12.1.1 The Anti-Hu Feng Campaign and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech

In the early years of the PRC, the CCP executed its first comprehensive purge of intellectuals, almost concurrently with its Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, known as the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign.¹ This campaign, analogous to the Russian Cultural Revolution launched by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, was broader and more ruthless than its Russian counterpart. Official statistics show that more than 1.3 million intellectuals, a quarter of China’s total by then, were scrutinized during the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign, unmasking 3,800 “counterrevolutionaries.” Eyewitnesses state that “the masses were mobilized for the campaign like a violent storm … all means were used to extort confessions.” Virtually all intellectuals “no longer dared to reveal any dissent” (Zhu, Reference Zhu2005, pp. 220–221). From then on, the majority of intellectuals, burdened by fear, suppressed their grievances and refrained from expressing themselves.

While the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign was primarily targeted at intellectuals within the CCP, the so-called “democratic parties” that represented intellectuals were also rapidly losing political power and subsequently became primary targets of the CCP’s purges during the same period. These “democratic parties” refer to the political entities that collaborated with the CCP in the 1940s to oppose the KMT’s one-party dictatorship. This alliance remained in place until just before the establishment of the PRC.

In September 1949, the CCP convened the inaugural meeting of the CPPCC, portraying it as the parliament of the new China. This gathering appeared to uphold the multiparty system that the CCP had promised a few years prior. However, the Common Program passed during this conference, which effectively acted as a constitution, completely overturned the CCP’s recent commitments to constitutionalism.

Under such circumstances, to placate the democratic parties, the CCP arranged for their leaders to occupy various significant roles, such as Vice-President of the State, Vice-Chairman of the CPPCC, head of the Government Affairs Council (GAC), and ministers. Furthermore, the Common Program stipulated that these democratic parties would coexist with the CCP, provided they accepted the CCP’s leadership. The China Democratic League, the largest of these democratic parties, attempted to comfort its members with the phrase “long-term coexistence, mutual supervision.” This phrase was later co-opted by the CCP’s 8th National Congress as its own policy.

However, just four years after its adoption, the CCP abandoned the Common Program. Since the enactment of the PRC Constitution, which is modeled after the Soviet type of constitution, the Standing Committee of the NPC – which is entirely controlled by the CCP – has officially become the highest organ of power, with a unified parliamentary and executive structure. In contrast, the multiparty CPPCC transformed from a legislative body to a so-called advisory body in an official capacity.

Simultaneously, the CCP also abolished the Central Government Council and the GAC, both of which were platforms where the democratic parties had significant presence and roles. The GAC was restructured into the State Council, which was monopolized by the CCP. Furthermore, the number of democratic party members serving as government ministers declined significantly, reducing these parties to largely nominal entities.

The Communist Party has been an international organization and a world phenomenon since its birth and so have the Stalinist purges since the 1930s. Communist Party members and people in the Soviet Union, China, and Central and Eastern Europe harbored deep discontent towards the persecution and suppression brought about by these purges in the regime. Against this backdrop, in February 1956, Khrushchev delivered a secret speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, in which he sharply criticized Stalin’s brutal persecution of individuals both inside and outside the CPSU and his cult of personality. This secret report, once exposed by the Western media, shook the entire Soviet-led socialist camp, including China.

As a response to Khrushchev’s secret speech and the challenges within the socialist camp to the cult of personality, Mao personally arranged for the People’s Daily editorial, “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” In it he emphasized that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the best system and that Stalin’s record was mostly one of achievements with some minor errors. Yet, overall, the CCP still maintained that it would follow the CPSU’s leadership, including the principles of the 20th Congress.

12.1.2 One Hundred Flowers versus Luring the Snake Out of the Hole

In late April 1956, Mao underscored the party’s intention for long-term coexistence with and mutual supervision of the democratic parties. He stated that this strategy was exploration of a development path that differed from that of the Soviet Union (Mao, Reference Mao1976). Following this, he proposed allowing “a hundred flowers to bloom” in the arts and “a hundred schools of thought to contend” in academia. These policies appeared to be a stark contradiction to the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign.

A few months later, at the 8th Congress of the CCP, these notions were not only formalized but were also further extended to protect citizens’ freedoms. Following the precedent set by the CPSU’s 20th Congress, which opposed the cult of personality, the 8th Congress stressed the rejection of “personality cults” and the “supremacy of any individual over the party.” In the new constitution of the CCP, passed at its 8th Congress, the phrase “Mao Zedong Thought is … the guiding theory” was removed.

