakdown. She was arrested in 1975
and committed suicide on 23 September 1976.
In March 1979, the CCP Central Committee approved the resolu-
tion of the Beijing municipal committee to reverse the verdict of the
“Three-Family Anti-Party Clique.” Wu Han’s name was cleared.
WU HAO AFFAIR. “Wu Hao” was an alias Zhou Enlai once used.
The so-called Wu Hao affair originally referred to the fabrication of
a story by the Kuomintang in the 1930s about Zhou Enlai’s break-
ing away from the Chinese Communist Party. During the Cultural
Revolution, Jiang Qing and her supporters made several attempts to
reopen this case to defame Zhou, and Mao Zedong’s apparent reluc-
tance to close the case altogether deeply troubled Zhou Enlai.
Between 16 and 21 February 1932, several Shanghai newspapers
carried the “Announcement of Wu Hao and Others Quitting the Com-
munist Party,” a notice fabricated by a Kuomintang intelligence unit.
The Communists in Shanghai, Chen Yun and Kang Sheng among
them, resorted to various means to refute the rumor, while the Pro-
visional Central Government of the Chinese Soviet in Jiangxi issued
an official notice in the name of Mao Zedong, head of the Soviet,
rebuking the Shanghai newspapers for running the fabricated notice.
In the meantime, Zhou Enlai left Shanghai for the Central Soviet in
Jiangxi in December 1931, two months before the fabricated notice
appeared. In 1943, during the rectification campaign in Yan’an, Zhou
Enlai spoke of the Wu Hao affair in detail, and the case was clarified
and closed.
During the campaign to “ferret out traitors” in the early summer
of 1967, some Red Guards at Nankai University looked through
pre-1949 Chinese newspapers and discovered the fabricated notice.
As soon as they identified Wu Hao as Zhou Enlai, they sent a copy
of the newspaper story to Jiang Qing. On 17 May 1967, Jiang wrote
Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, and Kang Sheng, that some Red Guards “found
an anti-Communist announcement, at the head of which was a Zhou
so-and-so, and they wanted to talk to me in person.” Zhou noted on
328 © XIE FUZHI
Jiang’s letter that the announcement was “a fabrication of the enemy.”
To clarify the matter, Zhou searched the old Shanghai newspapers and
wrote Mao on 19 May, enclosing the related materials. Upon reading
the letter and the attached materials, Mao offered no opinion; instead,
he instructed that these materials be sent to Lin Biao and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group for review before they were filed.
To protect himself, Zhou had his letter to Mao and the accompanying
materials photographed and archived in October and November 1967.
He wrote Jiang Qing on 10 January 1968 and notified her of the filing
of the photographs.
In response to a Beijing student’s written inquiry, Mao wrote on
16 January 1968, “This matter is already all cleared up as rumor
trumped up by the Kuomintang.” But four years later, Mao suggested
that Zhou speak to party leaders about the Wu Hao affair. Zhou pre-
sented the case at a meeting on 23 June 1972. Based on the opinions
of Mao and the Politburo, Zhou also announced that the tape record-
ings of the meeting and the transcripts were to be filed in the Central
Archives and that every provincial-level party committee was to pre-
serve a copy so that no further speculation on the so-called Wu Hao
affair would occur. After the meeting, however, the filing of Zhou’s
recordings was indefinitely delayed.
Three years later, Zhou, suffering from cancer, knew that he did
not have long to live. The “Wu Hao affair” was heavy on his mind.
Just before surgery, he asked to have the June 1972 records brought to
him. In shaky hand, he signed his name to the records with the nota-
tion, “Before entering the operating room, 20 September 1975.”
-X-
XIE FUZHI (1909-1972). Minister of public security and head of
the Beijing municipal government, Xie was an ally of both the Lin
Biao group and the Jiang Qing group and a close follower of Mao
Zedong’s radical policies during the Cultural Revolution. Born in
Huang’an, Hubei Province, Xie Fuzhi joined the CCP in 1931 and
participated in the Long March. He was named a general in 1955 and,
upon Mao’s recommendation, became minister of public security in
1959. In 1965, Xie was appointed vice-premier of the State Council.
He was elected an alternate member of the Politburo in August 1966
XIEJINGYI @ 329
and a regular member in April 1969. In 1967, he became chairman
of the Beijing Revolutionary Committee and political commissar
of the Beijing Military Region. He was also a member of the Central
Special Cases Investigation Group and, along with Wang Dongxing,
had control over the release of personal files of the central leaders.
In the capacity of the public security chief, the special case inves-
tigator, and the top municipal official of Beijing, Xie did much to
protect the past secrets of Jiang Qing and, at the same time, to frame
cases against such veteran leaders as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping,
and Zhu De. He was instrumental in producing the notorious “Six
Regulations of Public Security,’ which was issued nationwide on
13 January 1967 as a CCP Central Committee (CC) document. The
repressive measures prescribed in this document caused widespread
persecution of innocent people, especially those of the blacklisted
classes and categories. His instructions to investigators and law
enforcement officers that they may “break rules and regulations (ging-
gui jielii) and choose the best methods” in their investigations and
that they “should not apply the policy of benevolence (renzheng)”
to counterrevolutionaries resulted in much abuse and torture in
prisons and other agencies under the Ministry of Public Security. In
July 1967, Xie as a member of the CC delegation got involved in a
sectional conflict in Wuhan, Hubei Province, which led to a four-day
mass rally and protest known as the July 20 Incident. Xie was at the
peak of his political career when he died of illness in March 1972.
On 6 October 1980, the CC issued an investigative report concern-
ing Xie’s crimes and announced a decision to expel Xie Fuzhi from
the CCP. On 23 January 1981, a special court of the PRC Supreme
People’s Court named Xie Fuzhi a prime culprit of both the Lin Biao
and the Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary cliques.
XIE JINGYI (1937- ). A native of Shangqiu, Henan Province, Xie was
trained as a cryptographer and served as one at the general office of
the CCP Central Committee (CC) in Zhongnanhai compound, where
she came to know Mao Zedong personally. Xie’s political career
began in July 1968 when she was sent to Tsinghua University as a
member of the workers propaganda team. Later she became deputy
head of the Tsinghua Revolutionary Committee and a close ally of
Chi Qun, a member of the PLA propaganda team and head of the
Tsinghua Revolutionary Committee. Known as the “two soldiers” of
330 © XUJINGXIAN
Mao and close followers of Jiang Qing, Xie and Chi virtually ruled
Tsinghua until the downfall of the Gang of Four in October 1976.
During this period, Xie and Chi worked fairly closely, taking
orders from Jiang and enacting radical policies on the Tsinghua
campus—policies that affected the entire educational establishment
from the Rectify the Class Ranks movement of the late 1960s and
early 1970s to the anti-Deng Counterattack the Right-Deviationist
Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend campaign in 1976. Xie rose rapidly
in the CCP leadership: she became a member of the CCP’s Tenth
Central Committee and a party secretary of Beijing in 1973 and a
member of the Standing Committee of the Fourth National People’s
Congress. She was arrested with the Gang of Four within a month of
Mao’s death. She was expelled from the party. But, unlike Chi Qun
who was sentenced to 18 years in prison, Xie was spared of crimi-
nal charges reportedly due to her acknowledgement of guilt and her
confession.
XU JINGXIAN (1933- ). A leader of rebelling Shanghai government
functionaries and a close associate of Zhang Chunqiao, Xu was a
member of both the Ninth and the Tenth Central Committee (CC) of
the CCP, a deputy head of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee,
and a secretary of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee. In late
1976, he was removed from power as a “remnant of the Gang of
Four in Shanghai.”
A native of Shanghai, Xu was an activist in the CCP-led student
underground movement against the Kuomintang in Shanghai before
1949. He joined the CCP in the early 1950s, became a productive
writer, and made his name as the author of the revolutionary drama
The Young Generation in 1964. In the first half of the 1960s, Xu rose
steadily in the municipal party hierarchy of Shanghai and eventually
became party secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Commit-
tee Writing Group and established close working relationships with
Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, who were then in charge of
party propaganda work in Shanghai before the Cultural Revolution.
When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Xu, at the encouragement
of Zhang Chungiao, led the writing group to rebel against the CCP
Shanghai Municipal Committee and formed a radical “Rebel Station
of Shanghai Party Organs.’ On 18 December 1966, Xu’s organi-
zation and the Workers Command Post took the lead at a mass
XU XIANGQIAN e 331
rally in bombarding the Shanghai party committee. Xu attacked the
municipal leadership in a long speech at the rally, and because he and
members of his organization were all party functionaries, their role
turned out to be critical in bringing down the CCP Shanghai Munici-
pal Committee headed by First Secretary Chen Pixian and Mayor
Cao Diqiu. In the January Storm of 1967, Zhang Chunqiao named
Xu a deputy head of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Later,
Xu and other leaders of the Committee, including Ma Tianshui and
Wang Xiuzhen, helped Zhang persecute his critics, especially those
involved in the two incidents of the Bombarding Zhang Chunqiao
campaign. Xu and his associates also brought false charges against
Cao Diqiu, Wei Wenbo, and other senior officials in Shanghai.
In the meantime, Xu began to involve himself in the power conflict
in Beijing and became a lieutenant of the Gang of Four in various
nationwide political campaigns. He and his associates in Shanghai
were particularly active in attacking Chen Yi during the move-
ment against the February Adverse Current in the late 1960s and
criticizing Deng Xiaoping during the campaign against the Right-
Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend in 1975 and 1976. As a
reward for his loyalty to top-level cultural revolutionaries, Xu was
admitted into the CC as a full member and appointed a party secre-
tary of Shanghai when the CCP power structure was reestablished.
Ranking third next to Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan in the CCP
Shanghai Municipal Committee, he earned the popular nickname
“Xu Number Three” in Shanghai.
In October 1976 when members of the Gang of Four were detained
in Beijing, Xu and other “Gang remnants” plotted a Counterrevo-
lutionary Armed Rebellion in Shanghai, but the plan was aborted.
As soon as Hua Guofeng and the central leadership took full control
of Shanghai, Xu was arrested. He was dismissed from office and
expelled from the CCP. On 21 August 1982, the Shanghai Supreme
Court convicted Xu of several counts of counterrevolutionary crimes
and sentenced him to 18 years in prison.
XU XIANGQIAN (1901-1990). A senior leader of the Chinese Com-
munist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Xu
played a role of great importance as a political and military leader
before 1949 and held prominent positions in the party, the state, and
the army after the founding of the PRC. In the Cultural Revolution,
332 © XU XIANGQIAN
Xu was one of the veteran officials involved in the 1967 February
Adverse Current.
Born in Wutai, Shanxi Province, Xu was a member of the first
graduating class of the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy and
a veteran of the Northern Expedition. He joined the CCP in 1927
and participated in the Guangzhou Uprising in the same year. Xu
was general commander of the Fourth Front Red Army in the Long
March, deputy commander of the 129th Division of the Eighth Route
Army in the war of resistance against Japan, and commander of the
First Corps of the PLA’s East Field Army during the civil war in the
second half of the 1940s. Xu was the first chief of the general staff
of the PLA (1949-1954) after the founding of the PRC. In 1955,
Xu was appointed one of the 10 marshals of the PRC. Xu served as
a vice-chairman of the CCP Central Military Commission (CMC)
from 1959 to 1987 and a member of the Politburo from 1966 to 1969
and again from 1977 to 1987.
In January 1967, upon recommendation by Jiang Qing and approval
by Mao Zedong, Xu replaced Liu Zhijian as head of the All Forces
Cultural Revolution Small Group. In February 1967, Xu, along
with Tan Zhenlin, Chen Yi, and several other senior party and mili-
tary leaders, sharply criticized the radicals of the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group at a top-level meeting in Zhongnanhai
compound. The outburst of their anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment
was denounced by Mao as a February Adverse Current. In March
1967, Xu was removed as head of the All-Army Cultural Revolution
Group. In April, he was criticized at an enlarged meeting of the CMC.
Later, rebels searched his house, confiscated his personal belongings,
and posted the slogan “Down with Xu Xiangqian” on the streets of
Beijing. The veterans of the Adverse February Current came under
attack again in 1969 at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP;
though Xu retained his membership in the CC, his power and influ-
ence in military affairs were much reduced.
After Lin Biao’s demise in 1971, Mao began to seek support
from the “old government” faction of the central leadership and sent
friendly signals to Xu and other senior party and military leaders. Xu
reappeared at the CMC Standing Committee and was named a vice-
chairman of the National People’s Congress in 1975. In the post-Mao
era, Xu was reelected a member of the Politburo of both the Tenth
and the Eleventh CC. He served as defense minister and vice-premier
YANG CHENGWU œ% 333
of the State Council from 1978 to 1980 and vice-chairman of the
CMC from 1983 to 1988. He died on 21 September 1990.
