Timeline

Cultural Revolution Decision Timeline: From the May 16 Circular to the Fall of the Gang of Four

Ordering central documents, mass movements, and institutional reconstruction from 1965 to 1976.

The 1965 cultural campaign supplied charges for a leadership purge

In November 1965, Shanghai's Wenhuibao published Yao Wenyuan's attack on Wu Han's historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The declared subject was a play, but the political target included Wu, a deputy mayor of Beijing, the Beijing Party Committee that protected him, and leaders above it. An academic dispute became a case about the Party line. The accusers did not have to prove a specific crime. By interpreting the play as a defense of the purged Peng Dehuai, they could classify its author as an enemy.

Liu Shaoqi was still state chairman, Deng Xiaoping still ran much of the Central Committee's daily work, and the Cultural Revolution Group of Five led by Peng Zhen tried to keep the dispute within academic limits. Mao treated those limits as obstruction of his political offensive. The Cultural Revolution did not erupt spontaneously in the streets. The supreme leader chose targets first. Party newspapers, theoretical attacks, and central documents then expanded the assault across the political system.

The May 16 Circular authorized attacks that bypassed existing Party committees

On May 16, 1966, the Central Committee adopted a circular that dissolved Peng Zhen's Group of Five and discarded its report. A new Central Cultural Revolution Group was placed directly under the Politburo Standing Committee. The circular alleged that counterrevolutionary revisionists had infiltrated the Party, government, military, and cultural institutions and were preparing to seize power. It ordered Party committees at every level to remove them. ^[4]

The circular changed the boundaries of political attack. Grassroots cadres, teachers, and intellectuals no longer faced disciplinary charges that could be tested against evidence. They faced an unfalsifiable class identity. Office and professional standing could itself become proof that someone had usurped leadership. A local Party committee that protected its staff could also be accused of enforcing a bourgeois reactionary line.

From May through July, work teams entered schools and offices to control the movement and identify its targets. Mao then condemned the work teams, and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping lost control of the campaign. The Central Cultural Revolution Group could signal directly to mass organizations over the heads of regular Party and state institutions. Old lines of obedience broke down, but Mao and the central group retained the ultimate power to decide who counted as revolutionary.

The Sixteen Points and Bombard the Headquarters directed mass struggle at the Party-state

Mao wrote Bombard the Headquarters on August 5, 1966. Three days later, the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee adopted the Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, known as the Sixteen Points. It demanded bold mass mobilization, promoted big-character posters and debate, and named Party officials accused of taking the capitalist road as the campaign's main target. It described newly formed cultural revolution groups, committees, and congresses as organs for mass self-education. ^{[6] [5]}

The document also contained clauses against coercion, factional fighting, and persecution of minorities. Yet it defined political rivals as hidden enemies who had to be overthrown and told local Party organizations to surrender control of the movement. The operative signal came from Mao's public support for the Red Guards, his mass receptions for students traveling across the country, and the freedom granted to attack schools, offices, homes, and cultural institutions.

During Red August in Beijing, teachers, cadres, and families assigned to the Five Black Categories were subjected to struggle sessions, home raids, expulsion, and killings. Red Guards then traveled nationwide with free transportation and central support. Local participants brought their own grievances and factional choices, but the enemy categories, permission to act, and political authority came from the CCP center. Describing this period only as youthful fanaticism removes the people who issued the authorization. ^{[13] [15]}

The 1967 power seizures exposed the purpose and limits of Mao's mobilization

In January 1967, rebel organizations seized municipal power in Shanghai, and the center endorsed the January Storm. Power seizures spread. Rival organizations all claimed the greatest loyalty to Mao but fought over who could take control of government offices, factories, and schools. Once regular Party committees had lost authority, no election, court, or public rule could determine who should govern. Central endorsement, military support, and factional force decided the outcome.

The People's Liberation Army was ordered to support the left while maintaining production, transport, and institutional order. Military units could not always tell which faction the center considered left, and their local choices intensified conflict. The Wuhan Incident in July 1967 revealed open confrontation among local military authorities, mass organizations, and the Central Cultural Revolution Group. The center then expanded military involvement. A mass organization could continue to act only while the Party and army recognized it. ^[8]

The limits of mass rebellion were now clear. Rebels could humiliate and remove officials who had lost Mao's protection, but they could not create political organizations independent of the CCP. A group that resisted the center's restored order could change overnight from revolutionary left to target of a purge. Mao used mass mobilization to destroy rivals and existing institutions, then used the army to take control back.