However, for both the CPSU and CCP, declaring opposition to the personality cult was a policy change aimed at sustaining the communist totalitarian system. It is the power structure inherent in totalitarian rule, not merely policy or personal preference, that ensures the party leader invariably supersedes the party itself. The fight for supreme power within the party is always intense and brutal. In these power struggles, individuals who are adept at manipulating the totalitarian machinery and fostering personality cults are the ones who emerge victorious. Furthermore, the nature of totalitarianism dictates that suppression is a primary means of governance.

After Khrushchev’s secret report, the public in Poland and Hungary, deeply discontented with totalitarianism, launched large-scale anti-Soviet and anti-communist movements. Two months after the 8th Congress of the CCP, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress the “rebellion.”

Shortly after the incidents in Poland and Hungary, Mao convened the 2nd Plenary Session of the 8th CCP Central Committee and proposed a rectification-type campaign to prevent similar upheavals in China. Mao said, “I … propose a rectification … mobilize all students to criticize [liberal intellectuals] … professors are afraid of the proletarian democracy” (Li, Reference Li2008). CCP cadres familiar with the Yan’an Rectification understood Mao’s intentions, but any intellectual who had not been to Yan’an in those days had no comprehension of how ruthless a rectification could be.

In January 1957, Mao further elaborated to the secretaries of the provincial party committees across the country that the CCP’s removal of power from the democratic parties in China resulted in them “not causing trouble during the unrest in Poland and Hungary.” More specifically, he attributed this to their “lack of [political] capital.” Thus, to thoroughly subdue intellectuals and democratic parties, it was necessary to “strip them of their political capital” to ensure that “political capital … is not in their hands, but in ours. We must strip their political capital … until it is completely stripped.”

Moreover, Mao further clarified his strategy of “luring the snake out of the hole,” targeting the democratic parties and intellectuals.² In his words, “For democrats, we need to set them up against each other … let them be exposed, we will attack them afterwards, not beforehand” (Mao, Reference Mao1977, vol. 5, pp. 330–362). After these preparations, at the end of April 1957, Mao convened a talk with the leaders of the democratic parties. He encouraged them to assist the CCP with the rectification: “speak out everything, and do not withhold; the speaker is not guilty, and the listener takes the warning.” On May 1, the People’s Daily published the Central Committee’s Instructions on the Rectification Campaign, calling on non-CCP members to “speak out,” assisting the CCP and the government in the rectification movement. It was historically known as the Speak Your Mind Campaign (Daming dafang). Three days later, Mao issued an instruction in the name of the Central Committee, explicitly instructing all CCP organizations to encourage non-party members to criticize the CCP and help with its rectification efforts (Mao, Reference Mao1992a, vol. 6, p. 455).

Intellectuals and numerous others had amassed profound grievances during the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign, the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign, and the sweeping imposition of a Sovietized totalitarian model across all sectors. Encouraged by the Speak Your Mind Campaign and rectification initiated by the CCP, and oblivious of the CCP’s true intentions, prominent figures from the democratic parties publicly demanded the CCP to honor its commitments to establish a multiparty coalition government, replacing the existing CCP monopoly.

Big-character posters criticizing the party emerged on the campuses of Peking University and Renmin University. A large number of intellectuals publicly criticized the CCP’s constitutional and administrative flaws. Students started forming independent associations and workers began calling for strikes. The criticism of the CCP caused public outrage, and many campuses showed signs of the CCP losing control (Mao, Reference Mao1992a, vol. 6, pp. 238–240). At that time, many renowned professors were members of the CDL. On June 6, six professors affiliated with the CDL proposed that they would intervene to alleviate the students’ agitation. The leaders of the CDL consulted Zhou Enlai on this proposal on the same day but were immediately rejected and had to abandon their efforts (Ye, Reference Ye1999, pp. 100–101).