-Y-
YAN FENGYING (1930-1968). Born in Tongcheng, Anhui Province,
Yan was China’s best known singer of the regional musical theatre
called the huangmei opera. She started her performing career at the
age of 15. In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, Yan devoted all
her efforts to popularizing and perfecting the huangmei opera form.
She joined the CCP in 1960 and became a member of the execu-
tive council of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles in
the same year. During the Cultural Revolution, Yan was accused of
attacking the revolutionary model operas. She was denounced as a
representative of the “black line in literature and arts,” a counterrevo-
lutionary, and a Kuomintang spy. She was humiliated and tortured.
On the night of 7 April 1968, Yan tried to kill herself by an over-
dose of sleeping pills. Instead of rushing her to a hospital, however,
her persecutors from her work unit held a struggle meeting at her
bedside. When she was eventually taken to a hospital, no medical
worker would give her emergency treatment without permission from
her work unit. Yan died on 8 April 1968. Upon her death, doctors
dissected her body under the supervision of a PLA representative
from Yan’s work unit supposedly in search of a micro-transmitter
for sending intelligence to the Kuomintang. Yan’s name was cleared
by the CCP Anhui provincial committee in May 1978. A memorial
service was held for her in August 1978 by the Cultural Bureau of
Anhui Province.
YANG CHENGWU (1914-2004). An alternate member of the CCP
Central Committee (CC) from 1956 and acting chief of general staff
of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since 1966, General Yang
was persecuted by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing in 1968 as a member of
the so-called Yang- Yu-Fu Anti-Party Clique. Born in a poor peasant
family in Fujian Province, Yang began his military career as a young
Red Army soldier in 1929 when he was 15. In the following year,
he joined the CCP. Rising quickly in army ranks due to his military
prowess, Yang served, among other positions, as a regiment politi-
334 © YANG CHENGWU
cal commisar under Lin Biao in the Red Army First Corps during
the Long March, a regiment commander of the Eighth Route Army
in the war of resistance against Japan, and commander of the Third
Corps of the PLA North-China Military District in the civil war of the
second half of the 1940s. After 1949, he was appointed commander
of the Beijing Military Region and deputy chief of general staff.
Yang’s initial prominence in Cultural Revolution was largely a
result of his activities at a high-level CCP meeting held in Shanghai
at the end of 1965 and the enlarged Politburo sessions in May 1966:
at both meetings he was at the forefront attacking General Luo Ruiq-
ing, chief of general staff of the PLA. After the fall of Luo Ruiging,
Lin Biao, with Chairman Mao Zedong’s approval, appointed Yang
acting chief of general staff. However, Lin Biao and his wife Ye
Qun soon began to question Yang’s loyalty. First, since Yang would
accompany Mao on trips out of Beijing, Lin and Ye were eager to find
out from Yang what Mao said on these trips concerning Lin Biao and
were frustrated with Yang’s evasiveness about any statements Mao
made. Second, after the February Adverse Current of 1967, Yang
not only disobeyed Lin’s order not to pass party documents to Mar-
shal Ye Jianying but also followed the instructions of Zhou Enlai to
put in place certain measures for the protection of other old marshals.
Third, Yang declined Lin Biao’s request that he disregard facts and
help establish Ye Qun’s early party membership. And fourth, Yang
supported Yu Lijin, political commissar of the air force, after Lin
Liguo, Lin Biao’s son, joined the air force and led a faction against
Yu. In March 1968, when Lin Biao sought support from the Jiang
Qing group for the removal of Yang Chengwu and Yu Lijin, Jiang
asked Lin to dismiss Fu Chongbi, commanding officer of the Beijing
Garrison Command, as well. As a result of this political bargain, the
three generals were named by Lin, with the approval of Mao, as a
Yang-Yu-Fu Anti-Party Clique. Yang was arrested on 22 March 1968
and imprisoned for six years.
After the downfall of Lin Biao and his associates in September
1971, Mao began to seek support from other factions in the army. In
December 1973, Mao acknowledged some of the mistakes he made
concerning the Yang-Yu-Fu Affair. The names of the three generals
were cleared in July 1974. Yang was reappointed deputy chief of gen-
eral staff of the PLA and commander of the Fuzhou Military Region
YANG SHANGKUN © 335
in 1975. In March 1979, the CC officially rehabilitated the case of
the Yang-Yu-Fu Affair by publicizing its 1974 decision for the first
time. Yang became a member of both the Eleventh and Twelfth CC.
He was also elected vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference in 1983.
YANG SHANGKUN (1907-1998). Director of the General Office of
the CCP Central Committee (CC) and an alternate member of the
CCP Secretariat, Yang was named a member of the Peng-Luo-Lu-
Yang Anti-Party Clique at the enlarged Politburo sessions, 4-26
May 1966, and became one of the earliest victims of the Cultural
Revolution among ranking CCP leaders.
A native of Tongnan, Sichuan Province, Yang joined the Chinese
Communist Youth League in 1925 and became a member of the CCP
in 1926. After five years of training at Sun Yat-sen University in
Moscow, Yang came back to China in 1931 to lead the labor move-
ment in Shanghai and an anti-Japanese propaganda campaign in
Jiangsu Province. Yang joined the CCP central soviet government
in Jiangxi in 1933, became an alternate member of the CC in 1934,
and served as political commissar of the Red Army’s Third Infantry
during the Long March. He began to work directly under Liu Shaoqi
at the CCP North China Bureau in 1937 and became secretary of the
Bureau in 1938 upon Liu’s departure. Yang went to Yan’an in 1941
and became secretary general of the CCP Central Military Commis-
sion (CMC) in 1945. In 1948, Yang was appointed, and was to remain
until 1965, director of the General Office of the CC, an important
office that coordinates the daily affairs of the CC and offers services
to help top CCP leaders in their daily lives. In 1956, he became an
alternate secretary of CCP Central Secretariat at the First Plenum of
the CCP Eighth Central Committee while continuing to hold other
important positions as the general secretary of both the CC General
Office and the CMC.
On 11 November 1965, Yang was suddenly removed from the
General Office. On a charge of stealing top party secrets, he was
accused of tapping Mao Zedong’s, as well as other Politburo mem-
bers’, conversations and providing documents and archives to others
for copying without proper authorization, while the fact was, accord-
ing to the post-Mao leadership’s defense of Yang, that Yang simply
336 © YANG XIANZHEN
performed his duty in recording Mao’s conversations with foreign
visitors. According to Wang Li’s recollection, Mao also condemned
Yang for having persecuted Leftists as Rightists, including those with
connections to Mao. For punishment, Yang was demoted and exiled
to the provinces. In May 1966, Yang was named a member of the
Peng-Luo-Lu- Yang Anti-Party Clique at enlarged Politburo sessions.
In July, he was detained for investigation and lost his freedom.
Yang’s name was cleared in 1978. He was then appointed to several
important positions in Guangdong Province. In 1980, Yang became
a member of the core leadership in Beijing. The high positions he
served in the next 13 years include secretary general of the CMC, a
member of the Politburo, first vice-chairman of the CMC, and above
all, president of the PRC (1988-1993). Yang retired from all his posi-
tions at the end of 1993. He died on 14 September 1998.
YANG XIANZHEN (1896-1992). Born in Yunxian, Hubei Province,
Yang was a veteran member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
and one of the party’s leading Marxist theorists. He served as provost
and vice-president of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and became
president and party secretary when the institute was renamed the
Higher Party School of the CCP Central Committee (CC) in 1955.
Yang was demoted to vice-president in 1961 because of his critical
remarks about the Great Leap Forward. In 1964, he was criticized for
formulating the idea of “two combine into one” as the complement
or antithesis of “one divides into two” (a theory Mao Zedong upheld
and promoted) in the dialectic. Named “bourgeois spokesman within
the party” and accused of opposing Mao Zedong Thought and advo-
cating revisionism, Yang was dismissed from office in 1965.
During the Cultural Revolution, Yang was named by Kang Sheng
as a political target to bring down. He was struggled against at the
Higher Party School. He was also imprisoned for eight years (1967-
1975) as a member of the so-called Sixty-One Traitors Clique. After
he was released from prison in 1975, Yang was sent to Shaanxi, where
he remained doing manual labor until 1978. On 16 December 1978,
the CC dismissed the Sixty-One Traitors Clique as a case of injustice.
On 4 August 1980, the CC approved the Party School’s review of
Yang’s case, and Yang Xianzhen was finally rehabilitated. In his last
years, Yang served as a member on the Advisory Committee of the
CC. Yang died on 25 August 1992.
YANG-YU-FU AFFAIR ® 337
YANG XIGUANG (1949-2004). A self-labeled ultraleftist and the
leading theorist of the mass organization the “Provincial Proletarian
Alliance” of Hunan Province, Yang Xiguang was persecuted by the
government for his insistence on articulating and further theorizing
what he believed to be Mao Zedong’s original conception of the Cul-
tural Revolution.
Yang was the son of a ranking CCP official who was implicated
in the case of the Peng Dehuai Anti-Party Clique in 1959. When the
Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Yang was a student at Changsha
No. 1 Middle School in the capital city of Hunan. Inspired by Mao’s
critique of an emerging bureaucratic bourgeois class within the ruling
party and his ideas of continuous revolution based on such a critique,
Yang began to observe the development of the Cultural Revolution
from a perspective that he considered to be Mao’s original intention
of the Revolution. As an intellectually inclined political rebel, Yang
wrote a series of essays in which he judges the new establishment
of the revolutionary committee as falling far short of Mao’s politi-
cal ideal and denounces the current “red” capitalist class in the new
power structure with Premier Zhou Enlai as its general representa-
tive. A takeover by the militia is necessary in his view to usher in a
genuine proletarian dictatorship under Mao through general elections
with the Paris Commune of 1871 as a model. Prominent among these
essays was a long article entitled “Where Is China Going?” that
Kang Sheng named the reactionary political program of the “Provin-
cial Proletarian Alliance” of Hunan.
Yang was arrested in 1968 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The post-Mao government released him in 1978 but refused to redress
his case. He then changed his name to “Yang Xiaokai” because, with
a still “problematic” personal record, he could not find a job. In 1983,
Yang went to Princeton University as a doctoral student in economics
and received his Ph.D. in 1988. He died on 7 July 2004 while a chair
professor in economics at Monash University, Australia. See also
NEW TREND OF IDEAS.
YANG-YU-FU AFFAIR (1968). Also known as the 24 March Inci-
dent, this was a case Lin Biao and Jiang Qing framed against three
ranking military leaders: Acting Chief of General Staff of the PLA
and Director of the Central Military Commission Administrative
Group Yang Chengwu, Air Force Political Commissar Yu Lijin,
338 © YAO WENYUAN
and Commanding Officer of the Beijing Garrison Command Fu
Chongbi. The replacement of the three by Lin’s close associates fur-
ther strengthened Lin’s power in the military and gave Lin full con-
trol of the Central Military Commission Administrative Group.
The downfall of Yang, Yu, and Fu also set off a nationwide campaign
against a “right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend.”
On 22 March 1968, the CCP Central Committee (CC), the State
Council, the Central Military Commission (CMC), and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) jointly issued two orders
removing Yang Chengwu, Yu Lijin, and Fu Chongbi from power in the
military and appointing Huang Yongsheng chief of general staff of the
PLA and Wen Yucheng commanding officer of the Beijing Garrison
Command. On the evening of 24 March, the decision was announced
at a meeting of 10,000 middle- and high-ranking military cadres at the
Great Hall of the People. In his long speech at the meeting, Lin Biao
made several charges against the three generals, including a conspiracy
of Yang and Yu to take control of the air force and an armed storming
of the CCRSG ordered by Yang and led by Fu.
On the early morning of 25 March, Mao Zedong came out to greet
the assembled and show his support for Lin’s handling of the Yang-
Yu-Fu affair. The two orders were read for the first time on the after-
noon of 27 March at a mass rally of 100,000 civilians and military
personnel in Beijing. In her speech at the rally, Jiang Qing identified
Yang, Yu, and Fu as representatives of a “right-deviationist reversal-
of-verdicts trend.” In the CC’s political report delivered by Lin Biao
at the CCP Ninth Congress, the Yang- Yu-Fu affair was referred to as
an “evil trend to reverse the verdict on the February Adverse Cur-
rent.” None of the charges was substantiated, though Yang, Yu, and
Fu were indeed sympathetic with the old marshals involved in the
so-called February Adverse Current of 1967.
At a CMC meeting on 21 December 1973, more than two years
after Lin Biao’s downfall, Mao Zedong said, “The case of Yang- Yu-
Fu should be reversed. It was all Lin Biao’s doing. I made a mistake
in listening only to his side of the story.” In July 1974, Yang, Yu, and
Fu were rehabilitated. On 28 March 1979, the CC officially cleared
the case of the Yang-Yu-Fu Affair by publicizing its 1974 decision
for the first time.
