The Prelude to the Cultural Revolution: Polarized Politics and Factional Struggles

By late 1965, the Chinese leadership was fractured along lines that would prove unbridgeable. Mao Zedong, who had stepped back from day-to-day governance after the devastating famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, watched with growing alarm as President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping pursued economic recovery through pragmatic policies. To Mao, these adjustments looked like a slide toward capitalism. His fears were intensified by the Sino-Soviet split: he believed that the Soviet Union had abandoned socialist revolution for “goulash communism,” and he worried that China might follow a similar path if “capitalist roaders” inside the party were not purged.

The intellectual flashpoint came from an unlikely source—a historical drama. In 1961, Beijing’s deputy mayor Wu Han wrote a play entitled Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, ostensibly about an upright Ming dynasty official who criticized an emperor’s land policies. Mao interpreted the play as a veiled attack on his own dismissal of Defense Minister Peng Dehuai at the 1959 Lushan Conference. On November 10, 1965, a Shanghai newspaper published a scathing critique by Yao Wenyuan, a writer close to Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. The article, “On the New Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office,” ignited a political firestorm. Beijing’s party hierarchy, led by Peng Zhen—the mayor and head of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department—tried to contain the fallout. Peng’s group drafted the “February Outline” in early 1966, which sought to frame the dispute as a purely academic matter and limit the role of ideological struggle. Mao, however, saw the document as a direct challenge to his authority.

The April 1966 Politburo Conference: Mao Seizes the Initiative

In April 1966, Mao convened an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee in which he decisively moved to dismantle the opposition. The gathering, attended by key military and party officials, including Lin Biao—who would soon become Mao’s designated successor—became a tribunal against Peng Zhen and his allies. Mao personally denounced the February Outline as revisionist and accused its authors of protecting bourgeois elements within the party. Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing (the army’s chief of staff), Lu Dingyi (head of the Propaganda Department), and Yang Shangkun (director of the General Office) were all removed from their posts.

This April offensive marked the official launch of the Cultural Revolution as a mass political campaign. It was not yet the full-blown Red Guard movement, but it was the moment when the party’s top organs were co-opted or bypassed to begin a purge. Mao strategically used the Central Cultural Revolution Group—a handpicked team that included his wife Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, and the young ideologue Wang Li—to draft documents that would circumscribe the authority of the regular party apparatus. The meeting also elevated Lin Biao’s status and set the stage for the militarization of the movement. As the broader historical record later showed, this April gathering was the fulcrum on which the entire decade of upheaval turned.

The purge of Peng Zhen and his allies was not merely punitive; it sent a clear signal that no leading official, regardless of rank, was safe if they opposed Mao’s agenda. The April 1966 conference effectively dismantled the institutional checks that might have moderated the coming storm. Mao’s speech at the conference, which was later circulated internally, emphasized the need to “fight, rebel, and make revolution” within the party itself. This language directly contradicted the earlier party norms of collective leadership and democratic centralism, substituting them with a personality cult built around Mao’s infallibility.

The Central Cultural Revolution Group: A Shadow State Emerges

Perhaps the most significant institutional innovation to come out of the April conference was the formalization of the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG). Originally established in late 1965 as a small advisory body, the CCRG was now tasked with overseeing the entire propaganda apparatus and directing the ideological campaign. Its members—Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, and Wang Li—were all loyalists who answered directly to Mao, bypassing the regular party bureaucracy. The CCRG would soon become the nerve center of the Cultural Revolution, issuing directives, organizing mass rallies, and managing the Red Guard movement. It effectively created a parallel government that operated outside the control of the State Council or the Central Committee’s secretariat. This shadow administration enabled Mao to drive the movement forward without resistance from the established party structures that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping had built over the previous decade.

The May 16 Circular: Ideological Charter of the Cultural Revolution

On May 16, 1966, the Central Committee formally issued the document that would become the movement’s doctrinal foundation. Known as the May 16 Circular (officially the Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution), it was drafted under Mao’s direct supervision and reflected his most radical vision. The full text is available through archival sources such as the Wilson Center Digital Archive (read the document here).

