142 China in World History
years, some intellectuals in Beijing felt secure enough to write critical
and satirical essays about the excesses of Mao. The very appearance of
such writings suggested that Mao had lost much of his former power,
but Mao was not about to recede quietly into the background. He coun-
tered these trends by building up his image in the armed forces. Lin Biao,
a career military man, had replaced Peng Dehuai as minister of defense,
and in 1964, Lin created an edition of some of Mao’s writings, the Quo-
tations of Chairman Mao. Known as the “Little Red Book,” it became
required reading for all members of the People’s Liberation Army.
In 1966, Mao made a dramatic move to restore his power within
the Chinese Communist Party. Adopting his guerrilla warfare model to
political competition within the Party, with Lin Biao’s help, Mao began
to spread the cult of Mao from the army to all of society. Mao needed
other allies, particularly in the mass media, and for this he turned, with
the help of his wife, to Shanghai. Mao had divorced his third wife in
about 1939 to marry a Shanghai actress, Jiang Qing.^2 Jiang Qing had
great ambitions but had been frustrated for years because the Party lead-
ership had insisted that she not be deeply involved in political affairs.
Now Jiang Qing’s ambitions and Mao’s desire to regain power
were linked as Jiang made an alliance with several radical intellectuals
in Shanghai, where they published a virulent attack on criticisms of
Chairman Mao as “counterrevolutionary” (a very strong term imply-
ing a capital crime). When a student at Beijing University posted a
big-character poster criticizing professors as unprogressive for putting
too much emphasis on technical knowledge and not enough on Com-
munist ideology, Mao responded with his own big-character poster
giving students the exhilarating message that “to rebel is justifi ed.”^3
Mao called on all young people to organize themselves into Red Guard
units to fi nd and expose all examples of “capitalist-roader” sympa-
thies or Soviet-style “revisionism” in the universities and in society
at large.^4 Mao further declared that revisionists and capitalist-roaders
existed at the very highest levels of the Communist Party, an accusation
people quickly understood as directed at none other than Liu Shaoqi
and Deng Xiaoping.
Mao and his radical Shanghai comrades dubbed this nationwide
movement the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. All schools were
closed in 1966, and young people were given free rein to “smash the
four olds”—old ideas, habits, customs, and cultures. In a poisonous
atmosphere in which anyone could be accused of counterrevolutionary
thoughts or deeds at any time, youthful bands of Red Guards raided
people’s homes to fi nd evidence of revisionism, foreign infl uence, or