Causes of the Cultural Revolution

In the last chapter to her book Enemies of the People, Anne Thurston opens with a
quote from Aldous Huxley, talking about the idea that civilization “may be defined as a
systematic withholding from individuals of certain occasions for barbarous behavior”
(276). Her book is an immensely rich web of personal accounts from individuals who
lived through a period of Chinese history when humanity fell from civility into a tragic
and chaotic mess of irrational, uncontrollable, and largely meaningless terror. This paper
seeks to explore some of the causes that led “the thin veneer of civilization” to be lifted,
and the mark that it left on Chinese society afterwards once the veneer could somehow be
restored.

In the Wake of the Great Leap Forward

It is easy and probably a logical first step to find rumblings of the Cultural
Revolution (CR) in the failures of the Great Leap Forward (GLF). Indeed, one of Mao’s
major tactical themes for the GLF, one that he championed in the CR as well, was
“disequilibrium,” a flexible view of society that blends a degree of centralized Party
authority with local initiative coming from the masses (Schram 53). An unintended
consequence of the GLF was that resources became increasingly controlled by the Party
and cadres, causing ordinary people to rely more on these centralized authorities. Perhaps
an even more important consequence of the GLF was that it severely undercut the almost
sacrosanct status of Mao. Ordinary people began to doubt his idealistic policies. These
feelings gave way to the ascendancy of the Party and state bureaucracy in the early 1960s
to implement reforms to counter the depression caused by the GLF (Meisner 280).
Indeed, the failures of the GLF contributed to divisions among the Party officials
regarding approaches and viewpoints on how to proceed in the wake of GLF failures
(Tsou 67). Therefore, during the period of 1959-1962, Mao was forced to cede much of
the policy-making power to others in the Party. Party officials decided that the rapid shift
to high levels of commune ownership, as had been attempted during the GLF, was not
effective. Slower steps to socialism were necessary (Zweig 67). But by 1962, when the
economy was showing signs of recovering, Mao took that as his chance to react against
these infringements to his authority and his political strategies in order to elevate his
ideas once again and also to raise the position of the army, which he regarded as a key
factor to continuing the revolution (Tsou 67).

Mao’s Political Concerns

Because of the background of the GLF, many early sources on the CR cite Mao’s
idealistic socialist policy-making as the predominant contributing factor. Stuart Schram,
writing in 1973, explains the causes of the CR in largely ideological and theoretical
terms. He focuses on Mao’s emphasis on the need to constantly have in mind the
revolution at hand. In a general sense, Schram sees the CR as Mao’s way to show that it
was possible to borrow political ideas from the West without having Western values
infiltrating Chinese society as well. In this view, Mao stressed the primacy of finding
strength from within China without having to rely on Soviet leadership. This sentiment
was manifested in Mao’s focus on implementing agrarian radicalism as a way to stave off
threats of Soviet revisionism and rural capitalist restoration of local cadres (Zweig 64).
Part of this agrarian radicalism involved combining production teams into bigger
production units and shifting control of supply/marketing cooperatives from peasants to
the commune as a whole (Zweig 67-8). Agrarian radicalism intersected with CR goals of
invigorating revolutionary fervor in the necessity Mao saw of raising the political
awareness of peasants because changing their outlooks was crucial in order for the
economic and organizational changes to take place. During this time, “the radicals tried
to imbue peasants with a Maoist-collectivist ideology… Political study and ‘class
struggle’ campaigns were to teach peasants the evil of following the private road to
prosperity” (Zweig 70).
In all of these efforts, Schram stresses Mao’s concern about preserving the
“superstructure” of Chinese society, especially the “quality of the human beings
composing it” to ensure that they could keep up with the economic progress and to
prevent the economy from moving towards capitalism (79). “Mao’s aim, clearly, was
twofold: to change the structure of power in society, and to carry out an irreversible
transformation in the patterns of thought and behavior of the Chinese people” (Schram
85). Central to this goal was the need to establish the primacy of his ideas. Because of
this, Schram privileges the study of Mao’s ideas in fueling the CR because they were the
foundation of all cadres education. Seen in this light, the ideological division between
Mao and his colleagues becomes an important precursor to the CR.