12.1.3 The Anti-Rightist Movement’s Great Purge

Two days after Zhou Enlai’s refusal of the CDL leading members’ offer, Mao issued a secret directive to the CCP, formally initiating the Anti-Rightist Movement led by Deng Xiaoping. Mao said,

The strategy he arranged was: “Hold symposiums of university professors … Let the rightists spit out all their toxins … Let the reactionary professors, lecturers, teaching assistants and students speak freely and expose all their toxins” (Mao, Reference Mao1977, vol. 5, pp. 431–433). The offers made by the six CDL professors to assuage campus unrest were construed as attempts to seize the CCP’s dominance over universities (Zhu, Reference Zhu2005, p. 129).

On July 1, the People’s Daily published an editorial authored by Mao stating that: “Some say it was a conspiracy; we say it was an open conspiracy as the enemy had been told in advance. Demons can only be destroyed by releasing them from their cages, and poisonous grass can only be weeded if it grows above the ground.” The editorial charged that:

From then on, virtually all democratic party leaders became the “snakes” “lured out of the hole,” labeled as “rightists” by the CCP, and purged. Every democratic party lost its independence. Those who expressed views slightly diverging from the party line in schools, governmental agencies, and businesses were quickly, within a matter of months, branded as rightists. This included many of China’s most prominent scientists, writers, scholars, and even CCP cadres, such as Zhu Rongji, who later became Premier during the post-Mao reform era. Rightists were sent to prisons, labor camps, and other re-education venues, with some being dismissed from public service (all academic positions were in this category). Rightists with particularly high social status, such as the leaders of the democratic parties and esteemed professors, were, despite being spared labor reform, still stripped of their publishing and teaching rights, and some were even subjected to de facto house arrest.

According to the CCP’s Central Committee Document No. 55 of 1978, a total of 550,000 intellectuals were purged as rightists during the ARM, which accounted for 5.7 percent of the national cadres (a category that included teachers and researchers, as all schools and research institutions were nationalized) at the time (Hu, Z., Reference Hu2013). However, many historians estimate that the actual number of people who were categorized as various types of rightists and purged was between 2.01 million and 3.17 million. The purged rightists ranged in age from primary school students to centenarian imams and monks (Shen, Reference Shen2017, pp. 7–12).

It is worth noting that by the standards of developed countries, China had fewer than 240,000 engineers in 1956, and even fewer intellectuals in business, finance, science, and the humanities (Orleans, Reference Orleans1961, pp. 68–69, 74–75). By China’s standards of the time, the total number of intellectuals including primary school teachers and others with college or higher levels of education (excluding students) was about 5.5 million (Li, Reference Li2008). However, the ARM cast a wider net, targeting high school and university students as well as educated cadres in factories and the military. Notably impacted students included Lin Zhao, a Peking University student who was brutally tortured in prison and eventually executed during the Cultural Revolution, and Lin Xiling, a student from Renmin University who was imprisoned until after the Cultural Revolution when she was released and sought refuge in France.

One of the leading goals of the ARM was to completely eradicate the concept of the rule of law. Despite the lack of a tradition of rule of law within China’s institutional genes, the number of intellectuals advocating for this principle had been increasing since the late nineteenth century, including many who equated the Soviet judicial system with the rule of law. In the ARM, all advocates of the rule of law, encompassing law professors, judicial workers, party cadres, and other intellectuals, including advocates of a Soviet-style judicial system, were labeled rightists and purged.

In 1958, in the heat of the Anti-Rightist Movement, the CCP Central Committee denounced the entire party group in the Ministry of Justice as an anti-party group opposing the dictatorship of the proletariat and subsequently disbanded it. A substantial number of judges and lawyers were purged, even without expressing any distinct viewpoints (Xiong, Reference Xiong2003). Further deepening the impact of the purge on legal education and practice, all law schools were ordered to reduce enrolments, and universities ceased offering mandatory courses on constitutional law. The legislative process was also brought to a standstill, leaving China with essentially no functional laws beyond the constitution and marriage law for an extended period. It was not until the post-Mao era of reform that new legal frameworks, such as the Criminal Law and Civil Law, were drafted and passed.

The ARM was an extension of the Yan’an Rectification. If the Yan’an Rectification had been about transforming the CCP from an appendage of the Comintern into a fully independent totalitarian party, the ARM went a step further by cementing the ideological underpinnings of totalitarianism throughout China. The ARM’s wide-reaching purge not only stifled dissent among intellectuals and party cadres but it also instilled a culture of anticipatory obedience, with people learning to predict and align themselves with the party leader’s intentions.

