The Cultural Revolution

In the mid-1960s Mao Zedong wrongly believed that the Party and the state faced a danger of capitalist restoration and stressed "taking class struggle as the key link." In May and August 1966 the Party Central Committee held an enlarged Politburo meeting and the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee, which adopted the May 16 Circular and the Decision on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution was fully launched. After it began, a Red Guard movement arose in many places, publicly denouncing "those in power taking the capitalist road" and "reactionary academic authorities," and many cadres and intellectuals were persecuted. In 1967 rebel groups in Shanghai seized Party and government power in the city, and a frenzy of "all-round seizure of power" swept the country, paralyzing Party and government organs at every level; head of state Liu Shaoqi was falsely accused and persecuted to death. In September 1971 the plot of the Lin Biao counter-revolutionary clique for an armed coup was exposed, and Lin Biao died in a plane crash while fleeing abroad. Zhou Enlai then took charge of the Central Committee's day-to-day work, and in 1975 Deng Xiaoping led a comprehensive rectification, improving the situation somewhat. In 1976 Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Mao Zedong died in succession. In October 1976 the Politburo, represented by Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying, smashed the Jiang Qing counter-revolutionary clique (the "Gang of Four") in one stroke, ending the Cultural Revolution disaster. The Cultural Revolution brought the Party, the state and the people their most severe setback and losses since the founding of New China. In 1981 the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China, which fully repudiated it.