REIGN
OF THE
RED
TERROR
In 1966, China’s
leader Mao Zedong
launched his Great
Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in an
attempt to marginalise
his rivals. In this he
succeeded, says
Robert Bickers,
but at a truly horrific
cost to his country
W
Scan this QR Code for
the audio readerhen Red Guards arrived at the door
of Nien Cheng’s house in Shanghai
on the night of 30 August 1966, it
wasn’t an unexpected interruption.
Throughout ‘Red August’, organised gangs
of Chinese students had indulged in acts of
destruction across China in the name of
effacing ‘feudal’ traditions. Yet what
followed still seems astonishing to record.
More than 30 teenagers stormed into the
51-year-old widow’s home and began to
smash it up, destroying clothes, antiques,
records, paintings and furniture, burning
books, and defacing walls and mirrors with
political slogans. Nien Cheng herself was
seized; she would spend the next six and a
half years in captivity.
Her story was far from unusual. In
Shanghai alone, tens of thousands of
homes were attacked in this way, and many
of their terrified residents were beaten to
death or committed suicide. Red Guards
also killed cats and other pets they
considered a bourgeois affectation. Yet
rather than being the work of a rabble, a
lawless mob, this was an officially
sanctioned movement encouraged by Mao
Zedong and his inner circle. It was the
sharp end of China’s Cultural Revolution.
By the spring of 1965 Mao, the 72-year-old son of a small-time landowner in
south-central China, had held a
commanding position within the Chinese
Communist party for over three decades.
He was one of its founder members in
1921, and had emerged as the core leader
in the mid-1930s. After the party seized
power in 1949 and established the People’s
Republic of China, he had stamped his
personality and his programme on the
politics and policies of the new state. In the
late 1950s Mao had also come to assert his
own claim to leadership within the
international communist movement, which
had split as a result.
Mao had long been the focus of a cult of
personality. One of the era’s songs – almost
its national anthem – came to define his
status. “The east is red,” it began, “the sun
has risen, China has brought forth Mao
Zedong... he is the people’s saviour.”
But the ‘Great Helmsman’, as he was
also called, was now worried about the
future – and he was particularly concerned
about his own legacy. It was Mao who, in
1958, had steered the party into a pell-mell
race to the future, a rapid process of
agricultural collectivisation and a
nationwide programme – the Great Leap
Forward – to increase industrial productionHISTORY