YAO WENYUAN (1931- ). A key member of the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), second secretary of the Shang-
YAO WENYUAN @ 339
hai Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
and a member of the CCP Politburo from 1969 to 1976, Yao was one
of Mao Zedong’s trusted cultural revolutionaries and the author of
the article “On the New Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from
Office” that came to be known as the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural
Revolution. He was generally considered to be de facto head of the
CCP Propaganda Department after 1971. Yao was arrested in 1976 as
a member of the Gang of Four.
A native of Zhuji, Zhejiang Province, Yao was a son of Yao Pengzi,
a left-wing writer in the 1930s. Yao joined the CCP in 1948 while a
high school student in Shanghai. After the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) took over Shanghai from the Nationalists, Yao started to work
as a correspondent for the CCP-controlled media. By 1957, his
militant criticism of allegedly bourgeois, revisionist, and reactionary
writers had already caught the attention of Chairman Mao Zedong.
On 10 June 1957, Mao applauded one of Yao’s essays attacking
Rightists and recommended it for nationwide distribution.
In the first half of the 1960s, Yao was involved in Mao’s back-
stage strategic planning of the Cultural Revolution and became a
close ally of Jiang Qing. Around 1963, he followed Zhang Chun-
qiao, director of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Shanghai
Municipal Committee, to work for Jiang Qing in her “revolution
in Peking opera” program. Yao rose to prominence in 1965 when
he, following instructions from Zhang and Jiang, wrote “On the
New Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” attacking
Wu Han. In 1966, Yao published a series of articles attacking Deng
Tuo, Peng Zhen, and the CCP Beijing Municipal Committee, which
earned him the nickname “proletarian golden stick.” A rising star
on China’s political scene, Yao was named a member of the newly
established CCRSG in May 1966 and began to play a significant
role in bringing down the Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping faction
of the central leadership in the ensuing months. During the Criticize
the Bourgeois Reactionary Line campaign, Yao and other CCRSG
members pushed the rebel movement forward against the old party
establishment. He also actively engaged in Shanghai’s January
Storm, instigating rebels to take power from the senior leaders of
Shanghai government, Chen Pixian and Cao Diqiu. After the fall of
Chen and Cao, Yao became vice-chairman of the Shanghai Revolu-
tionary Committee and, later, second secretary of the CCP Shang-
hai Municipal Committee.
340 © YEJIANYING
As a theorist, Yao helped Mao formulate the theory of continu-
ing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat: On 7
November 1967, the People’s Daily, the Red Flag, and the Liberation
Army Daily carried a joint editorial entitled “March Forward along
the Road of the October Socialist Revolution: Commemorating the
50th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution,” which,
drafted by Yao Wenyuan and Chen Boda, sums up in six points the
theory of the Cultural Revolution and names it Mao’s most significant
contribution to Marxism. In 1969, Yao was elected to the Politburo at
the Ninth National Congress of the CCP.
After the downfall of Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu in
late 1967 and Chen Boda in 1970—all of them radical writers and
theorists in the service of Mao’s cultural revolution politics—Yao
became Mao’s most trusted writer, propaganda chief, and ideologi-
cal watchdog. In the ensuing years until October 1976, Yao was the
person in charge of the People’s Daily and the Red Flag and virtu-
ally controlled official media in China. During this period, Yao was
further involved in the top-level power struggle of the CCP and
became a member of the Jiang Qing-led Gang of Four. With the
nation’s propaganda apparatus under his control, Yao, with Mao’s
support, advocated the political interests and ideology of his faction
and helped edge out several political rivals, including Lin Biao and
his associates in 1971 and Deng Xiaoping and his supporters in 1975
and 1976.
On 6 October 1976, within a month of Mao’s death, Hua Guofeng
and Ye Jianying ordered the arrest of Yao and other members of the
Gang of Four. On 23 January 1981, a special court of the Supreme
People’s Court of the PRC convicted Yao of a series of crimes, includ-
ing organizing and leading a counterrevolutionary clique and partici-
pating in Jiang Qing’s activities to usurp state power, and sentenced
him to 20 years in prison.
YE JIANYING (1896-1986). A senior leader of the Chinese Commu-
nist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Ye played
a significant role in China’s political and military matters before,
during, and after the Cultural Revolution. Of particular importance
was his involvement in the February Adverse Current of 1967 and
in the ousting of the Gang of Four in October 1976. The latter put to
an end the decade-long turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
YEJIANYING ° 341
A native of Mei County, Guangdong Province, and a graduate of the
Yunan Military Academy, Ye became deputy director of the Depart-
ment of Instruction at the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy in
1924 when the Academy was founded. He participated in the Northern
Expedition in 1926, joined the CCP in 1927, and became one of the
leaders of the Guangzhou Uprising. After two years of study in Mos-
cow, Ye returned to China in 1930 and became chief of staff of the
Red Army and later assumed presidency of the Red Army School. A
leading officer during the Long March, Ye was credited with reporting
to Mao Zedong about Zhang Guotao’s dubious moves and saving the
troops led by Mao and Zhu De. In the war of resistance against Japan
and the civil war afterwards, Ye, as chief of staff of the Eighth Route
Army and then of the PLA, continued to distinguish himself as a top
military analyst of the CCP.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Ye
was appointed to a number of prominent government and military
positions, including mayor of Beijing, governor of Guangdong, com-
mander of the South-China Military Region, president and political
commissar of the PLA Military Academy, and vice chairman of the
CCP Central Military Commission (CMC). In 1955, Ye was made
one of 10 marshals of the PRC. He became a member of the CCP
Central Committee (CC) in 1945 and a member of the Politburo in
August 1966 at the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central
Committee.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Ye rose steadily in
the CCP central leadership. He supported Mao’s move to purge Luo
Ruigqing, chief of general staff of the PLA and general secretary
of the CMC, and led the CC work group on the Luo case in May
1966. He also took Luo’s place as general secretary of the CMC.
As the revolution continued to unfold, however, Ye was taken aback
by the moves of the ultraleftist forces against the military establish-
ment. In February 1967, Ye, along with Tan Zhenlin, Chen Yi, Xu
Xiangqian, and a few other senior party and military leaders, sharply
criticized the radicals of the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group at a top-level meeting in Zhongnanhai. The outburst of their
anti-Cultural Revolution sentiment was denounced by Mao as a Feb-
ruary Adverse Current. Ye was soon removed as general secretary
of the CMC. The veterans were under attack again in April 1969 at
the Ninth National Congress of the CCP. Although Ye, alone of all
342 © YEQUN
the veterans involved in the February Adverse Current, was allowed
to retain his seat in the Politburo, he was nevertheless exiled from
Beijing in October 1969.
Mao began to enlist Ye’s support in his strategic move against the
Lin Biao faction after the Lushan Conference of 1970. In July 1971,
Ye was entrusted with the responsibility of receiving U.S. Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger during the latter’s secret visit to Beijing.
After Lin Biao’s demise in 1971, Ye took charge of the daily affairs of
the military in the capacity of vice-chairman of the CMC. Ye became
a vice-chairman of the CCP in 1973 and minister of defense in 1975.
In between the two appointments, however, Ye and Premier Zhuo
Enlai were harshly criticized at the enlarged Politburo sessions,
25 November-5 December 1973, for carrying out a “right-wing
capitulationist line” or Zhou-Ye revisionist line in their negotiations
with the United States. Eventually, in 1976, during the campaign to
counterattack the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend,
Mao removed Ye from power because he followed both Deng Xiao-
ping and Zhou Enlai closely to carry out a rectification program.
Within a month of Mao’s death, Ye worked closely with Hua
Guofeng and Wang Dongxing in making the decision to arrest the
Gang of Four on 6 October 1976. In March 1977, Ye resumed his
responsibility for the daily affairs of the CMC. In March 1978, he
was elected chairman of the Standing Committee of the National
People’s Congress. Ye retired in 1985 and died on 22 October 1986.
YE QUN (1917-1971). Wife of Lin Biao and liaison between Lin and
his supporters in the armed forces during the Cultural Revolution, Ye
was director of the office of Lin Biao, a member of the All Forces
Cultural Revolution Small Group, and a member of the Central
Military Commission Administrative Group (1967-1971).
Born in Minhou (Fuzhou), Fujian Province, Ye Qun took part in
the December 9 anti-Japanese, patriotic movement in Beijing in 1935
as a middle school student. In the early stages of the war of resis-
tance against Japan, Ye was briefly associated with a Kuomintang-
controlled youth organization before she went to Yan’an to join the
Communists in 1938. She married Lin Biao in 1942. After the Com-
munists took power in 1949, she began to serve as Lin Biao’s secre-
tary and, officially belonging in the military, eventually attained the
rank of full colonel.
YEQUN ® 343
Ye Qun began to be actively involved in politics in the central
leadership in late 1965 when she assisted Lin Biao in bringing down
Luo Ruiging, chief of general staff of the PLA. Ye telephoned Li
Zuopeng, deputy commander of the navy, and advised him on how
to frame Luo in a report Lin Biao had asked him to write. At the end
of November, Ye carried Lin’s personal letter to Hangzhou to see
Mao Zedong on the alleged problems of Luo, and her report to Mao
in their six-hour conversation was mainly based on Li Zuopeng’s
fabrications. Following Mao’s instruction, the Standing Committee
of the Politburo held an enlarged session in Shanghai in December
1965 to criticize Luo. Ye Qun, who was not even a Central Commit-
tee (CC) member at the time, not only attended the meeting but also
spoke three times for almost 10 hours altogether, enumerating Luo’s
“crimes” of opposing Mao Zedong Thought and attempting to take
over Lin Biao’s power at the Ministry of Defense.
Ye’s political engagement went further after the Cultural Revolu-
tion began in mid-1966. In August 1966, Lei Yingfu, a ranking offi-
cer in the Department of General Staff, fabricated material against
President Liu Shaoqi at Ye’s suggestion. Following Ye’s instruction,
Song Zhiguo, of the general office of the Central Military Commis-
sion (CMC), wrote in September to frame Lin and Ye’s personal
enemy Marshal He Long. In October, at Jiang Qing’s request, Ye
instructed Jiang Tengjiao, a ranking officer of the air force, to con-
duct a dramatic “ransacking household” (chaojia) by Red Guards
at the homes of some notable personages in Shanghai in search of
material that might reveal what Jiang Qing thought to be her embar-
rassing past as a film actress. On 11 January 1967, Ye was named a
member of the All Forces Cultural Revolution Small Group, her first
official title of political significance. After the February Adverse
Current of 1967, Ye was involved in the activities to frame Marshals
Xu Xiangqian and Ye Jianying. In August 1967, when the Central
Military Commission Administrative Group was formed to take over
the daily affairs of the CMC, Ye Qun was appointed one of its four
founding members. In 1969, at the Ninth National Congress of the
CCP, Ye was elected to the CC and the Politburo.
At the Lushan Conference of 1970, the conflict between the Jiang
Qing faction and the Lin Biao faction surfaced. Ye joined Chen
Boda, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo in attacking Zhang
Chungiao and supporting a proposal not to eliminate the office of
344 œ YILIN DIXI
the national president. She, along with other supporters of Lin Biao,
was reproached by Mao. On 6 September 1971, when General Huang
Yongsheng informed Ye of the critical remarks on Lin Biao that Mao
made during his southern inspection, Ye was said to have passed
the intelligence to Lin Biao right away, and the two allegedly made a
decision to let their son Lin Liguo execute a plot against Mao’s life.
The alleged assassination plan was foiled due to the changes Mao
made on his itinerary. On the evening of 12 September, Mao’s sudden
and unexpected return to Beijing and Zhou Enlai’s telephone conver-
sation with Ye Qun made Ye believe that their scheme was detected.
She boarded the jet plane Trident 256 with Lin Biao and Lin Liguo
and fled the country on the early morning of 13 September. About
two hours after taking off, Trident 256 crashed near Undurkhan in
Mongolia, killing all passengers onboard.
Ye Qun’s role in the September 13 Incident and the events lead-
ing up to it still lacks a definitive account today. Apparently, after
she stepped into the political arena of the CCP central leadership in
late 1965, Ye took an increasingly active role mediating between the
frail, increasingly reclusive Lin Biao and his cohorts in the armed
forces. Yet it remains a question whether, as the official version of
history has it, Ye was simply Lin Biao’s loyal agent or, according to
her daughter Lin Liheng’s eyewitness account, Ye was a much more
manipulative and domineering figure who plotted with Lin Liguo in
the last few days of their lives without Lin Biao’s knowledge.