The Circular explicitly repudiated the February Outline, calling it a “report of a revisionist line” permeated with “bourgeois ideas.” It warned that “representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture are a heap of counter-revolutionary revisionists” who must be “completely exposed and criticized.” The document dissolved the existing Propaganda Department under the Central Committee and created a new Cultural Revolution Group, directly accountable to the Politburo Standing Committee, effectively placing Mao’s faction in charge of public discourse. It also ordered an all-out campaign against the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

The May 16 Circular did more than provide rhetorical ammunition. It redefined the nature of class struggle, asserting that the principal contradiction in Chinese society was between the proletariat and the new bourgeoisie inside the party itself. This represented a fundamental shift from earlier campaigns that targeted landowners or capitalists outside the party structure. By locating the enemy within the revolutionary ranks, the circular legitimated the purging of senior officials who had spent decades building the People’s Republic. It criminalized dissent as counter-revolutionary sabotage and set the stage for the violent factionalism that followed.

Historians have noted that the circular’s language was deliberately apocalyptic. It described the situation as “a life-and-death struggle between the two roads of socialism and capitalism,” leaving no room for compromise or moderation. The document also explicitly called for the use of “mass democracy” to overcome bureaucratic resistance—a phrase that would be interpreted as a license for street-level violence. In a key passage, the circular declared: “To rebel is justified.” This motto, soon plastered on walls and shouted at rallies, became the slogan of the Cultural Revolution. The May 16 Circular was thus not merely a policy document but a revolutionary manifesto that mobilized millions of young people to act as Mao’s enforcers.

Mass Mobilization and the Birth of the Red Guard Movement

Armed with the ideological charter of May 16, Mao and his allies pivoted to mobilizing China’s youth. In August 1966, at a mass rally in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Mao received the first formations of the Red Guards—predominantly middle school and university students who wore red armbands and swore loyalty to his thought. While the May 16 Circular had called for a cultural and political cleansing, the Red Guards transformed that abstract mandate into street-level terror. They rampaged through cities, destroying temples, burning books, and attacking individuals labeled as “ox-ghosts and snake-spirits” (counter-revolutionaries).

The April political offensive and the May 16 Circular together created a framework in which no institution was safe from Maoist scrutiny. The circular’s language empowered any group that claimed it was carrying out Mao’s revolutionary line to denounce authority figures—teachers, party secretaries, factory managers—as capitalist roaders. The Central Cultural Revolution Group actively encouraged big-character posters and public struggle sessions, bypassing the court system entirely. Within months, the party’s own discipline committees collapsed, and a pervasive atmosphere of denunciation engulfed workplaces and neighborhoods. This rapid escalation was a direct outgrowth of the May 16 directive’s call to “boldly mobilize the masses” and the April purge that eliminated moderate voices capable of restraining the process.

The Red Guards were not a monolithic force. Factional splits soon emerged, often along lines of social class, school origin, or personal loyalty to various CCRG members. Groups like the “Rebel” and “Conservative” factions fought pitched battles in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. The central government, under Mao’s direction, played factions against one another to maintain control. The chaos that ensued would eventually require the intervention of the People’s Liberation Army, but in the summer and fall of 1966, the Red Guards were the primary vehicle for the Cultural Revolution’s destructive energy.

Impact on Education and Intellectual Life

The immediate target of the Red Guards was the educational system. Schools and universities were closed for years, as teachers were dragged before struggle sessions and students were encouraged to “learn revolution by making revolution.” Textbooks were purged of “bourgeois” content, and entrance examinations were abolished in favor of political recommendations. The closure of the education system created a lost generation: millions of young people who would later be sent to the countryside for “re-education” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The May 16 Circular’s attack on the “Four Olds” specifically targeted libraries, archives, and museums, leading to the destruction of countless manuscripts and artworks that had survived millennia. The loss of cultural heritage is incalculable.

