Event Record
The Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976
From central mobilization, Red Guards, and factional conflict to military restoration, purges, rehabilitation, and memory management.
Contents
What happened
In 1966 Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution. Central documents and mass organizations pushed political struggle into schools, factories and government offices. Red Guards conducted denunciations and searches, factional fighting spread, and the military later took over parts of cities and institutions. The movement ended after Mao’s death in 1976. The 1981 Party resolution acknowledged a grave disaster for the Party, state and people. [1] [2]
How violence was organized
Central slogans supplied legitimacy. Local Party committees and mass organizations enforced them, while the military redrew the boundaries of order when conflict escaped control. Deaths, detention and property loss varied by region, and public statistics remain incomplete. Records of factional fighting and killings in Guangxi show violence amplified by political mobilization and organizational competition, not merely by a few individuals losing control.
Official account and historical record
The 1981 resolution placed primary blame on Mao’s late errors and the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing groups while preserving the Party’s legitimacy. The account acknowledged catastrophe but created no national victim register and no independent process to examine every local responsibility. [3] [7]
How the power worked
The Cultural Revolution showed how the CCP could combine personality cult, mass mobilization and organizational purge into a violence machine. A political label decided who could be attacked. Workplaces and schools converted it into punishment. The military decided which faction could survive. After the movement, memory was folded into Party history, responsibility concentrated on a few leaders and the system itself escaped judgment.
Evidence limits
Historical resolutions, local archives, foreign records and scholarship can reconstruct policy, chronology and some violent episodes but not one uncontested national death toll. Regional findings require household, hospital, police and work-unit files and survivor testimony. The evidence establishes a disaster produced by political organization and coercive enforcement, not spontaneous social disorder.
Sources
Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of the PRC since 1949primary-recordUnavailable
Chronology of One Hundred Years of the CCPprimary-recordUnavailable
Library of Congress China Country Studygovernment-reportLive
CCP Central Committee May 16 Circularprimary-recordLive
Sixteen Points on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutionprimary-recordLive
Bombard the Headquarters—My Big-Character Posterprimary-recordLive
UK National Archives Resource on the Cultural Revolutiongovernment-reportLive
Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966–1971academic-researchRedirected
The Political Legacy of Violence during China's Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected
Anatomy of a Regional Civil War: Guangxi, 1967–1968academic-researchRedirected
Official Historical Inquiries into Guangxi's Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected
Economic Legacies of the Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchLive
The Early Cultural Revolution, 1966–1968academic-researchRedirected
Demobilization and Restoration in the Late Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected
Harvard Fairbank Center Archive on Cultural Revolution Big-Character Postersacademic-researchLive
Foreign Relations during the Cultural Revolutionacademic-researchRedirected
The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Cambridge History of Communismacademic-researchRedirected