YILIN DIXI. Made of the Chinese transliteration of pennames that
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin once used, this was the pseudonym that Liu
Wozhong and Zhang Licai, two students at the Beijing Agricultural
University High School, adopted in their “Open Letter to Comrade
Lin Biao” criticizing Lin’s peak theory concerning Mao Zedong
and Mao Zedong Thought. The specific target of criticism in this
letter is a speech Lin gave at the Military Academy on 18 September
1966, in which Lin spoke of Mao as a rare genius that could emerge
once in several hundred years, an unmatched thinker looking far
beyond capitalism and therefore standing much higher than Marx,
Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.
In their critique of Lin’s speech, Liu and Zhang embrace Joseph
Stalin’s assessment of Leninism in the context of monopoly capitalism
and judge Lin Biao’s comparison of Mao with his revolutionary pre-
YU HUIYONG @ 345
decessors to be ahistorical and therefore wrong. While acknowledg-
ing Mao Zedong Thought as the most applicable theory of Marxism
in current times, they disagree with Lin’s view that PLA personnel
should devote 99 percent of their political study to reading Mao’s
works; the percentage was inappropriate, they argue, because it is
necessary to study the classic texts of earlier Marxist thinkers in order
to understand the development of Mao’s ideas. They also criticize Lin
for being out of touch with the masses and out of touch with theory,
too, which includes Mao’s speculation on replacing the old state
apparatus with a “commune of the east” as the ultimate goal of the
Cultural Revolution.
Liu and Zhang posted their open letter as a big-character poster
on the campus of Tsinghua University on 15 November 1966 and then
distributed it as handbills. Their critique of Lin Biao soon became
known across China. They were struggled against as counterrevo-
lutionaries on school campuses in Beijing. The authorities arrested
them on 20 December 1966 on a charge of attacking the proletarian
revolutionary headquarters. The post-Mao government rehabilitated
Liu and Zhang and, on 18 June 1979, officially pronounced the origi-
nal verdict unjust.
YU HUIYONG (1929-1977). Born in Shandong Province, Yu joined
the PLA in 1946 and the CCP in 1949. He caught the attention of
Jiang Qing in 1965 when he, as a composer, was involved in the
making of the Peking Operas Taking Tiger Mountain by Stratagem
(Zhiqu Weihushan) and On the Dock (Haigang). Produced by the
Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe, both operas were to be on the list of
the eight model dramas promoted by Jiang Qing. Yu was a lecturer
at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music at the time. Due to his contri-
bution to the production of the two operas, Jiang Qing, accompanied
by Zhang Chungiao, then director of the CCP Shanghai propaganda
department, received him in person.
Jiang’s high regard for him proved to be a political fortune to Yu
during the Cultural Revolution. In October 1966, Zhang Chunqiao
rescued Yu from the “cow shed” (where people labeled class enemies,
or cow-demons and snake-spirits, were detained) at the Shanghai
Conservatory of Music and made him a member of a performance
team that Jiang Qing had asked to form in Shanghai for the purpose of
showcasing the two model operas in Beijing. Shortly after Shanghai’s
346 © YU LIJIN
January Storm of 1967, Yu was made chairman of the Revolution-
ary Committee of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and, later,
party secretary of Shanghai Cultural Bureau. In July 1971, Yu, an
enthusiastic supporter and advocate of Jiang Qing’s radical propa-
gandist art theory and experiment, was named deputy director of the
newly formed State Council Cultural Group. He became a member
of the CCP Tenth Central Committee in August 1973 and minister of
culture in January 1975.
During these years, Yu, along with Liu Qingtang and Qian Hao-
liang, represented Jiang Qing and her group in cultural and art cir-
cles. Taking orders from Jiang Qing, he launched attacks on a number
of well-known literary and artistic productions and events, including
the Jin opera Three Trips to Taofeng, a painting exhibition in Beijing
(which Yu labeled “black’’), and the film Pioneers (chuangye). These
attacks provided ammunition for the ultraleftist faction of the CCP
leadership against their political rivals such as Zhou Enlai and Deng
Xiaoping and drastically deepened political repression in cultural
and artistic circles. On 22 October 1976, Yu was detained as a diehard
follower of the Gang of Four. He committed suicide on 28 August
1977 while in detention. In September 1977, Yu was expelled from
the CCP. In October 1983, more than six years after his death, the
party committee of Ministry of Culture issued a document officially
dismissing Yu from his posts both within and outside the party.
YU LIJIN (1913-1978). Political commissar of the air force, General
Yu was persecuted by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing in 1968 as a member
of the so-called Yang- Yu-Fu Anti-Party Clique. Born in Dayan, Hubei
Province, Yu joined the Red Army in 1928 and became a member of
the CCP in 1930. A veteran of the Long March and a long-time politi-
cal officer in the army, Yu was appointed political commissar of the
air force in the Nanjing Military Region after 1949 and later political
commissar of the air force of the PLA.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Yu came under attack
by rebels in the military until he was appointed a member of the All
Forces Cultural Revolution Small Group in January 1967. But Yu
soon had conflicts with Wu Faxian, commander of the air force and
Lin Biao’s close associate, especially after Lin Liguo, son of Lin Biao,
joined the air force and received special treatment from Wu Faxian.
Lin Liguo’s entry led to a split of the Air Force Command personnel
YU LUOKE © 347
into two factions: his own supporters and those of Yu Lijin’s. The Lin
Liguo supporters fabricated the story of a romantic and slightly sala-
cious affair between one of Yu’s secretaries and the daughter of Yang
Chengwu, acting chief of general staff, and had the secretary arrested.
Yang Chengwu suggested to Wu Faxian that the arrest was not appro-
priate and that Yu’s secretary should be released. This suggestion was
soon used by Lin Biao as evidence of a Yang-Yu conspiracy to take
over power at the Air Force Command.
In March 1968, when Lin Biao sought support from Jiang Qing’s
group for removing Yang Chengwu and Yu Lijin from power, Jiang
asked Lin to dismiss Fu Chongbi, the commanding officer of the
Beijing Garrison Command, as well. As a result of this political
bargain, the three generals were named by Lin, with the approval of
Mao Zedong, as antiparty elements in the army. Yu was arrested on
23 March 1968 and imprisoned for six years.
In December 1973, more than two years after the downfall of Lin
Biao, Mao acknowledged his mistakes concerning the Yang-Yu-Fu
Affair. The names of the three generals were cleared in July 1974.
Yu was reappointed first political commissar of the Civil Aviation
Administration of China and second political commissar of the air
force. Yu died in 1978. In March 1979, the CC officially cleared the
case of the Yang-Yu-Fu Affair by publicizing its 1974 decision for
the first time.
YU LUOKE (1942-1970). An outspoken critic of the blood lineage
theory and the discriminatory class line of the CCP, Yu sacrificed his
life advocating equal rights for the underprivileged and the oppressed.
He was China’s pioneer of democratic consciousness during the Cul-
tural Revolution.
A native of Beijing, Yu was born into a family that was considered
politically untrustworthy in post-1949 China. His grandfather’s class
status was that of a capitalist. His father, an engineer, was branded
“Rightist” in 1957. Despite his academic excellence, Yu Luoke was
denied a college education due to his family background. After high
school, first as a farmer at Red Star People’s Commune in the Beijing
suburbs and then an apprentice at the Beijing People’s Machine Fac-
tory, Yu taught himself the Chinese classics and Western philosophy.
The influence of his readings, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on
the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men among them,
348 © YU LUOKE
was to be noticeable in his article “On Family Background” for
which he was best known during the Cultural Revolution.
Yu was remarkably independent in his political thinking when
almost the whole nation was carried away by the fever of the Revo-
lution. Upon reading Yao Weyuan’s article “On the New Historical
Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office,’ which is known as the pro-
logue to the Cultural Revolution, Yu presented his counterargument
in several articles defending the playwright Wu Han’s high regard
for Hai Rui. One of the articles was published in Shanghai’s Wenhui
Daily on 13 February 1966 as an example of bad criticism; it was
shortened by the editor and re-titled “It Is Time to Fight Mechanistic
Materialism.” Some of his journal entries of this period show his
critical views about the personality cult of Mao Zedong and the
model operas promoted by Jiang Qing and his skepticism toward
the Cultural Revolution in general, all of which were to be counted
as evidence of his “‘counterrevolutionary crimes” later on.
The brutality of the Red August of 1966 and the notoriety of the
blood lineage theory represented by a Red Guard couplet (“If the
father is a hero, the son is a real man. If the father is a reactionary,
the son is a bastard.”) eventually prompted Yu to write “On Family
Background,” a critique of government-sanctioned, Red Guards-
promoted “class” discrimination against tens of millions of youths
from nonproletarian families. The mimeographed version of this
article came out in December 1966. The revised version was published
on 18 January 1967 in the Journal of Middle School Cultural Revolu-
tion and soon became one of the most widely circulated articles during
the Cultural Revolution. Letters of support poured in from all parts of
China. In the three months that followed, Yu wrote a number of articles
on the same issue and published them in the Journal of Middle School
Cultural Revolution and two other mass organization newspapers. He
also participated in public debates over the theory of blood lineage.
Yu’s outlets were blocked on 13 April 1967 when Qi Benyu, a
member of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, spoke of
“On Family Background” as a “reactionary” piece attacking social-
ism as a caste system. The authorities arrested Yu on 5 January 1968
and executed him on 5 March 1970. His “crimes,” as listed in his
court verdict, include “writing reactionary letters, poems, and diaries
39 66.
calumniating the proletarian headquarters,’ “planning to organize
99 66
a counterrevolutionary clique,” “threatening to plot assassinations,”
ZHANG CHUNQIAO @® 349
and “intending to sabotage the proletarian dictatorship.’ On 21
November 1979, Beijing Intermediate People’s Court redressed Yu’s
case and pronounced the earlier court decision unjust.
<7 =
ZHANG CHUNQIAO (1917-2005). Deputy head of the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG), first secretary of the
Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) (1967-1976), a member of the CCP Politburo (1969-1976)
and its standing committee (1973-1976), vice-premier of the State
Council (SC) (1975-1976), and director of the General Political
Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) (1975-1976),
Zhang was a leading ultraleftist intellectual and government official
who was deeply involved in Chairman Mao Zedong’s backstage stra-
tegic planning of the Cultural Revolution and played a significant role
in the politics of the central leadership during the Revolution. Zhang
was arrested in 1976 as a member of the Gang of Four and remained
faithful to Mao’s legacy after the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Juye, Shandong Province, Zhang was a leftist writer in
Shanghai who, assuming the penname Di Ke, had debated with Lu
Xun in the 1930s. Zhang joined the CCP in 1936. At the outbreak
of the war of resistance against Japan, Zhang went to the Com-
munist base Yan’an and worked as a leading editor in several local
newspapers. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China
(PRC), Zhang returned to Shanghai and assumed several important
posts in the area of journalism and political propaganda under the
CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee, including editor-in-chief of
the committee’s official organ Liberation Daily, director of the com-
mittee’s department of cultural work and department of propaganda,
and an alternate secretary of the municipal committee. In 1958 when
the radical Great Leap Forward policies were beginning to be imple-
mented, Zhang published an article entitled “Eradicate the Ideology
of the Bourgeois Right,’ advocating the abolition of material incen-
tives in all production units. Mao applauded the article and recom-
mended its reprint in the CCP official organ People’s Daily.
In the first half of the 1960s, Zhang began to be involved in Mao’s
strategic moves for the launching of the Cultural Revolution and
350 © ZHANG CHUNQIAO
became a close ally of Jiang Qing. Together with Yao Wenyuan,
Zhang actively supported Jiang’s “revolution in Peking opera”
program. He also worked with Jiang in 1965 in planning an attack
on Wu Han and helped Yao Wenyuan in writing and publishing a
critique of Wu’s historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office—an
article to be known as the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural Revolution.
In February 1966, Zhang was involved in the symposium organized
by Jiang Qing on literature and arts in the armed forces. After the
symposium, Zhang, along with Chen Boda, edited and revised the
Summary of the Symposium before it was handed to Mao for fur-
ther revision. Containing a harsh judgment on China’s literary and
art productions since 1949, this summary report was issued by the
CCP Central Committee (CC) in April 1966 in preparation for the
Cultural Revolution.
Zhang was named deputy head of the CCRSG in May 1966 and
began to play a significant role in bringing down the Liu Shaoqi
and Deng Xiaoping faction of the central leadership in the ensuing
months. During the Criticize the Bourgeois Reactionary Line cam-
paign, Zhang and other CCRSG members pushed the rebel move-
ment forward against the old party establishment. In December 1966,
Zhang instigated rebels at Tsinghua University and other schools to
denounce President Liu Shaoqi at a mass rally in Tiananmen Square.
