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Timeline – Cultural Revolution

In an effort to return China to its communist roots, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

turned to the youth of the country to help start the “Cultural Revolution.”
Mao called on young people to take down leading intellectuals, party
leaders, and their own parents. These teenagers came together to form the
Red Guards.
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October 1949: Mao declared victory in the Communist revolution and
established the People’s Republic of China.

May 1966: Articles in the state controlled papers introduced the

idea of a “Cultural Revolution.”

Red Guard groups, made up of Chinese youth,

emerged throughout China.

Aug. 1966: Mao officially launched the “Cultural Revolution” with a

speech at the Chinese Communist Party.

Oct. 1966: Mao called for the Red Guards to destroy the “Four
Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old
ideas.

Jan. 1967: Red Guards achieved the overthrow of provincial party

committee officials and replaced them with radicals.

Feb. 1967: Top-level Communist Party officials called for an end of

the Cultural Revolution, but Mao continued to support it.

Summer 1967: Mao replaced pre-Cultural Revolution party officials with

radicals who supported the revolution.

1968: On Mao’s orders, the Red Guards were broken up in the

“rustification movement,” where individual teenagers
were “sent down” to villages throughout China to “learn
from the peasants.”

April 1969: Mao declared “victory” of the Cultural Revolution and

supported Lin Biao as his new successor.

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Document A: Mao’s “Little Red Book”
Mao’s “Little Red Book” is a collection of Mao Tse-Tung’s quotations that were
used as a source of inspiration and guidance for members of the Red Guard
during the Cultural Revolution. These are two excerpts from the book.

The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours.
You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life,
like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed in you.
The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.
Mao, 1957

We must help all our young people to understand that ours is still a very
poor country, that we cannot change this situation radically in a short time,
and that only through the united efforts of our younger generation and all
our people, working with their own hands, can China be made strong and
prosperous within a period of several decades. The establishment of our
socialist system has opened the road leading to the ideal society of the
future, but to translate this ideal into reality needs hard work.
Mao, 1957

Source: Mao Tse-Tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. 1964

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Document B: Red Guard Song
Patriotic songs and slogans were common characteristics of the Cultural Revolution.
This song was written by the People’s Liberation Army Songs Editorial Department
sometime around 1967.

Red Guards, Red Guards.

Burning with revolutionary zeal,
Tested by the storm of class struggle,
Tempered for battle our hearts are red,
Standing firm, direction clear, our vigor for revolution strong,
We follow the party with full devotion,
We are Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.

Red Guards, Red Guards.

We want to be the successors to Communism.
The revolutionary red banner passes on from generation to generation,
We want to try on the glorious tradition.
Loving the country, loving the people, loving the collective, loving to work.
Connecting with the workers and the peasants,
We are Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.

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Document C: At the Center of the Storm

Rae Yang was a young girl in the spring of 1966, when she became a part of the Red
Guards during the Cultural Revolution. In 1997, she published a memoir retelling the
story of her life and her family in China throughout the political turmoil of the 1950s
through the 1980s. In this excerpt she writes about her early experience in the Red
Guards.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out in late May 1966, I felt like the legendary
monkey Sun Wukong, freed from the dungeon that had held him under a huge mountain
for five hundred years. It was Chairman Mao who set us free by allowing us to rebel
against authorities. As a student, the first authority I wanted to rebel against was
Teacher Lin, our homeroom teacher. A big part of her duty was to make sure that we
behaved and thought correctly.

Now the time had come for the underdogs to speak up, to seek justice! Immediately I
took up a brush pen, dipped it in black ink and wrote a long dazibao. Using some of the
rhetorical devices Teacher Lin had taught us, I accused her of lacking proletarian feeling
toward her students, of treating them as her enemies, of being high-handed, and of
suppressing different opinions. My classmates supported me by signing their names to
it. Next, we took the dazibao to Teacher Lin’s home nearby and pasted it on the wall of
her bedroom for her to read carefully day and night. This, of course, was not personal
revenge. It was answering Chairman Mao’s call to combat the revisionist educational
line.

Within a few days, dazibao written by students, teachers, administrators, workers, and
librarians, were popping up everywhere like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Secrets
dark and dirty were exposed. Every day we made shocking discoveries. The sacred
halo around the teachers’ heads that dated back two thousand five hundred years to the
time of Confucius disappeared. Now teachers must learn a few things from their
students. Parents would be taught by their kids instead of vice versa, as Chairman Mao
pointed out. Government officials would have to wash their ears to listen to the ordinary
people….

Source: Rae Young, Spider Eaters: A Memoir, 1997.

Vocabulary

dazibao –propaganda posters written to denounce counter-revolutionaries

high-handed– bossy
proletarian –working class
revisionist—in this case, someone opposing Mao’s position !!

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Document D: Under the Red Sun Memoir
Under the Red Sun is a memoir written by Fan Cao about her experiences during the
Cultural Revolution published in 2005. Here is an excerpt from the memoir.

I was a 7th grader when the Great Cultural Revolution broke out.
Growing up in the “New China” we were fed with revolutionary ideas bathed
in the red sunlight of Mao. We worshiped Mao the same way pious
Christians worship their God, and we were completely devoted to him. I,
myself, really believed that we were working for a paradise on earth, and
we were going to save the entire world. How glorious it was to have the
great destiny of liberating all humanity! In fact, we did not even understand
what revolution was and how other people in the world really lived…

I was not allowed to join the Red Guards simply because my

grandparents were rich before the communists took away their land, and
my parents were considered “intellectuals,” which automatically made them
anti-revolutionists regardless of the fact that they had been following Mao’s
idealism since their early adulthood. As members of the university faculty,
my parents were obviously in trouble. I, of course, was guilty by
association. Only a 13-year-old girl, I became a target of the revolution.
After that, I lost all my friends and lived in perpetual fear for several years.
Despite this unbearable life, I did not dare challenge my belief in the
revolution. Instead, I wondered if it might be my parents who had done
something wrong. I wrote a dazibao denouncing them to show my loyalty to
Mao. My naivety deeply wounded the feelings between my parents and me.

As I grew up, I slowly learned the truth behind the so-called

“revolution.” I also realized that my family and I were relatively lucky
compared with hundreds and thousands of innocent people who died in the
endless political movements. I am very remorseful, and I still feel shaken as
I think back on what happened during the Cultural Revolution.

Source: Fan Cao, Under the Red Sun, 2005

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