approval of “Persons in
power taking the
capitalist road”? This
description was a coded
way of identifying the
culprits as Liu Shaoqi
and other senior leaders
including Deng Xiaoping.
Few pieces of
theatrical criticism have
had such an impact.
Between 1966 and 1976,
an estimated 1.5 million
people died as a result of
persecution or in bloody,
armed factional strife, and tens of millions
would face political disgrace or have their
lives permanently altered. Liu Shaoqi was
toppled, dying in disgrace in 1969. The
country was turned inside out, parts of it
collapsing into civil war. The economy was
shattered – it was better to be ‘Red’ than
‘Expert’, claimed the slogans – and China
retreated into a morbidly violent isolation.
On 5 August 1966 Mao issued a
manifesto calling on revolutionaries to
“bombard the headquarters” and defend
the party from a “white terror” launched
against it by “some leading comrades”.
Answering his call with all the idealism
and passion of their age came China’s
young people.
Two months earlier, students at a middle
school in the capital had formed a new
revolutionary militia, the Red Guards,
pledged to support Mao and attack his
opponents. Endorsed by Mao, the new
movement spread swiftly across the
country as millions of young people flocked
on to its trains to make political pilgrimages,
to participate in mass rallies in Beijing or
visit other sites of historic, revolutionary
importance and to “share experiences” with
Red Guards in other towns and cities.BOURGEOIS VICTIMS
For several extraordinary months China
was turned upside down as its youngpeople launched a wave
of attacks against
perceived enemies in the
party and in every political
or social institution. Those
enemies were seen
everywhere – including in
the homes of the
‘bourgeois’ such as Nien
Cheng in Shanghai.
The widow of a former
diplomat, she had
become manager of the
local branch of the
British oil company
Shell, and had recently retired from a post
helping to wind up that firm’s interests.
Nien Cheng had studied in the mid-1930s
at the London School of Economics,
where she had met her husband, and was
a cosmopolitan, cultured patriot. She had
toured Britain, speaking at meetings to
rally support for China during the
Japanese invasion, and she and her
husband had lived in Australia for five
years, where their daughter Meiping had
been born.
Meiping grew up bilingual, like her
parents; she learned to play the piano, and
became a film actress. Nien Cheng ordered
English books from a London bookshop,
and stocked her pleasant house with wine
bought on trips to the British colony of
Hong Kong, and with valuable Chinese
antiquities. She employed three servants
and a gardener, and had a cat.
There certainly remained a gulf between
the cosmopolitan world of city residents
such as Cheng and her daughter and that
of the majority of China’s people, who still
lived on the land. Meiping had seen this first
hand in late 1965, when she had been sent
to live with a village family on Shanghai’s
outskirts, and had been shocked at the
conditions she encountered. But a bond of
solidarity had nonetheless developed
between the urban sophisticate and the
impoverished villagers.Such ties were torn asunder in the orgy
of violence and destruction that engulfed
the family after 30 August 1966. In the
custody of the state, Nien Cheng was
subjected to ‘struggle meetings’ at which
she was denounced and forced to confess
to political crimes, and spent six and a half
years in solitary confinement. In June 1967
Meiping was kidnapped, beaten, tortured
and killed by a Red Guard gang.
The destruction of symbols of ‘Old’
(pre-revolutionary) China came to be a
defining feature of the Red Guard
movement. They attacked the ‘Four Olds’- old ideas, old culture, old customs, old
habits – pillaging temples and churches,
Out with the ‘Old’
Red Guards at a Buddhist temple gate, Beijing, in 1966. Such
symbols of ‘Old’ China were relentlessly attacked during
‘Red August’AKG IMAGES/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGESFaction fought
faction. They
fought with
loud-speakers,
pamphlets, fists,
clubs, guns,
tanks. Suburbs
of major cities
were wrecked
1966
The Cultural Revolution is
proclaimed in May. Red Guards
form and, after mass rallies in
Beijing, begin attacks on the ‘four
olds’ and ‘class enemies’,
‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘bad
elements’.1921
The Chinese Communist
party is established in
Shanghai, its founding
members having been
encouraged by foreign
agents of the Communist
International (Comintern).1949
Chiang Kai-shek’s
nationalist government
retreats to Taiwan. On
1 October Mao Zedong
proclaims the
establishment of the
People’s Republic of China.1958
Mao launches the
Great Leap Forward
with the aim of
overtaking the
economic output of
the UK and matching
that of the US.1959 – 62
Famine results in at
least 30 million deaths.
As a result, Mao is
sidelined by Liu Shaoqi,
and some policies of the
Great Leap Forward era
are abandoned.THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: 10 KEY EVENTS
Starving rural victims of the famine
caused by Mao’s Great Leap ForwardHISTORY