He also supported the Shanghai Workers Command Post during
the Anting Incident and led the Shanghai rebels’ power-seizure
movement in January 1967. After Chen Pixian and Cao Diqiu, the
senior leaders of the Shanghai government, were overthrown, Zhang
became chairman of the newly established Shanghai Revolutionary
Committee and, later, first secretary of the CCP Shanghai Municipal
Committee. In 1969, Zhang was elected to the Politburo at the Ninth
National Congress of the CCP.
After the downfall of Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu in late
1967 and Chen Boda in 1970—all of them radical writers and theorists
in the service of Mao’s cultural revolution politics—Zhang became
China’s foremost Maoist theoretician. In an article entitled “On Com-
plete Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie,’ published in April 1975,
Zhang presented an authoritative Maoist theoretical justification for
the Cultural Revolution. Considering Zhang Chunqiao to be a faithful
student of his Cultural Revolution ideology and a possible successor,
Mao made him a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo
ZHANG TIESHENG © 351
in August 1973 and second vice-premier of the SC and director of the
General Political Department of the PLA in January 1975.
In the 1970s, Zhang was deeply involved in the power conflict in
the central leadership. At the Lushan Conference of 1970, he was
the unnamed target of attack by the Lin Biao faction. After the down-
fall of Lin Biao, in the evolving conflict between cultural revolution-
aries and the politically moderate Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping,
Zhang became a member of the Jiang Qing-led Gang of Four. In late
1975, Zhang and his colleagues convinced Mao of Deng Xiaoping’s
anti-Cultural Revolution stand and finally defeated Deng during the
Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of- Verdicts Trend
Campaign.
On 6 October 1976, within a month of the death of Mao, Hua
Guofeng and Ye Jianying ordered the arrest of Zhang and the other
members of the Gang of Four. On 23 January 1981, a special court of
the Supreme People’s Court of the PRC convicted Zhang of a series
of crimes, including organizing and leading a counterrevolutionary
clique and initiating and continuing to plot power takeovers from the
state government, and sentenced him to death with a two-year reprieve.
Zhang protested all accusations by keeping his silence throughout the
trial. Before the trial, he had stated that he was still a firm Maoist and
supported all the radical policies of the Cultural Revolution. In 1983,
his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. On 21 April 2005,
Zhang died of cancer.
ZHANG TIESHENG (1950- ). Also known as the “hero of the blank
examination paper,’ Zhang Tiesheng wrote a note of protest and plea
after a series of poor performances at the college entrance examina-
tion in 1973. His note was used effectively by the ultraleftist faction
of the CCP leadership as a political weapon against what they con-
sidered to be the restoration of the old education system supported by
Zhou Enlai. Zhang Tiesheng, the 23-year-old applicant, was elevated
by Jiang Qing and her supporters to the status of a hero with the
courage to “go against the tide.” The incident contributed much to the
debasement of knowledge and learning in general and the worsening
of the nation’s higher education in particular in the last three years of
the Cultural Revolution.
Since 1970 when colleges began to admit students, admission deci-
sions had been based on recommendations from applicants’ work
352 © ZHANG TIESHENG
units. In April 1973, however, the State Council approved a document
submitted by its Science and Education Group cautiously suggesting
that college applicants’ examination scores be considered in addition to
recommendations. Zhang Tiesheng, an educated youth working in the
countryside in Liaoning Province, was recommended by his commune
to take part in the regional examination. Overwhelmed by language
and math tests and frustrated further by chemistry and physics, Zhang
Tiesheng wrote a letter to the “respected leaders” on the back of the
examination sheets. In the letter Zhang explained how his total devotion
to the work in the countryside cost him study time. He also attacked
other candidates who did better in the tests as bookworms craving col-
lege for their own benefit and ignoring their proper occupation.
Zhang’s letter caught the attention of Mao Yuanxin, Mao Zedong’s
nephew and a ranking official in Liaoning, who had already become
Jiang Qing’s close associate. Mao Yuanxin made the decision to pub-
lish the letter with an editor’s note, and he edited both. On 19 July
1973, Zhang’s letter, along with the editor’s note, appeared in Liaon-
ing Daily under the title “A Thought-Provoking Examination Paper.”
Three weeks later, all major newspapers, including the People’s
Daily, reprinted the letter and the note. Mao Yuanxin talked about
Zhang Tiesheng as a “sharp rock” that he could use to attack others.
Jiang Qing called Zhang a hero who dared to go against the tide.
Mao Zedong also noticed Zhang Tiesheng. Mao mentioned him with
approval while suggesting that professors at Beijing’s eight institutes
be gathered and given a test. Following the publication of Zhang’s
letter, an anti-intellectual propaganda campaign began nationwide,
in which the newly revived attention to examination scores was
denounced as the bourgeois counteroffensive against the revolution
in education. As a result of such propaganda, the trashing of culture
and knowledge went further in schools at all levels.
Zhang Tiesheng himself, on the other hand, was admitted as a
worker-peasant-soldier student, as a college student was then
called, at the Tieling Institute of Agriculture in Liaoning in autumn
1973. He soon became a party member and was given a responsible
position in the school’s leadership. In 1975, he was made a member
of the Standing Committee of the Fourth National People’s Con-
gress. Zhang became more politically active in 1976 as a follower
of the Jiang Qing group: in Liaoning, Beijing, and Shanxi, he talked
about himself as a sword and a gun, attacked veteran cadres as “res-
toration maniacs,” and called for an organizational “surgery” with
ZHANG ZHIXIN © 353
an “iron hand.” In March 1977, five months after the downfall of the
Gang of Four, Zhang Tiesheng was arrested on a charge of counter-
revolutionary crimes. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
ZHANG XITING (1928- ). A rebelling official during the Cultural
Revolution, Zhang became deputy head of the Sichuan Provincial Rev-
olutionary Committee in 1967 and an alternate member of the Cen-
tral Committee at the Ninth National Congress of the CCP in 1969.
She was dismissed from office for her involvement in a factional war in
Sichuan. On 24 June 1978, Zhang and her husband Liu Jieting, also an
official in Sichuan, were arrested on a counterrevolutionary charge. On
24 March 1982, Zhang was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
ZHANG YUFENG (1944— ). Born in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang Prov-
ince, Zhang served as an attendant on the special train for central lead-
ers in the 1960s and caught the attention of Chairman Mao Zedong.
In 1970, she was transferred to Zhongnanhai to work as an attendant
at Mao’s residence. Her relationship with Mao was said to be inti-
mate. In late 1974, she was appointed Mao’s confidential secretary.
As Mao’s health was worsening, Zhang, as one of the few who could
still make out Mao’s increasingly unclear vocal expressions, became
indispensable as an intermediary between Mao and other leaders.
After Mao’s death, Zhang was transferred out of Zhongnanhai to work
at Bureau No. 1 of Historical Archives. She eventually went back to
her first employer the Ministry of Railways. In the meantime, she led
an editorial effort on Mao’s private library, which resulted in the pub-
lication of a 24-volume Mao Zedong Book Collection in 2001.
ZHANG ZHIXIN (1930-1975). A loyal communist who made known
her critical view of the ultraleftist policies of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP), especially those of the Cultural Revolution, through
regular channels within CCP organizations, Zhang was imprisoned
for more than five years and eventually executed as an “active counter-
revolutionary.”
A native of Tianjin and a graduate of People’s University, Zhang
joined the CCP in 1955 and became a secretary (ganshi) of arts and
literature at the Propaganda Department of the CCP Liaoning Provin-
cial Committee in 1957. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolu-
tion, Zhang criticized Lin Biao’s promotion of Mao’s personality
cult and Lin’s “Peak Theory” and questioned Lin’s motives. When
354 © ZHAO YOUNGFU
the Ninth National Congress of the CCP was held in 1969, Zhang,
while working at a May 7 Cadre School and under surveillance,
spoke out against the inclusion in the newly-revised CCP Constitu-
tion of Lin Biao as Chairman Mao Zedong’s successor. She also
criticized Jiang Qing, the so-called “standard-bearer of the proletar-
ian arts and literature,” for virtually destroying arts and literature.
Zhang saw the persecution of President Liu Shaoqi as unjust and
the ultraleftist policies of the CCP as the direct cause of nationwide
factional violence and chaos during the Cultural Revolution. Zhang’s
criticism also went beyond the Cultural Revolution: she expressed
sympathy for Marshal Peng Dehuai who was dismissed from office
in 1959 for his criticism of Mao’s Great Leap Forward policies.
Peng’s letter to Mao, in Zhang’s view, was not antiparty; rather,
writing a letter to the party chairman was a legitimate move endorsed
by the party constitution. Zhang also pointed out that Mao had made
mistakes in the late 1950s and that the leftist policies of the CCP,
which began in 1958, continued and went much further during the
Cultural Revolution.
Because of her sharply critical views, the provincial authorities of
Liaoning ordered Zhang’s arrest on 26 September 1969 on a counter-
revolutionary charge. While in prison, she refused to acknowledge
her “crimes” and insisted on her right to speak out, for which she was
so brutally abused that she eventually suffered a mental breakdown.
On 3 April 1975, following instructions from Mao Yuanxin, the
local authorities sentenced Zhang Zhixin to death. Two hours before
her execution on 4 April, the executioners cut Zhang’s vocal cords to
prevent her from speaking.
On 31 March 1979, the CCP Liaoning Provincial Committee
redressed her case and named her a revolutionary martyr. On 11
August 1979, Beijing’s Guangming Daily published a long report
about Zhang Zhixin’s life; the details of her persecution shocked the
whole nation. Since then, Zhang has become a national symbol of
integrity, courage, conviction, and opposition to tyranny.
ZHAO YONGFU. See FEBRUARY 23 INCIDENT.
ZHOU ENLAI (1898-1976). Vice-chairman of the Chinese Commu-
nist Party (CCP) (1956-1976) and premier of the People’s Republic
of China (PRC) (1949-1976), Zhou was China’s chief administrator,
ZHOU ENLAI @ 355
negotiator, and diplomat. A supporter of Mao Zedong’s Cultural
Revolution, Zhou was entrusted with the responsibility of managing
the daily affairs of the party and the state from August 1966 until his
death in January 1976. Moderate and pragmatic in his approach to
both state affairs and party politics, he was the single most important
stabilizing factor in the CCP leadership during this turbulent period.
Despite his painstaking and tactical efforts to deradicalize Mao’s
ultra-leftist policies, however, he never openly opposed Mao’s deci-
sions. In later stages of the Cultural Revolution, as he became the
unnamed target of political campaigns launched by the ultraleftists of
the Jiang Qing group with Mao’s consent, his reputation as a sane,
humane, and upright leader soared among the populace. Eventually,
not long after his death, he became the inspiration for the April 5
Movement of 1976—an unprecedented spontaneous mass protest
movement against the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership,
anticipating a swift end to the Cultural Revolution.
A native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, Zhou was a student
leader in Tianjin during the May Fourth Movement. He studied in
both Japan (1917-1919) and France (1920-1924). He joined the
CCP in 1921 and became a leader of the CCP’s European branch.
Upon returning from France, he was appointed, among other ranking
political and military positions in both the CCP and the nationalist
Kuomintang, director of the political department of the Huangpu
(Whampoa) Military Academy where Chiang Kai-shek was com-
mandant. In July 1927, Zhou played a major role in organizing the
Nanchang Uprising, the first military insurrection of the Communists
against the Kuomintang. In late 1931, as he joined Mao Zedong and
Zhu De in the Communist rural base in Jiangxi, he was appointed
secretary of the CCP’s Jiangxi Soviet Central Bureau and replaced
Mao as political commissar of the Red Army. During the Long March
(1934-1935) and during the Yan’an years that followed, however,
Zhou supported Mao’s political and military strategies and helped
establish Mao’s central leadership in both the party and the army. In
late 1936, he negotiated with Chiang Kai-shek to form a Nationalist-
Communist alliance against the invading Japanese army.
During the war of resistance against Japan, while working with
non-Communists and promoting the United Front in the Kuomintang-
controlled areas, Zhou successfully cultivated the image of the CCP
and won broad sympathy and support for the CCP among liberal
356 © ZHOU ENLAI
politicians and intellectuals. As he returned to Yan’an in 1943 to
participate in the Rectification Movement under Mao’s leadership,
however, he was attacked as the representative of the “empiricist fac-
tion” within the party. Zhou survived by pleading guilty and harshly
criticizing himself.