Immediate Consequences: Political Purges and Social Chaos

The immediate aftermath of these events saw the Chinese state descend into a factional maelstrom. By early 1967, the Red Guard movement had splintered into warring factions, many of which fought pitched battles in urban centers. The targets of the April and May decisions—Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and thousands of other officials—were systematically vilified, tortured, or killed. Liu Shaoqi, once seen as Mao’s heir apparent, was expelled from the party in 1968 and died in disgrace the following year. The destruction of cultural heritage was staggering: countless ancient temples, manuscripts, and artworks were destroyed during the “Smash the Four Olds” campaign, a policy directly traceable to the May 16 Circular’s exhortations.

Economically, China lurched into paralysis. Transport networks were disrupted by factional fighting, industrial output plummeted, and agricultural production stagnated. The army, under the leadership of Lin Biao, eventually had to impose military control over fractured regions, but not before an entire generation of youth had been uprooted. The intellectual and educational sectors were gutted: universities closed, laboratories destroyed, and scholars persecuted. As the official Party history later acknowledged in the 1981 Resolution on Party History, the Cultural Revolution “brought severe damage to the party, the state, and the people.” The April 1966 consolidation of power and the May 16 Circular were the instruments that made that damage inevitable.

Harvard historian Roderick MacFarquhar, in his classic study The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, argues that the spring 1966 events “shattered the carefully constructed consensus of the post-Leap years and replaced it with a logic of permanent revolution that could only end in disaster.” MacFarquhar’s analysis points to the bureaucratic infighting and ideological rigidity that Mao himself instigated. More recent scholarship, such as Elizabeth Perry’s work on the role of violence in state-building, highlights how the April and May decisions weaponized social tensions that had been simmering since the Great Leap Forward. These academic perspectives underscore that the Cultural Revolution was not a spontaneous outburst but a deliberately engineered campaign with clear institutional origins.

The Long Shadow of Spring 1966: Historical Assessment

Historians and political scientists continue to debate the relative weight of structural forces versus personal ambition in the launch of the Cultural Revolution. What is undisputed is that the twin events of April and May 1966 transformed a limited ideological purge into a genocidal social catastrophe. The May 16 Circular, with its unambiguous framing of intra-party opponents as class enemies, created a permission structure for violence that persisted for a decade. The April Politburo meeting, by stripping away institutional guardrails, guaranteed that Mao’s radicalism would not be checked.

These events are not merely historical footnotes; they established a model of top-down chaos that has influenced later political campaigns in China. The campaign’s legacy—the erosion of trust, the normalization of denunciation, and the trauma inflicted on millions—continues to shape Chinese society. Understanding the ground zero of the Cultural Revolution, the spring of 1966, is essential for anyone seeking to comprehend how state-sponsored destruction can be systematically manufactured. The documents of that period, including the May 16 Circular, remain indispensable primary sources for scholars examining the mechanics of mass political terror and the fragility of institutions under totalitarian conditions.

For further study, the Wilson Center Digital Archive provides an extensive collection of translated documents, including the May 16 Circular and other key materials from the Cultural Revolution. Additionally, the teaching resources on China’s Cultural Revolution from the Association for Asian Studies offer a balanced introduction to the period. These sources help contextualize the April and May 1966 events within the broader trajectory of Maoist radicalism.

Conclusion: The Fatal Convergence of Ambition and Ideology

The April 1966 launch and the May 16 Notice were not bureaucratic formalities; they were the detonators of a political explosion that shattered China’s social fabric. Mao’s personal drive to reclaim absolute authority, conjoined with a messianic belief in permanent revolution, found expression in documents that deliberately collapsed any distinction between reasoned policy and apocalyptic struggle. The resulting upheaval killed millions, erased centuries of cultural achievement, and left a vacuum of leadership that plunged the nation into a decade of darkness. Any study of authoritarian politics must reckon with how these two spring events weaponized ideology and youth to remake a civilization at its foundations.