Guards had experienced real and heady power; in
the name of Mao they had taken the law into their
own hands, believing that they should lead
Chinese society through revolution to communist
utopia. They had ventured forth with Mao’s bless-
ing, causing mayhem and attacking not only the
local officials, as Mao had instructed in his Big
Character Poster of August 1966, ‘Bombard the
Headquarters’, but also anyone belonging to the
traditional establishment. Their bitterness and
disillusionment when Mao and the party leader-
ship suppressed them and forced them to labour
in the countryside were fierce indeed. Paradoxi-
cally the Cultural Revolution also gave rise to the
Democracy Movement, whose ideals of individual
rights and liberties were the exact opposite of the
Red Guards’ cry of submission to Mao’s doctrines
and vision.
During the last years of his life Mao acted
more and more autocratically. He found it useful
to maintain in power a Politburo in which the
extreme left group (Gang of Four), which
included Jiang Quing, his actress wife since 1938,
was balanced by the reformists, led by Deng
Xiaoping, who returned to the central stage in
1973 as one of the vice-premiers. Premier Zhou
Enlai, who had weathered all the turns of policy,
moving just sufficiently in whatever direction the
wind blew, was a moderating influence. His
unqualified loyalty to Mao and his flexibility help
to explain how he alone among China’s political
elite had remained at the centre. The attempts by
the Gang of Four to undermine his position only
earned them Mao’s reproof, but they too retained
considerable influence until the chairman’s
death. It was Mao’s way of balancing rival forces.
Nonetheless, a victim had to be found who could
be blamed for the excesses of the Red Guards.
From the highest ranks of the Politburo, Mao
chose his intended successor, Lin Biao, minister
of defence since 1960. Accused of plotting to
assassinate Mao, Lin Biao was never brought
to trial, and died conveniently in an air crash in
1971, allegedly while trying to escape.
In 1975 Zhou Enlai fell seriously ill. Mao, who
recognised Deng’s abilities, delegated to him the
running of the state, despite the hostility of the
Gang of Four. Zhou Enlai died the following
year, in April 1976, but Deng’s ascendancy was
short-lived. Thousands of people demonstrated in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, ostensibly to mourn
the death of Zhou Enlai but in reality protesting
against the repression of the ultra-left. There were
scuffles with police and the square was cleared by
force, an uneasy precedent for what was to
happen there thirteen years later.
Between 1970 and 1974 the economic recov-
ery was proceeding in fits and starts. This did not
deflect the party leadership from making grand
plans for the future. At the Fourth National
People’s Congress in January 1975 Zhou Enlai
proclaimed that the country’s objective now was
to catch up with the developed world by the end
of the century by concentrating on the ‘four
moderns’: the modernisation of agriculture, of
industry, of national defence and of science and
technology. But within the constraints of Mao’s
ideology such results could not be attained. It
would be left to Mao’s heirs to try new ways of
achieving the necessary growth.
What has subsequently been called the second
phase of the Cultural Revolution continued to
disrupt China. Some 12 million students, profes-
sionals and intellectuals had been sent into the
countryside to be educated in the realities of
Chinese peasant life. Many unjust imprisonments
were upheld. Education and science were dis-
rupted; schools and universities only gradually
reopened in the 1970s. The see-saw policies of
Mao’s hierarchy inflicted untold hardship and suf-
fering on millions of Chinese. They would
remember the decade from 1966 to 1976 as the
years of great turmoil.
Yet there were also, at least in principle, some
beneficial aspects. The relocation of industrial
activity throughout China, away from the manu-
facturing cities of the southern China coast spurred
a more even development and mitigated the Third
World phenomenon of developing mega-cities
unable to cope with the population influx. Had
there been more rational planning, with transport
and communications keeping pace and with the
older urban centres being maintained and renewed
as necessary instead of suffering from neglect,
China’s economic development would have suf-
fered less from Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As it
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