When the PRC was founded in 1949, Zhou served as premier
(1949-1976) and foreign minister (1949-1958). He was in charge of
designing and implementing the country’s economic policies in the
form of a series of five-year plans. His rather cautious and pragmatic
approach to economic matters was often criticized by Mao in the late
1950s. On the diplomatic front, Zhou’s success was enormous: he
went to Moscow in 1950 to negotiate a 30-year China-Soviet treaty of
alliance, he represented the PRC at the 1954 international conference
in Geneva and at the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indo-
nesia, and he traveled broadly throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe
in the late 1950s and early 1960s to promote China’s relations with
Third World countries. The historic meeting between Mao Zedong
and U.S. President Richard Nixon in February 1972 was, to a great
extent, arranged and implemented by Zhou in cooperation with his
U.S. counterpart Henry Kissinger.
In April 1966, when Mao was stirring up revolution by making
angry and harshly critical comments about Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi,
Zhou, who was in charge of the daily activities of the central gov-
ernment at the time during President Liu Shaoqi’s absence from
Beijing, indicated his support for the revolution for the first time in
a formal work report, which virtually legitimized Mao’s otherwise
personal views. But Zhou’s support was nevertheless riddled with
ambiguity throughout. In the heat of the violent Red Guard move-
ment, Zhou made arrangements within the limits of his power to
protect veteran cadres and notable personages from the Red Guards’
attack. When the first mass campaign against Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping was about to begin, he tried in vain to persuade Mao to
soften the harsh political sentence that their policies were a “bour-
geois reactionary line.” As the revolution was spreading rapidly
across the country, he tried to stabilize the nation’s economy by tacti-
cally publicizing Mao’s words “grasp revolution and promote pro-
duction.” During the February Adverse Current of 1967, he tried
to remain neutral as a number of military marshals and vice-premiers
vented their anti-Cultural Revolutionary rage at the ultraleftists of the
ZHOU ENLAI @ 357
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, only to betray his stand
by identifying himself and the veteran leaders together as “us.” In the
early 1970s, Zhou began to talk about the importance of knowledge
and the possibility of enrolling high school graduates directly in col-
lege—propositions that were in conflict with the current practice of
the “revolution in education.”
Zhou Enlai’s position in the CCP leadership was on the rise during
the Cultural Revolution. At the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth
Central Committee (1-12 August 1966), he became the third high-
est ranking leader of the CCP. After the downfall of Lin Biao in
September 1971, he became second, next to Mao. As his status
and power increased, however, Zhou was facing greater challenges
and provocations from the ultraleftist faction of the CCP leadership
who, along with Mao, envisioned Zhou as a formidable anti-Cultural
Revolutionary force after Mao’s death. And, as indispensable as Zhou
was, Mao never considered him as his successor; rather, Mao often
equated Zhou’s meticulous attention to details and superb skills as an
administrator with the neglect of more important matters and the lack
of firm ideological and political conviction.
From 25 November to 5 December 1973, enlarged Politburo
sessions were convened at Mao’s suggestion to criticize Zhou for
his “right revisionist line” and “capitulationism” in foreign policy
because of his negotiations with the United States on the sensitive
issue of military exchange. Jiang Qing called the conflict between
Zhou and Mao as “eleventh line struggle within the party.” A month
later, in January 1974, another general offensive against Zhou was
launched in the name of an anti-Lin Biao campaign known as Criti-
cize Lin and Criticize Confucius, which was followed by yet another
implicitly anti-Zhou movement: that of the Water Margin Appraisal
(1975-1976). The attack on Zhou in both of these campaigns took
the form of allusory historiography in which Confucius and Song
Jiang—a capitulator in the historical romance Water Margin, in Mao’s
view—were depicted with considerable resemblance to China’s cur-
rent premier.
Zhou was instrumental in Deng Xiaoping’s reinstatement as vice-
premier in 1973. In December 1974, Zhou, gravely ill with cancer and
escorted by hospital nurses, flew to Changsha to discuss personnel
matters with Mao in preparation for the forthcoming Fourth National
People’s Congress. Zhou recommended Deng for the position of the
358 © ZHOU QUANYING
first vice-premier against Zhang Chunqiao, the candidate of the Jiang
Qing group. In the opening session of the Fourth Congress on 13
January 1975, Zhou delivered the government work report, confirm-
ing the “four modernizations” (modernization in industry, agriculture,
national defense, and science and technology) as the long-range goal
of the PRC.
Zhou Enlai’s painstaking efforts to deflate the influence of ultra-
leftism and to restore normality to China won sympathy nationwide.
By the time of his death on 8 January 1976, he had become the most
respected Communist leader in China. As Zhou’s body was trans-
ported to the Beijing Babaoshan Cemetery via Chang’an Avenue on
the afternoon of 11 January, an estimated one million citizens lined
the street waiting in bitter cold to pay their respects to the late pre-
mier. Mao Zedong, absent from Zhou’s funeral, commented harshly
on a briefing report with the words “Restoration [of capitalism] in the
name of mourning.” In the meantime, the traditional custom of pay-
ing homage to the dead during the Qingming Festival season (in late
March and early April) provided an occasion for another, and more
powerful, outpouring of public grief at the loss of Zhou in major cit-
ies of China, which turned into a venting of public rage against ultra-
leftism as well. The memory of the late premier had thus become a
rallying point for the masses against the Cultural Revolution. See also
CONFUCIANISM VERSUS LEGALISM; NANJING INCIDENT;
PING-PONG DIPLOMACY; TIANANMEN INCIDENT; UNITED
STATES-CHINA RELATIONS; WU HAO AFFAIR; ZHOU-YE
REVISIONIST LINE.
ZHOU QUANYING. A student at Tsinghua University, Zhou was a
leader and theorist of the “4-14 Headquarters,” a moderately inclined
rebel organization. As an antithesis of the ultraleftist new trend of
ideas, Zhou articulated his rather conservative assessment of the
political state of the nation in a much-publicized article entitled “The
4-14 Trend Shall Prevail” (3 August 1967). Rejecting the notion that
a privileged bourgeois bureaucratic class had formed within the CCP
since it became the ruling party in China in 1949, Zhou regarded
the 17 years of the communist rule before the Cultural Revolution
as a proletarian dictatorship under the leadership of Chairman Mao
Zedong. The number of so-called capitalist-roaders within the party
was extremely small. He therefore opposed the drastic overhaul of
ZHOU RONGXIN @ 359
the political system and the violent struggle through which power
was to be redistributed. Zhou was highly critical of the nationwide
mass movement following the directions of the Central Cultural
Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) because it was drawing the entire
country further and further into chaos.
Many moderate rebels sympathized with these ideas, and Zhou’s
article became quite popular among them. Later, in other writings,
Zhou singled out Chen Boda, head of the CCRSG, as a target of
criticism and also made known his observations of the conflicts
among members of the CCRSG, Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, and other
top leaders, which led to his detention by the authorities. He was
released after Mao mentioned his name at a meeting with the five
Red Guard leaders and said that a theorist should be freed. But Zhou
was Officially arrested on 19 May 1978 because of a big-character
poster he wrote in 1977 in which he reversed his earlier views
and exposed the privileges the CCP officials enjoy. He was finally
released in December 1979 after the government pronounced his case
misjudged.
ZHOU RONGXIN (1917-1976). As minister of education when
Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping was conducting an overall rectifica-
tion program in 1975, Zhou followed Deng closely and criticized
various forms of anti-intellectualism promoted in the Cultural
Revolution. In the subsequent anti-Deng Counterattack the Right-
Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend campaign, Zhou was
denounced as Deng’s right-hand man and an enemy of the revolu-
tion in education.
Born in Penglai, Shandong Province, Zhou Rongxin joined the
CCP in 1937. He was appointed deputy minister of education in 1959
and secretary-general of the State Council in 1965. In late 1966 and
early 1967, Jiang Qing and her supporters accused Zhou of carrying
out a bourgeois reactionary line (that of Liu Shaoqi) and support-
ing the repressive Red Guard organizations, such as the Pickets of
the Xicheng District in Beijing, in the early stages of the Cultural
Revolution. Zhou was publicly denounced and humiliated. In January
1975 when Deng Xiaoping assumed various top leadership positions
and took charge of the daily affairs of the CCP Central Committee
(CC) and the State Council, Zhou was appointed minister of educa-
tion. Urged by Deng to speak out, Zhou became one of the few vocal
360 © ZHOU YANG
advocates of Deng’s policies and worked diligently to control the
damage caused by the Cultural Revolution in education and to restore
normality to the nation’s schools.
In late 1975 when Chairman Mao Zedong began to criticize Deng
and prepare for an anti-Deng campaign, the field of education was
Mao’s breakthrough point, and Zhou Rongxin became a prominent
target in the so-called great debate on the revolution in education.
Zhou was accused of negating the revolution in education and
opposing Mao’s education policies. He was repeatedly struggled
against despite his ill health. At a struggle meeting held at the Min-
istry of Education on 12 April 1976, Zhou suffered a heart attack. He
died the next day. Zhou’s name was cleared by the CC in 1977.
ZHOU YANG (1908-1989). A man of letters and a CCP veteran in
cultural work, Zhou Yang was denounced during the Cultural Revo-
lution as a representative of the “revisionist black line in arts and
literature.”
Born in Yiyang, Hunan Province, Zhou Yang joined the CCP in
1927. In the first half of the 1930s, Zhou was deeply involved in the
activities of the League of Leftist Writers in Shanghai, editing its offi-
cial organ Literature Monthly and providing the CCP leadership for
the League. He went to the revolutionary base Yan’an in 1937. In the
next 30 years—up to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution—Zhou
Yang assumed a number of culture-related official positions includ-
ing president of the Lu Xun Institute of Arts and Literature, deputy
head of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee
(CC), deputy minister of culture of the PRC, and vice-president of the
China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. He was also appointed
a member of the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group in
July 1964. Zhou Yang was attacked during the Cultural Revolution
for leading a “revisionist black line” in cultural spheres and for being
one of the “Four Fellows” allegedly antagonistic to, and ridiculed
by, the revered modern Chinese writer Lu Xun in the 1930s. He was
imprisoned for nine years until July 1975 when Mao Zedong said
that Lu Xun would not agree to shut up the likes of Zhou Yang.
After his full rehabilitation in 1979, Zhou was appointed to a num-
ber of ranking positions including president of the China Federation
of Literary and Art Circles, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, and deputy head of the CCP Propaganda Department.
ZHU CHENGZHAO œ% 361
As one of the few ranking cadres of the CCP capable of serious criti-
cal reflection upon the grave mistakes committed by themselves and
by the CCP leadership as a whole, Zhou played an important role in
the post-Cultural Revolution “Liberation of Thinking” movement and
began to reassess the ideology of the CCP from a humanist perspec-
tive in the 1980s. Zhou Yang died on 28 July 1989.
ZHOU-YE REVISIONIST LINE. This was the charge against Zhou
Enlai and Ye Jianying for their allegedly “right-wing capitulation-
ism” in dealing with the United States in late 1973 in the face of
threat from the Soviet Union. See also ENLARGED POLITBURO
SESSIONS, 25 NOVEMBER-5 DECEMBER 1973.
ZHU CHENGZHAO (1943-1998). A well-known rebel student
leader, Zhu was a founder of the mass organization East-Is-Red
Commune at the Beijing Geological Institute and the Capital College
Red Guards Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters (commonly known
as the Third Command Post). In August 1966, Zhu, a senior stu-
dent of hydrology at the Beijing Geological Institute, criticized the
work group sent by the Ministry of Geology and, together with his
schoolmate Wang Dabin, formed the mass organization East-Is-Red
Commune. This organization won the full support of the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CCRSG) during the campaign
to criticize the bourgeois reactionary line. Following instructions
from Qi Benyu, of the CCRSG, Zhu and Wang led a team to Sichuan
Province in December 1966 to kidnap Marshal Peng Dehuai to Bei-
jing to be struggled against by the masses. This mission gave Zhu an
opportunity to talk with Peng and read classified information about
the Lushan Conference of 1959. In the meantime, he came to know
Marshal Ye Jianying through his friend Ye Xiangzhen, daughter of
Marshal Ye.
The unexpected exposure to internal information, the influence of
Peng and Ye, and the misfortune of his own father—a veteran com-
munist denounced as a member of the “black gang” of the Beijing
party committee at the outset of the Cultural Revolution—apparently
enabled him to see the serious problems of party politics and of the
CCRSG, so much so that in January 1967, Zhu and some of his close
friends began to plan a campaign to challenge the CCRSG. However,
Wang Dabin leaked the information to the central leaders. Chen Boda
362 © ZHU CHENGZHAO
and some other members of the CCRSG soon took preemptive mea-
sures to persecute Zhu and Ye Xiangzhen as a “counterrevolutionary
clique” and called upon their fellow students to struggle against them.
Zhu, then, was held incommunicado for a number of years. His case
was eventually cleared by the post-Mao leadership in late 1970s.
