Restoring Order: PLA, Lin Biao and the End of the Cultural Revolution, 1968-76
Calling in the Army
By the summer of 1967, Mao Zedong had a problem of his own making. The Red Guards he had unleashed had splintered into rival factions, looted PLA armouries and turned cities like Wuhan and Shanghai into battlegrounds. The Wuhan Incident of July 1967 showed Mao that even regional military commanders could no longer be trusted to police the chaos. From late 1967 the People’s Liberation Army was sent in to restore order. PLA ‘mass support’ teams entered factories, schools and government offices. Where Red Guard groups refused to disband, the army arrested or shot their leaders. The instrument that had launched the Cultural Revolution — mobilised teenagers — was now the obstacle to controlling it.
From December 1968, Mao launched the ‘Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside’ (xiaxiang) campaign. Roughly 17 million urban young people, most of them former Red Guards, were sent to remote villages between 1968 and 1976. The movement that had attacked the CCP was now scattered into the rural fields.
The Purge of the Party Leadership
The PLA imposed order, but the political purges did not stop. In October 1968 the Twelfth Plenum expelled Liu Shaoqi from the CCP and stripped him of all posts. Liu was held without medical care and died of pneumonia in a Kaifeng prison cell in November 1969 — his family was not told for three years. Deng Xiaoping was sent to a tractor factory in Jiangxi but escaped death; his son Pufang was thrown from a Beijing window during the Red Terror and crippled. Most provincial party committees had collapsed; in their place stood ‘revolutionary committees’ chaired by PLA officers. By the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969, the CCP that emerged was a fraction of its 1965 size, dominated by army men and Cultural Revolution radicals.
The Rise and Fall of Lin Biao
At the Ninth Party Congress, Defence Minister Lin Biao was formally written into the new constitution as Mao’s ‘close comrade-in-arms and successor’. It was the high point of his career. It was also the start of his fall. Mao began to suspect Lin of plotting to take power early; the two men quarrelled over the abolition of the post of state chairman in 1970. Then on 13 September 1971, Lin’s Trident jet crashed in the desert of Mongolia, killing him, his wife and his son. The official version — never independently verified — is that he had been fleeing the country after a failed coup, ‘Project 571’, against Mao. Whatever the truth, the affair was a public disaster. The man who had built the cult of Mao was now denounced as a traitor; the Little Red Books had to be reprinted to remove his preface. Mao’s succession plan lay in ruins, and his own health declined sharply afterwards.
By 1971 Mao was visibly ailing — Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease and depression all played a part. The Lin Biao affair shocked him into withdrawal; he barely appeared in public for months. Two rival factions now jostled openly for the succession: the radicals around Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, who had built their power inside the Cultural Revolution apparatus, and the pragmatists around Premier Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Historians like Frank Dikötter argue that Mao’s control was real but selective: he could still pick winners and losers, but the day-to-day government was no longer his.
Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and the Four Modernisations
Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s closest senior partner since Yan’an, used the post-Lin shock to rebuild government. In February 1972 he hosted President Richard Nixon in Beijing — the opening to the United States that ended China’s isolation. In 1973 he recalled Deng Xiaoping from internal exile and made him Vice Premier. In January 1975 Zhou unveiled the ‘Four Modernisations’ — agriculture, industry, defence, science and technology — the framework for what would later become Deng’s reform era. But Zhou himself was dying of cancer. He died on 8 January 1976. The radicals had blocked the public mourning they feared would become a political demonstration; on 5 April 1976 (the Tiananmen Incident) crowds laid wreaths to Zhou and clashed with police. Deng was blamed and purged for a second time.
The Gang of Four
Through Mao’s last years, four Cultural Revolution radicals based in Shanghai dominated culture, propaganda and education: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen — the Gang of Four. Jiang Qing’s ‘eight model operas’ were the only theatre permitted; films, books and music outside the model were banned. Schools and universities still operated on the ‘red’ class background system, and the gaokao (university entrance exam) had been suspended since 1966. The radicals attacked Deng under the slogan ‘Criticise Deng and the Right Deviationist Wind’ in early 1976. They expected to inherit power on Mao’s death. They were wrong.
Was the Cultural Revolution ended by the army in 1968, by Mao’s declining health from 1971, by Zhou Enlai’s rebuilding from 1972–75, or only by Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976? The orthodox CCP ‘Resolution’ (1981) frames the Cultural Revolution as ‘ten years of chaos’ (1966–76), keeping it as a single block. Revisionist historians like Frank Dikötter and Roderick MacFarquhar argue the violent ‘mass phase’ ended in 1968, but the political purges and cultural restrictions continued until Mao’s death. Sympathetic historians like Mobo Gao stress positive social changes — rural healthcare, literacy — that survived into the 1970s. Strong Paper 3 answers name a school of thought rather than just ‘some historians say’.
The Death of Mao and the Arrest of the Gang of Four
Mao died on 9 September 1976, aged 82. His chosen successor was not a radical but a compromise figure — Hua Guofeng, a Hunanese provincial cadre Mao had promoted from 1971. Hua had a Mao quotation as his title to power: ‘With you in charge, I am at ease’. Within a month, on 6 October 1976, Hua acted. Backed by veteran marshal Ye Jianying and the Beijing garrison, he had the Gang of Four arrested at a Politburo meeting. Their show trial in 1980–81 sentenced Jiang Qing to death, suspended for two years and later commuted to life imprisonment; she committed suicide in 1991. Hua himself was outmanoeuvred by Deng Xiaoping during 1978–80, who returned to power and launched the reform era. The Cultural Revolution was over.
Four turning points ended the Cultural Revolution: PLA restoration of order from 1967–68; the Lin Biao affair (Sept 1971) which broke Mao’s succession plan; Zhou Enlai’s Four Modernisations (1975); and the arrest of the Gang of Four (Oct 1976) by Hua Guofeng one month after Mao’s death.