The People’s Republic of China 143
secret anti-Maoist sentiment. Red Guard factions quickly became
polarized as each one tried to prove it was more revolutionary than its
rivals. In 1968, Liu Shaoqi was removed from offi ce, expelled from the
Party, beaten, and denied medical treatment. He died of pneumonia in
prison in 1969. Deng Xiaoping was sent into exile in south China to
“reform himself through labor” by working in a tractor plant.
For a time Mao tolerated the chaos of the Red Guards, but by the
summer of 1968, when anarchy and civil war seemed close, he retreated
and called in the People’s Liberation Army to restore order. He pro-
claimed that the Cultural Revolution was a great success but said the
Red Guards had gone too far. As if simply concluding one phase of the
revolution and moving on to the next “higher stage,” Mao now urged
that all former Red Guards be sent to the countryside themselves, to live
This 1967 poster glorifi es young Red Guards carrying the banner of Chairman
Mao and attacking the “four olds” (“old ideas, old culture, old customs, old
habits of the exploiting classes”), trampling traditional Confucian virtues,
Buddhism religion, and foreign infl uences alike. In the heady atmosphere of
unprecedented freedom from adult supervision and the intense propaganda about
class struggle and the evils of revisionism, young people often beat and tortured
their teachers and anyone else they could identify as revisionists or secret enemies
of Chairman Mao. Library of Congress, LC-USZC4–3346