Andongni’aoni de Zhongguo (Antonioni’s China) KA JERJEN «
E>
Anting shijian (Anting Incident) E B
Glossary
Baimaonii (White-Haired Gir) «KHER»
Baiwan xiongshi
(Million-Strong Mighty Army) Ĥ AA HENE
Baiyangdian shige qunluo (Baiyangdian poet group) FF ve ERAR YA
Bajie shi’erzhong quanhui (Twelfth Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central
Committee) / JE EA
Bajie shiyizhong quanhui (Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central
Committee) / JE EA
baohuangpai (royalists) R ÆYK
baoshoupai (conservatives) IRSFYR
Bayiba (mass rally of 18 August 1966) /\—~/\
Beijing daxue Qinghua daxue dapipanzu (Peking University and pare
hua University Great Criticism Group) JURA UE KAI
Bian Zhongyun
FR
bianselong (chameleon) Z4 JÈ
Bo Yibo 4i — yk
buduan geming (
-i
AN
uninterrupted revolution) > Wi $
changzheng dui (long march team) {EBA
chanshazi (add sand to the mix) EWF
Chen Boda KÉ
iA
Chen Erjin KR/R
H
Chen Lining 5
Chen Pixian BRAS
EJ
i=
NIV.
Chen Shaomin K/h fj
Chen Xilian 45H%
Chen Yi MRAZ
Chen Yonggui BRACE
Chen Zaidao [RFE
pä
363
364 © GLOSSARY
Chen Zhuoran 649%
Chi Qun i8##
chijiao yisheng (barefoot doctor) HE Æ
chou laojiu (the stinking old ninth) 7.
Chuangye (Pioneers)
Chunmiao (Spring Seedling) «4A»
chushen (family background) Hi}
Chushenlun (“On Family Background”) «tlie»
da chuanlian (great networking) KM
da lianhe (grand alliance) AIK
da minzhu (great democracy) KRE
da, za, qiang (strike, smash, snatch) fT. fii. #6
dangnei zuidade zouzipai (the biggest capitalist-roader within the party)
SEAL BCA RYZE BIR
We
dapipan (great criticism) A4it3
=
dazibao (big-character poster) KF}
ad
Deng Tuo *h44
VA
Deng Xiaoping X$/MF
Di erci woshou (Shaking Hands the Second Time) <$
Ding Xuelei (pen name) J %
aE
E
bg
Ake —
tt
Vv
ie
Ding Zuxiao | 4
dingfeng lun (peak theory) TUE
dou, pi, gai (struggle, criticism, reform) SE. Fit. Be
dousi pixiu (fight selfishness, repudiate revisionism) HAAHI
douzheng hui (struggle meeting) *+4+
Dujuanshan (Azalea Mountain) «#1631»
Eryue bingbian (February Mutiny) — H F$%
Eryue niliu (February Adverse Current) -H wit
Eryue tigang (February Outline, short for “Five-Person Cultural Revolu-
tion Small Group’s Outline Report Concerning the Current Academic
Discussion”) Z H #224)
Fan ganrao (Anti-Interference) 2 FÈ
fan’ geming liangmian pai (counterrevolutionary two-faces) SLEAN
HYK
fanchaoliu (going against the tide) SII
fandong xueshu quanwei (reactionary academic authority) 5J ARAL
Jax
Fanji (Strike Back) «27»
feng, zi, xiu (feudalism, capitalism, revisionism) #
GLOSSARY @ 365
fengqinglun shijian (SS Fengqing Incident) KURE FF
Fu Chongbi (#3274
Fu Lei (8
Fu Lianzhang (FEE
geming weiyuanhui (revolutionary comes EMER
geren chongbai (personality cult) SAS
gongan liutiao (Six Regulations of Public A short for “Regulations
on Strengthening Public Security during the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, also known as the Six Regulations of Public Security”) 7S
BNE
gongdaihui (workers’ representative assembly) TARRE
gongnongbing xueyuan (worker-peasant-soldier students) LTKRŽ in
gongxuandui (workers propaganda team) T EBA
eoug7enes! (Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Rebel Command Post)
Tan]
gongzuozu (work group) T44
gouzaizi (son of a bitch) 4) 8T
Guan Feng X4%
Guanyu jianguo yilai dang de ruogan lishiwenti de jueyi (Resolution on
Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of
the People’s Republic of China)
Haigang (On the Dock) HEHE
Han Aijing 4b% rh
He Long JÈ
heibalun (eight black theories) ¥/ U
heibang (black gang) 4#
heicailiao (black material) 7244+
heihua (black words) i5
heiqilei (Black Seven Categories) 428
heishou (black hands) F
heiwulei (Black Five Categories) #4 71.28
hong baoshu (red book of treasures) 21.325
hong bayue (Red August) 21./\ H
hongdaihui (Red Guards’ representative assembly) TARRE
fH
366 © GLOSSARY
Hongdengji (Red Lantern) «2
HK
4
honghaiyang (red sea) 21-7
hongse kongbu (red terror) 21
TKE»
Hongdu nühuang (Queen of the Red Capital) «2
[ fa
via
Hongse niangzijun (Red Detachment
hongwaiwei (Red Peripheries) 21.
hongweibing (Red Guards) 21. |
hongwulei (Red Five Categories) 21
Hu Shoujun W}
368 © GLOSSARY
Longjiang song (Ode to Longjiang River) «JEL
Lu Dingyi Mi~
Lu Ping MF
Lun gongchandangyuan de xiuyang (Cultivation of a Communist) «Ve
Tepe ie AEF ED
Luo Ruiqing ¥ Sigil
Luo Siding (pen name) 3 IRH
luxian douzheng (line struggle) Et Ze +t
Ma Sicong 5 Au
Ma Tianshui 4 A7K
Mao Yuanxin EXET
Mao Zedong EAK
Mao Zedong sixiang (Mao Zedong Thought) E3445 E
Mao Zedong sixiang xuanchuandui (Mao Zedong Thought propaganda
team) EIER EAR fe BA
Maozhuxi yulu (Quotations from Chairman Mao) «EEE i>»
Nanjing shijian (Nanjing Incident) Pd i. E4
Nanjing zhishi qingnian zhi ge (“Song of the Educated Youths of Nan-
jing”) “RATE Bo
Nei ren dang (Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party) W ASE
ni banshi, wo fangxin (“I feel at ease with you in charge”) “RIE, FÈ
PUÒ”
Nie Rongzhen RIA
Nie Yuanzi ICHE
niuguisheshen (cow-demons and snake-spirits) 4 Hett
niupeng (cow shed) #H}
Pan Fusheng WA Æ
Paoda silingbu 4 Borbarding the Headquarters”) «FT E] ih»
Peng Dehuai &7 (21/4
Peng Peiyun © {iil
Peng Zhen #7 A
Peng-Luo-Lu- Yang ee jituan (Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party
Clique) 9 bit he ni E A
pengishi (jet plane style) "txt
Pi Chen zhengfeng (criticize Chen Boda and conduct rectification) fit
PAREN
Pi Lin zhengfeng (criticize Lin Biao and conduct rectification) 42 X
pidou hui (struggle meeting) #It--
Pi Lin pi Kong (criticize Lin Biao and criticize Confucius) #PRHEFL
ba
GLOSSARY *® 369
ping Shuihu (Water Margin appraisal) PE «7K ii»
pingpang waijiao (ping-pong diplomacy) J°£4h%¢
pinxuandui (poor peasants propaganda team) AEPA
Qi Benyu RAS ES
Qian Haoliang (Hao Liang) RIFE (se
Qiersi bugao (July 24 [1968] Public Notice) t= 4p 4
Qieryi daxue (July 21 University) EZ =K%
qingdui (rectify the class ranks) ji BA
Qinggong mishi (Inside Story of the Qing Court) «A bE
qingli jieji duiwu (rectify the class ranks) FERNE.
Qingtongxia shijian (Qingtongxia Incident) Fy Flea (-F
Qisan bugao (July 3 [1968] Public Notice) aan
Qiu Huizuo KSE
Qixi baihutuan (Raid on White Tiger Regiment)
Yao Wenyuan Wk XJ
Ye Jianying H&E
Ye Qun HT ##
yida sanfan (One Strike and Three Antis) tJ
Yilin Dixi (pen name) fF
yingshe shixue (allusory historiography) #75) 2
Yiyue fengbao (January Storm) ~~
Yiyue geming (January Revolution) —~
FAK
TR
E
H Al%
H EAN
LA
RE
ZR
24
Ea
youqing fan’an feng (right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend) 47W
HIS
Yu Huiyong FAyvk
Yu Lijin ROLE
Yu Luoke i375
zaijiaoyu (reeducation)
zaofan youli (“To rebel is justified”)
zaofanpai (rebels) X/x ik
zaoqingshi wanhuibao (morning request, evening report) +F
LAK
Zhang Chunqiao Sk Ah
Zhang Jieting YKI
Zhang Linzhi KIK
Zhang Pinghua 5° (4,
Zhang Tiesheng KRÆ
Zhang Yang 3k 44
Zhang Yufeng IKEA
Zhang Zhixin IKT
Zhao Yongfu KK
zhengbian jing (scripture of coup d’état) IK
zhengzhiju huiyi (Politburo sessions) K6 J5
zhengzhiju kuoda huiyi (enlarged sessions of the Politburo) KA
KZN
HAA
K
66
1E
KAH
rA
“7
BAN, M
GLOSSARY *® 373
Zhiqu weihushan (Taking Tiger Mountain by Stratagem) «IPUR
I>
zhishi qingnian (educated youth) WIR FF
Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei xiezuozu (Shanghai Municipal Party Com-
mittee Writing Group) PFH ETAY H
Zhongguo de heluxiaofu (China’s Khrushchev) F E AWE RK
zhongsu lunzhan (China-Soviet debate) PRE ik
zhongyang gongzuo huiyi (CCP Central Committee work session)
THERN
zhongyang wenge pengtouhui (extended Central Cultural Revolution
Small Group routine meeting) FAXEM LA
Zhongyang wenge xiaozu (Central Cultural Revolution Small Group)
ESCH NEA
Zhongyang zhuan’an shencha xiaozu (Central Special Case Examina-
tion Group) PER EAMH
Zhongyang zuzhizu xuanchuanzu (Central Organization and Propa-
ganda Group) PF R2H2A2H a fe 24
zhongziwu (loyalty dance) 8
Zhou Enlai F BK
Zhou Quanying JA] R22
Zhou Rongxin FREE
Zhou Xinfang Jil {AIF
Zhou Yang Ji] 4H
Zhu Chengzhao 7/4
zhuageming, cushengchan (grasp revolution, promote production) 9#
an, (EARS
zichanjieji fandong luxian (bourgeois reactionary line) R TAI)
EKER
zilaihong (born red) H KZ
zouzibenzhuyidaolu de dangquanpai (those in power who take the capi-
talist road) EKRE É AY AYR
zouzipai (capitalist-roader) x2 YR
zuigao zhishi (highest directive) x15 fĘ 75
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This bibliography is a selection of English-language material on the Cul-
tural Revolution published from 1966 to the present. The sources are
arranged topically in 14 sections.
The first section, on general works, includes major historical docu-
ments, general analyses, and period histories, as well as such reference
tools as bibliographies, dictionaries, chronicles, and yearbooks. The
sources listed under the next two sections, “Mao Zedong and the Cultural
Revolution” and “CCP Leaders and the Cultural Revolution,” concern
the role of the central leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
during the Cultural Revolution and cover a wide range of topics from
Mao’s conception of the Cultural Revolution to the factional conflicts
and the subsequent purge at the top level of the party.
By contrast, the next two sections, “Red Guards and Urban Youth
Reeducation” and “Rebels, Masses, and Violence,” focus on the various
stages of the Cultural Revolution at the grassroots level. Highlighting the
phenomenon of the Red Guards and other forms of mass participation
in the Cultural Revolution, titles in these sections explore the dynamics
of these mass movements, and some of them attempt to explain why
and how the mass movements led to a state of nationwide anarchy and
violence. The section on “Heterodox Thoughts,” also focusing on the
grassroots level of the movement, contains both documents and analy-
ses of the ideas that deviate from official Maoism. These documents
and studies reveal, to some extent, the painstaking efforts of China’s
younger generation in search of identity and a more democratic society
during the years of tight ideological control.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) played a complex role during
the Cultural Revolution. The titles listed in the section on the army’s
participation cover topics such as the functions of the PLA in regional
or local government, its control over the mass movements, its conflicts
with the party’s ultraleftists, and its vital role in the power struggles
375
376 © BIBLIOGRAPHY
of the central government. In addition, some titles here also relate the
personal experiences of high-ranking officers.
For overviews of Chinese society in many other aspects, the reader
may consult publications included in the sections on “Society and Social
Life,” “Education and Intellectuals,” “Arts and Science,” “Foreign Pol-
icy and Foreign Relations,” and “Cultural Revolution in the Provinces.”