Revolutionary committees turned rebellion into state repression from 1968 to 1971

By 1968, revolutionary committees had been established across the provinces. Their claimed three-way alliance combined military officers, existing cadres, and mass representatives. In practice, the military and cadres approved by the center usually held the decisive power. Red Guard and other mass organizations were ordered to end factional fighting and submit to unity. Large numbers of urban youths were sent to the countryside. ^{[13] [14]}

The restoration of order did not stop persecution. The Cleansing of the Class Ranks, One Strike and Three Antis, and the campaign to investigate the May 16 conspiracy shifted violence from factional fighting to organized examination. Work units, revolutionary committees, and military-controlled public security bodies investigated personal histories, forced confessions, and assigned enemy status. Research based on local records finds that severe repression often peaked after the new organs of power were established, not only during the early Red Guard violence. ^{[8] [9]}

The Ninth Party Congress in 1969 wrote Lin Biao into the Party constitution as Mao's successor and formally confirmed the new order. Two years later, Lin died in a plane crash after what the CCP described as a failed coup and flight from China. A man just proclaimed successor had suddenly become the leader of an anti-Party clique. The reversal showed that the system had no stable rule of succession, only the supreme leader's changing trust.

Administrative restoration did not end political campaigns after 1971

After the Lin Biao crisis, Zhou Enlai oversaw the restoration of parts of the government and economy. Deng Xiaoping returned to the leadership in 1973. Schools, factories, and government offices resumed more regular operations, but the center did not abandon the use of campaigns to settle leadership disputes. The 1974 Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign and the 1975 struggle over rectification both became instruments through which rival leaders sought Mao's approval. ^[14]

Zhou died in January 1976. In April, crowds in Tiananmen Square mourned him and criticized Cultural Revolution leaders. The center labeled the gathering counterrevolutionary and removed Deng again. Mao died on September 9, eliminating the final arbiter of elite conflict. On October 6, Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying, Wang Dongxing, and their allies used the central security detail to arrest Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. The leadership soon announced that it had smashed the Gang of Four. ^{[2] [14]}

The arrests were not the result of open political competition. They were an internal security operation that removed the Central Cultural Revolution faction and cleared the way for restoration of the Party-state. Central documents had launched the Cultural Revolution, and an armed guard operation against central leaders ended it. Ordinary people never possessed the power to decide when the movement began, where it went, or when it stopped.

The CCP condemned the Cultural Revolution while preserving its underlying power structure

The CCP's 1981 historical resolution defined the years from 1966 to 1976 as severe turmoil that brought disaster to the Party, state, and people. It assigned Mao primary responsibility for launching the Cultural Revolution while portraying the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing groups as forces that exploited his errors and deepened the catastrophe. ^[1] The resolution acknowledged Mao's responsibility, but it kept judgment within the people and questions selected by the Party.

Every decisive change from the May 16 Circular to the arrest of the Gang of Four came from the top of the CCP. The center declared enemies within, authorized attacks on normal institutions, ordered military takeover when factional conflict threatened rule, organized new purges, and finally arrested the losing leadership faction after Mao died. The winners then monopolized the history of the decade.

This sequence defeats the CCP's most convenient alibi. The Cultural Revolution was not an interval of anarchy created by the disappearance of the Party. The Party used Mao's authority to open violence, then used the military and its organization system to select targets and rebuild control. It has repudiated Mao's decisions without accepting independent investigation, open archives, free discussion, or judicial accountability. The institutional power that produced the disaster has never faced judgment by the people it ruled.

Sources

1. Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of the PRC since 1949primary-recordUnavailable
2. Chronology of One Hundred Years of the CCPprimary-recordUnavailable
3. Library of Congress China Country Studygovernment-reportLive

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4. CCP Central Committee May 16 Circularprimary-recordLive

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5. Sixteen Points on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutionprimary-recordLive

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6. Bombard the Headquarters—My Big-Character Posterprimary-recordLive

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7. UK National Archives Resource on the Cultural Revolutiongovernment-reportLive

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8. Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966–1971academic-researchRedirected

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9. The Political Legacy of Violence during China's Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected

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10. Anatomy of a Regional Civil War: Guangxi, 1967–1968academic-researchRedirected

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11. Official Historical Inquiries into Guangxi's Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected

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12. Economic Legacies of the Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchLive

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13. The Early Cultural Revolution, 1966–1968academic-researchRedirected

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14. Demobilization and Restoration in the Late Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected

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15. Harvard Fairbank Center Archive on Cultural Revolution Big-Character Postersacademic-researchLive

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16. Foreign Relations during the Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected

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17. The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Cambridge History of Communismacademic-researchRedirected

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