Mao Zedong vs. Liu Shaoqi

The difference between Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong became a symbol of the
division between organization and ideology within the Party (Lee 328). In general terms,
Liu was more concerned with maintaining centralized leadership. He believed that the
pace of the revolution should be slowed down and saw a degree of capitalistic
development as a necessary step towards achieving socialism. Mao, on the other hand,
had more faith in letting things develop according to more spontaneous initiatives from
lower level officials, all in the name of quickening the transition to socialism and
communism. Mao placed more faith in the masses to show enthusiasm in contributing to
building a socialist society, whereas Liu took a more paternalistic view in thinking that
the masses would have more to contribute to society if they understood their roles in the
socialist state (Schram 69).
The growing rift between Mao and Liu, coupled with the fact that officials were
more willing to support Liu’s more pragmatic approach to socialist development, all
served to undermine Mao’s authority. While he ostensibly was still Chairman of the
Party, in reality, he did not have control or have the power to determine concrete policies.
Meisner contends that “the gap between Chinese Communist theory and practice
widened, and the conflict between radical Maoists and party bureaucrats grew
increasingly sharp and eventually irreconcilable” (253).
The incident of Peng Dehuai’s report to Mao that listed the shortcomings in the
implementation of three socialist policy campaign collectively known as the Three Red
Banners (General Line, GLF, and the People’s Commune movement), demonstrates the
degree to which Mao felt threatened by these changes within the Party. Mao accused the
letter of possessing “capitalist equivocation”, and accused Peng of holding rightist
tendencies and of criticizing the Party. Liu Shaoqi responded to Mao’s request to further
investigate the implementation of the Three Red Banners. But his investigation pushed
him to agree with Peng that the Party had been responsible for many of the errors. Mao,
not surprisingly, disagreed, and declared that anyone going against the Three Red
Banners would be labeled a revisionist. During Politburo meetings between December
1964 and January 1965, Mao pegged Liu as a “reactionary element who had sneaked into
the Party” (Yan 7). Additionally, Mao believed that Liu had organized a wide support
base and that at least 1/3 of the leadership throughout the country was on his side. In
order to address this concern, Mao felt he had to target these lower cadres in a mass
campaign to eliminate these pockets of opposition hidden within the Party (Yan 3).

Class Labeling
While many scholars attribute the CR to the power struggle that occurred within
the elite of the Party, most symbolically in the debate between Mao and Liu, Lynn White
contends that this is not sufficient an explanation. According to her, it seems insufficient
to argue that disputes among a selected elite in Beijing could so quickly spread to low-
level officials. The Mao/Liu debate then speaks to a larger concern of Mao’s to root out
all class enemies in society. Those in the Party could undermine his authority, and he did
not want this sentiment to spread among the lower levels of the Party and throughout
society as well. One contradiction Mao faced in dealing with the problems of the 1960s
was the fact that social class relationships were harder to delineate now that private
property had been abolished. He was therefore faced with the issue of identifying new
classes that appeared due to recently implemented policies. With these difficulties in
identifying classes, Mao placed a greater emphasis on continuing the class struggle,
warning that previously overthrown classes “were still planning a comeback” and
cautioning people of the possibility that “new bourgeois elements may still be produced”
(Meisner 305).
But in analyzing the emphasis on class struggle as a cause of the CR, White takes
a step back from the ideology from which it sprung and focuses instead on how this
emphasis provided a framework that served to influence people’s behavior. In Mao’s
attempt to emphasize class struggle and delineate class lines, all manners of categorizing
positions within society were subject to political labels (school admissions, jobs, rural
work assignments, housing, food, all became subject to categorizing based on class
labels). These labels were more often than not based on official methods of labeling
rather than on their inherent “links with economic production”, creating a system where
heterogenous elements were grouped together as “rightist” or “bad element” without a
clear or necessarily rational basis for these judgments. The radical groups in the CR were
diverse, “comprising many youths and even pedicab drivers, as well as many who were
seriously discontented with the regime” and used factionalist disputes among class labels
to push for their own interests and what they saw as unfair (White “The Cultural
Revolution as…” 97). White holds that these practices of labeling people were a leading
cause of the CR because they served to divide the population and motivated many to
aspire to the best class categories in any manner they could in order to gain “social
legitimacy.” People were powerless to deny the categories imposed on them because to
do so would appear “self-serving” such that the safest alternative was to become a
“super-conforming radical” (White Policies of Chaos 324-5).
 Andrew Walder’s essay seeks to overturn another commonly held belief of the
CR, that the ideas set forth by Mao in instigating the CR were a far cry from what
actually happened on the ground. He argues that, in fact, what happened during the CR
was very close to what its ruling principles were. Walder interprets the CR as being
primarily a campaign to reveal the conspirators hidden within the party threatening to
subvert socialism. If one views the CR in this way, then the excesses of what occurred
could be seen as a straightforward consequence of Mao’s political agenda. This questions
the common conceptions that attribute the CR to policy debates between Mao and Liu, or
as a way to thwart the Soviet model in favor of a more equal and participatory socialism
(Walder 44-45).