Such peculiar phenomena as the administration of workers propaganda
teams, the May 7 Cadre School, the eight model dramas, and the politics
of a reevaluation of Confucianism and Legalism are examined by the
works in these sections. So are the strategic changes in China’s foreign
policy exemplified by the normalization of diplomatic relations with the
United States and Japan in the 1970s.
The next section, “Fiction and Memoirs,” includes mostly what has
become known as the “literature of the wounded” and the “literature
of reflection”—works that came out after 1976 portraying private lives
against the broad background of the Cultural Revolution. Some of them,
in the form of novels, short stories, films, poems, biographies, and auto-
biographies, depict at once a disillusioning journey of the individual and
that of the nation.
The titles under “Aftermath,” the last section of the bibliography,
examine the impact of the Cultural Revolution on contemporary China
and on the world at large. Some of them focus on a critical assessment
of the Cultural Revolution, and some explore the relationship between
the Cultural Revolution and China’s subsequent economic reform in the
1980s and the prodemocracy movement in 1989. One repeated theme
found in many works listed in this section is the disillusionment of most
Chinese citizens toward their government and toward the ideology of
communism.
This bibliography does not include any Internet sources because the
value of the existing English sites about the Cultural Revolution is quite
limited, and some of them are not stable, either. However, there are a
number of reliable and resourceful Chinese-language sites on the Inter-
net; the most useful are the Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution at
http://museums.cnd.org/cr/, which is a rich database of Cultural Revolu-
tion documents, studies, and memoirs, and the Memorial for Victims of
the Chinese Cultural Revolution at http://www.chinese-memorial.org/,
which includes more than 600 biographies of individuals who were
killed or harassed to death during the Cultural Revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY *® 377
General Works: References, Documents, and Analyses
Adhikari, G. What do They Want to Achieve by This “Cultural Revolution.” New
Delhi: D.P. Sinha, 1966.
Ahn, Byung-joon. “The Cultural Revolution and China’s Search for Political Order.”
China Quarterly 58 (1974): 249-285.
Ahn, Byung-joon. Ideology, Policy and Power in Chinese Politics and the Evolu-
tion of the Cultural Revolution, 1959-1965. Dissertation. Columbia University,
1972. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1977.
An, Pyong-jun. Chinese Politics and the Cultural Revolution: Dynamics of Policy
Processes. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976.
Armbruster, Frank E., John W Lewis, David Mozingo, and Tang Tsou. China Brief-
ing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Asian Research Centre, ed. The Great Cultural Revolution in China. Hong Kong:
Asia Research Centre, 1967; Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1968; Melbourne:
Fleshch, 1968.
Asian Research Centre, ed. The Great Power Struggle in China. Hong Kong: Asian
Research Centre, 1969.
Austin, Paul Britten. China: The Revolution Continued. Trans. Jan Myrdal and Gun
Kessle. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Barnouin, Barbara, and Changgen Yu. Ten Years of Turbulence: The Chinese Cul-
tural Revolution. New York: Kegan Paul International, 1993.
Baum, Richard. “Ideology Redivivus.” Problem of Communism 16.3 (1967): 1-11.
Baum, Richard, and Louise B. Bennett, eds. China in Ferment: Perspectives on the
Cultural Revolution. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
Bennett, Gordon A. “China’s Continuing Revolution: Will It Be Permanent?” Asian
Survey 10.1 (1970): 2-17.
Benton, Gregor, and Alan Hunter, eds. Wild Lily, Prairie Fire: Chinas Road to
Democracy, Yan’an to Tian’anmen, 1942-1989. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1995.
Brugger, William. “The Ninth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.”
World Today 25.7 (1969): 297-305.
. China: Radicalism to Revisionism, 1962—1979. London: Croom Helm,
1981.
Buchanan, John Hayward. The Cultural Revolution in China. Thesis. University of
Mississippi, 1968.
Carry the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Through to the End. Peking: For-
eign Languages Press, 1966.
Chang, Hsin-cheng. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: A Terminological
Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Chang, Parris H. Radicals and Radical Ideology in China’ Cultural Revolution.
New York: Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University,
1973.
378 © BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chang, Teh-kuang. The Cultural Revolution and the Political Modernization of
Communist China: Prepared for Delivery at the 8th World Congress of the
International Political Association, Munich, Federal German Republic, August
31—-September 5, 1970. N.p.: International Political Science Association, 1970.
Chang, Tony H. China During The Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976: A Selected Bib-
liography Of English Language Works. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Chen, Lin. The Image of the Cultural Revolution of China. Dissertation. University
of Wisconsin, 1995.
Chen, Shaoyu (Wang Ming). China: Cultural Revolution or Counterrevolutionary
Coup? Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1969.
Chen, Theodore Hsi-en. “A Nation in Agony.” Problems of Communism 15.6
(1966): 14-20.
Chi, Wen-shun. “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Ideological Perspec-
tive.” Asian Survey 9 (1969): 563-579.
. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Ideological Perspective.
China Series Reprint. C-12. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of
California, 1974.
, comp. and ed. Readings in the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution: A
Manual for Students of the Chinese Language. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971.
China after the Cultural Revolution. 2 vols. Brussels: Universite libre de Bruxelles,
1972.
China after the Cultural Revolution: A Selection from the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists. New York: Random House, 1970.
“China in Transition.” Political Quarterly 45.1 (1974): 1-114.
Ching, Shui-hsien. Rifle Rectifies Rifle in Mao 5 Cultural Revolution. Taipei: Asian
Peoples’ Anti-Communist League, 1969.
Chiou, Chwei Liang. Ideology and Political Power in Mao Tse-tungs Cultural
Revolution, 1965—1968. Dissertation. University of California, Riverside
Chong, Woei Lien. China s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives
and Post-Mao Counternarratives. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002
Christiansen, Wilbur Norman. The Cultural Revolution in China. Auckland: New
Zealand-China Society, 1967.
Chu, Djang. “A Psychological Interpretation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
World Affairs 130 (1967): 26-33.
Chu, Godwin C, Philip H. Cheng, and Leonard Chu. The Roles of Tatzepao in the
Cultural Revolution: A Structural-Functional Analysis. Carbondale, 111.: South-
ern Illinois University, 1972.
Chu, Wenlin. “An Analysis of the Peiping Regime’s Important Personnel.” Issues
and Studies 6.8 (1970): 69-80.
Chui, Chui-liang. Maoism in Action: The Cultural Revolution. St. Lucia: University
of Queensland Press; New York: Crane, Russak, 1974.
Chung, Hua-min. Cultural Revolution in 1969. Hong Kong: Union Research Insti-
tute, 1970.
BIBLIOGRAPHY @ 379
Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, May 16, 1966:
A Great Historical Document. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967.
Clements, K. P. “A Symbolic Interpretation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revo-
lution 1965-1968.” Political Science 24 (1972): 14-21.
Colleen, Diane Adele. The Genesis and Development of the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution in China from 1953 to 1968. Thesis. Northeastern Illinois
State College, 1969.
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. China: Inside the People s Republic. New
York: Bantam Books, 1972.
Communiqué of the Enlarged 12th Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Commit-
tee of the Communist Party of China (Adopted on October 31, 1968). Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1968.
Communiqué of the Second Plenary Session of the Ninth Central Committee of
the Communist Party of China, September 6, 1970. Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1970.
Constitution of the Communist Party of China (Adopted by the Ninth National
Congress of the Communist Party of China on April 14, 1969). Peking: Foreign
Languages Press, 1969.
Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1975.
The Cultural Revolution in China. Calcutta: National Book Agency Private, 1966.
The Cultural Revolution in China: Its Origins and Course. Dehra Dun: EBD, 1968.
D’Avray, Anthony. Red China through Mao’s Long March to the Cultural Revolu-
tion: A Phased Historical Case Study in Problem Solving and Decision Making.
London: AEM, 1978.
Dai, Shen-Yu. “Peking’s ‘Cultural Revolution.’” Current History 51 (1966): 134—
139.
Damien, G. D. “The Dialectical Structure of the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution.” Orbis 14 (1970): 192-217.
Daubier, Jean. A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Trans. Richard Seaver.
New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Davis, Raymond M. China's Cultural Revolution. Albion: Albion College, 1984.
Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party of China Con-
cerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Adopted on August 8, 1966).
Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966.
Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Adopted on August 8, 1966). Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1966.
Deliusin, Lev Petrovich. The “Cultural Revolution” in China. Moscow: Novosti
Press Agency Publishing House, 1967.
Deshingkar, Giri D. “Causes of the Cultural Revolution.” China Report 3.1 (1966):
9-12.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Cultural Revolution in China. London: Bertrand Russell
Peace Foundation, 1967.
380 © BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dittmer, Lowell. China 5 Continuous Revolution: The Post-Liberation Epoch, 1949-
1981. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
. “Chinese Communist Revisionism in Comparative Perspective.” Studies in
Comparative Communism 13.1 (1980): 3—40.
. “Line Struggle’ in Theory and Practice: The Origins of the Cultural Revo-
lution Reconsidered.” China Quarterly 72 (1977): 675-712.
Documents of the First Session of the Fourth National Peoples Congress of the
People’s Republic of China. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975.
Documents of the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Hong
Kong: Hsinghua News Agency, 1969.
Documents of the Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Hong
Kong: Foreign Languages Press, 1973.
Domes, Jurgen. Cultural Revolution in China: Documents and Analysis. Courrier
de 1 ‘Extreme-Orient. 6. Brussels: Centre d’etude, du sud-est asiatique et de 1
‘Extreme—Orient, 1974.
. “Some Results of the Cultural Revolution in China.” Asian Survey 11
(1971): 932-940.
Dorrill, William F. Power, Policy and Ideology in the Making of Chinas “Cultural
Revolution. ” Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1968.
— ctal. China in the Wake of the Cultural Revolution. McLean, Md.: Research
Analysis Corporation, 1969.
Doyle, Jean Louise. Conflict Management in the Chinese Cultural Revolution:
A Case Study in Political Change. Dissertation. Boston University, 1973. Ann
Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1973.
Dutt, Gargi, and Vidya P. Dutt. Chinas Cultural Revolution. New York: Asian
Publishing House, 1970.
Esmein, Jean. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. New York: Anchor Books, 1973;
London: Deutsch, 1975.
Fairbank, John King. Mao and the Cultural Revolution: China Scholar John King
Fairbank Examines Mao's Cultural Revolution. Audio cassette. Center for Cas-
sette Studies, 1972. 1 cassette.
Fan, Kuang Huan. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: Selected Documents. New
York: Grove Press, 1968.
Feng, Hai. “The Cultural Revolution and the Reconstruction of the Chinese Com-
munist Party.” Asia Quarterly 4 (1972): 303-320.
Friedman, Edward. “Cultural Limits of the Cultural Revolution.” Asian Survey 9.3
(1969): 188-201.
Frolic, B. Michael. “What the Cultural Revolution was All About.” New York Times
Magazine, 24 Oct. 1971.
Fu, Zhengyuan. Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
Gamberg, Ruth. Marxism and the Cultural Revolution in China: A New Kind of
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About the Authors
Guo Jian is a professor of English and Chinese at the University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has a bachelor of arts in Chinese from Bei-
jing Normal University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of
Connecticut at Storrs. He has published internationally in Chinese and
in English on classical Chinese literature, the Cultural Revolution, and
Western critical theory. He also served as a co-editor of The Cultural
Revolution Database (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002).
Yongyi Song is on the library faculty at California State University, Los
Angeles. He has an master of arts in China Studies from the University
of Colorado and a master of library science from Indiana University at
Bloomington. He is the author of The Cultural Revolution: A Bibliogra-
phy, 1966—1996 (Harvard, 1998) and The Cultural Revolution & Het-
erodox Thoughts I & II (M.E. Sharpe, 2001). He was chief editor of The
Cultural Revolution Database (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002).
He is the recipient the “21st Century Librarian National Award” (School
of Information Studies, Syracuse University) in 2004 and the “Paul How-
ard Award for Courage” (American Library Association) in 2005.
Yuan Zhou is the Curator of the East Asian Library of the University of
Chicago. He has a bachelor of arts from Peking University, China, and
a master of science as well as a Ph.D. in library and information science
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the com-
piler and editor of A New Collection of Red Guard Publications: Part I
(1999), a 20-volume set of reprinted Red Guard newspapers published
during the Cultural Revolution. He was also a co-compiler and co-editor
of Chinese Cultural Revolution Database (Chinese University of Hong
Kong, 2002), responsible for Part II: Mao Zedong’s speeches, writings,
and directives during the Cultural Revolution. In addition, he published
articles on various topics in library and information science, including
collection development, applications of information technology, library
history, and the development of East Asian libraries.
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