Origins of the Cultural Revolution, 1962-66
Why Did Mao Need a New Revolution?
By 1962, Mao Zedong was the chairman of a victorious party but a defeated policymaker. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the famine that followed had killed at least 15 million people, and the recovery was being run by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping — not by Mao. Liu’s 1962 ‘Seven Thousand Cadres’ speech blamed the disaster on policy errors ‘30 per cent natural, 70 per cent man-made’. Mao stepped back from day-to-day rule but never accepted that judgement. He believed the party itself had grown soft, ‘capitalist roaders’ were creeping back into power, and that only a new Cultural Revolution could restart the revolution.
Between 1962 and 1966, Mao prepared a comeback against his own party through three linked moves — the Socialist Education Movement to attack rural cadres, Lin Biao’s PLA cult of Mao, and a campaign in education and culture against ‘bourgeois’ thinking.
The Power Struggle: Mao, Liu and Deng
After the Great Leap, Liu Shaoqi (President of the PRC from 1959) and Deng Xiaoping (General Secretary of the CCP) ran the recovery. They scaled back the communes, allowed peasants small private plots, restored material incentives in factories and rebuilt the bureaucracy. Production climbed back. To Mao, however, this looked like the Soviet Union under Khrushchev — the revolution being quietly buried under managers, technicians and bonuses. He began to call Liu ‘China’s Khrushchev’ in private. Deng had defended pragmatism in his own words — ‘black cat or white cat, so long as it catches mice’ — a saying later used against him. Mao’s answer was to widen the political quarrel into a moral one about the soul of communism.
The Socialist Education Movement, 1962–65
The first concrete campaign was the Socialist Education Movement, also called the ‘four cleanups’: clean politics, clean economics, clean organisation, clean ideology. Liu Shaoqi was put in charge. Work teams were sent into villages to root out corrupt accountants and party secretaries. But Mao steadily redirected the campaign upwards. By 1964–65 he was insisting the real enemy was not a few crooked village officials but ‘those in authority taking the capitalist road’ inside the party. Liu and Deng had run the campaign themselves — and now the same campaign was being turned against them.
Students often picture Liu and Deng as bystanders ambushed in 1966. In fact they ran the Socialist Education Movement themselves and supplied much of its language about ‘capitalist roaders’. What they did not anticipate was that Mao would point those same labels at them. Historians like Roderick MacFarquhar argue the four cleanups were the dress rehearsal for the Cultural Revolution — the methods (work teams, denunciation meetings, public confessions) were already in place by 1965, just aimed at lower targets.
Lin Biao and the PLA Cult of Mao
While Liu ran the state, Lin Biao turned the People’s Liberation Army into Mao’s personal political base. Appointed Defence Minister in 1959, Lin replaced Peng Dehuai, the marshal who had been purged at Lushan for criticising the Great Leap. Lin made Mao’s thought the moral spine of military training. In 1964 the PLA published the pocket-sized ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao’ — the Little Red Book — first for soldiers, then for cadres, then nationally. Soldiers were drilled in ‘the three constantly read articles’ (short essays by Mao) and the slogan ‘Learn from the PLA’ was pushed across civilian life. By 1966 the army was loyal to Mao personally, not to the state council or to Liu.
Lin Biao’s 1964 publication of the ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao’ (the Little Red Book) gave the cult of Mao its central scripture. The slogan ‘Learn from the PLA’ pushed military political training into civilian life and prepared the country for mass mobilisation in 1966.
Reform of Education
Mao’s third front was the schools and universities. Examinations were attacked as a way of restoring privilege: a peasant’s son with mud on his boots, Mao argued, was being filtered out by middle-class teachers using bourgeois entrance tests. From 1964 entry to senior schools and universities was tilted towards class background: applicants were classified as ‘red’ (worker, peasant, soldier) or ‘black’ (landlord, rich peasant, capitalist), with the ‘red’ categories favoured. Senior academics were criticised in the press as ‘bourgeois authorities’. The education system that had recruited Liu and Deng’s technocrats was being undermined from below before the Cultural Revolution opened officially.
The Wu Han Affair and the May 16 Notification
The trigger came in November 1965, when the Shanghai propagandist Yao Wenyuan published an attack on a play by the Beijing official Wu Han, ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’. The play described an honest Ming dynasty official sacked for telling the emperor the truth. Mao read it as a coded defence of Peng Dehuai, the marshal he had purged in 1959. The attack on Wu Han widened into an attack on the Beijing party leadership that protected him. On 16 May 1966 the Politburo issued the May 16 Notification, drafted under Mao’s direction. It denounced Liu’s allies as a ‘black gang’ and warned that ‘capitalist roaders’ had infiltrated the party, the army, the government and culture. The notification set up the Cultural Revolution Group around Jiang Qing, Chen Boda and Kang Sheng. The Cultural Revolution was now official.
Was Mao defending the revolution or himself? The CCP’s 1981 verdict judged Mao ‘70 per cent right, 30 per cent wrong’ across his whole career, while condemning the Cultural Revolution itself as a disaster caused by his mistaken leadership. Revisionist Western historians — Frank Dikötter, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Roderick MacFarquhar — argue Mao engineered the campaign to destroy rivals who had outflanked him after the Great Leap. Sympathetic historians like Mobo Gao argue that the desire to renew the revolution was genuine, even if the methods were catastrophic. Strong Paper 3 answers acknowledge that the ‘why’ is a contested historical question with different schools of thought, not a settled fact.