The Personality Cult of Mao

In considering the role that Mao’s ideas played in bringing about the CR, White
cautions us to differentiate between his own motives and the motives of the antagonistic
forces that opposed each other in his name. In this way, it is sensible to see Mao as a
“necessary but insufficient condition” because of his leadership style and his motto that:
“It is right to rebel” (91). He played a necessary role in loosening police control and in
galvanizing Red Guards units, but this does not completely answer the question of why
and how the CR became so widespread and violent (White “The Cultural Revolution
as…” 93). What did help to spread the CR so widely was the strength of the personality
cult of Mao, which elevated his thoughts and his persona to an almost sacred status.
While the use of the personality cult of Mao was useful in mobilizing the masses
to gain power in society, it eventually devolved into a “moral regeneration and political
cleansing” campaign, because Mao’s ideas were characterized by “ambiguity bordering
on incoherence” (Walder 54). It wasn’t clear who these supposed traitors were, or how
one could identify them. This gave CR rebels free reign to interpret Maoist thought for
their personal gain. “If you opposed whoever happened to seize power in a locality or
unit first, you were a rebel; if you supported them, you were a conservative… the labels
were relative and depended on the local political situation” (Walder 55). Walder regards
the differing interpretations of Maoist thought as arising directly from the ambiguities of
Mao’s goals for the CR.
But along with the ambiguity clouding Mao’s motivation for launching the CR,
there also had to be a deeply entrenched reason among the people to affix themselves so
vehemently to the cult of Mao. With regards to this, White contends that
Impatience with the slowness of social change, and thus policies of
pressure to speed it before the Party had a personnel infrastructure strong
enough to support them well, brought social reactions that explain the
strength of the CR tide –and many of its eddies, too (Policies of Chaos
321).
In this view, the ideological goals of the CR were not as fundamental as the frustrations
growing among officials and the masses alike in trying to exercise the Communist ideals
that had been proposed ever since the Communist takeover in 1949. Therefore, Mao’s
calls for people to invigorate their revolutionary spirit and to embrace class struggle
resonated with a population that was increasingly disillusioned due to repeated examples
of “bureaucratism, despotism, paternalism, special privileges, graft, and greed” expressed
within the Party and government that stood as obstacles to the progress towards
communism (Yan 7).
Mao saw the necessity of harnessing this sense of frustration, especially among
young adults, whose political consciousness he felt was necessary to cultivate in order to
ensure “revolutionary successors” who would be the future of China’s socialist society
(Meisner 282). Mao also relied on the support of students as a justification that the CR
was supported by the masses. But more often than not, the students on which he focused
his revolutionary cultivation did not understand the implications of Mao’s equivocal
ideas. Consequently, the students, mobilized in the form of revolutionary Red Guards,
eventually used Mao’s ideas to put themselves in a better position. According to Tan
Tsou, “The Maoists’ ideological pronouncements, used at the beginning of the CR to
mobilize the students to attack the Party leaders, also served as justification for their
excessive acts… Red Guards had absorbed the strategic thinking of Mao without
accepting his idealistic values” (93).

Conclusion
This dangerous combination of sanctioned spontaneity, widespread frustration,
and blind devotion to the cult of Mao ultimately resulted in a ten-year tragedy that
Thurston says is outsized only by “the Nazi Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, and the recent
genocide in Cambodia” (xv). One would expect that a society recovering from a tragedy
of this scale would take a lesson from this history in order to prevent it from ever
happening again. In her concluding chapter in Policies of Chaos, White shows that after
the CR, fighting among low-level elites decreased in accordance with the motto: “Never
again”. She also suggests that one of the constructive effects of the CR was that since
Party officials and policy makers have the experience of failed Maoist policies to
“categorize people, control people, and scare people,” policies along these lines are less
likely to be implemented again (335). But in a general sense, the political problems that
the CR brought to the fore of society never diminished. Rather, they shifted from being
issues exposed and debated among the public to factional disputes hidden behind the
shield of the Party (Meisner 376).
In Enemies of the People, Anne Thurston discusses a more pervasive and lasting
legacy that the CR left in Chinese society around the time of Deng Xiaoping’s reform
policies. That is a sense of political anomie, especially among young people, due to
upturned norms engendered by the CR and a lack of sufficient remedies. Faced with the
unequivocal primacy of the CCP, many people are skeptical, uncertain about how to
reform China, especially when the shadow of history warns of what can happen when the
implementation of radical changes goes wrong.
 Works Cited

Lee, Hong Yung. The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed.
New York: The Free Press, 1999.

Schram, Stuart R. “Introduction: the Cultural Revolution in historical perspective.”

Authority, Participation and Cultural Change in China. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1973.

Thurston, Anne. Enemies of the People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Tsou, Tang. The Cultural Revolution and Post-Mao Reforms: A Historical

Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Walder, Andrew G. “Cultural Revolution Radicalism: Variations on a Stalinist

Theme.” New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Ed. William A. Joseph,
Christine P.W. Wong, and David Zweig. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1991.

White, Lynn T. III. “The Cultural Revolution as an Unintended Result of Administrative

Policies.” New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Ed. William A. Joseph,
Christine P.W. Wong, and David Zweig. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1991.

---. Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in China’s Cultural

Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao. Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution. Trans.
and Ed. By D. W.Y. Kwok. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996.