After the ARM, Liu Shaoqi proclaimed that party members ought to become “compliant tools” or “screws” (Liu, Reference Liu1958). From that point onwards, students were educated to be either critical of or, at the very least, oblivious to individual rights and interests, basic civil liberties, constitutional principles, and the principles of checks and balances of power. The “role models” held up by the party have typically been individuals who devoted themselves to serving the needs of the party and its top leadership. The ARM’s purge not only led to individuals ceasing to express divergent political views but more devastatingly, many intellectuals even started aiding the CCP in indoctrinating the younger generations. As a result, China rapidly transformed into a fully-fledged totalitarian state.

12.2.1 Growth versus Power

Promoting rapid economic growth is a common feature of communist totalitarian regimes all over the world as it is the basis for the legitimacy of such regimes. Communist ideology asserts that superior systems grow faster. Achieving rapid economic growth that catches up with, and surpasses, developed capitalist nations is key to validating the superiority of socialism, which is characterized by a one-party rule, thus legitimizing such a totalitarian dictatorship. Central planning was formulated, from the Soviet Union to China, on the principle of maximizing economic growth at any cost, including lives. Moreover, both the CPSU and the CCP viewed economic power as the key to ensuring the survival of their respective regimes. The well-known saying of Lenin and Stalin, “those who fall behind get beaten,”³ has been passed on to the CCP as a cornerstone of its ideology for generations.

The pace of development was also relevant to the power struggle between the CCP and the CPSU for the leadership of the world communist movement. Following the Marxist principle regarding institutional superiority, a more superior totalitarian regime should also grow faster than others. If China’s system were superior to that of the Soviet Union, China should have developed at a faster pace, enabling the CCP to supplant the CPSU as the leader of the world communist movement. Indeed, as early as 1956, Mao had begun discussing reforms to the system, which were copied wholesale from the Soviet Union. He stressed that:

In November 1957, not long after claiming to bury capitalism by rapid growth, Khrushchev proposed, at the Communist and Workers’ Party Conference in Moscow, the goal of the Soviet Union to overtake the United States in fifteen years.⁴ At the same conference, Mao announced that the East wind of socialism would overwhelm the West wind of capitalism, setting a goal for China to catch up with Britain in fifteen years (Mao, Reference Mao1992a, vol. 6, pp. 625–647). Upon returning from Moscow, Mao promptly launched the GLF.

Although economic growth is very important for totalitarian systems, power and the ruling structure that ensure it are always of primary importance. The GLF was no exception. In addition to speeding up development, the initiative of the GLF aimed at refining the CCP’s governance structures, strengthening the leader’s power, and creating the capacity to overtake leadership from Moscow in the global communist movement.

Institutional changes are inseparable from existing institutional genes. Under the influence of China’s institutional genes, before the full-scale centralization in 1950, the CCP had developed a federal-like governance structure of a totalitarian system with multiple local power bases called “liberated areas.” Local forces have always been a significant part of the power base of the CCP since the establishment of the Chinese Soviet (see Chapter 11), constituting the greatest difference between the CCP regime and the Soviet Union in institutional structure. Under the so-called “Large Area System,” each large area enjoyed substantial autonomy in the newly founded PRC. Later, the CCP centralized power on a massive scale, abandoning the Large Area System and weakening local authority. This was accepted by most of the party’s top local leaders, both from a historical perspective – in terms of building a new imperial dynasty – and in light of comprehensive Sovietization. However, in the implementation of Sovietization, the central ministries took all the resources and power from local governments, leading to discontent among local officials and affecting their motivation.

Furthermore, the excess concentration of power in central ministries and the substantial diminution of local authority rendered the supreme leader vulnerable to the influence of these central ministries. The more resources these ministries controlled, and the stronger they became, the greater their capacity to counterbalance the supreme leader’s power. Conversely, when local power was weak, transferring extensive authority to the local level would diminish the power of the central ministries, enhancing the supreme leader’s political influence.

12.2.2 A Fusion of Marx and Qin Shi Huang

Mao’s specific idea about reforming the Soviet totalitarian system can be traced back to the institutional genes of the Chinese imperial system. In promoting the GLF, Mao proclaimed himself, in a speech at the 1958 Beidaihe Conference, as a fusion of Marx and Qin Shi Huang. Here, “Marx” represented imported communist totalitarianism while “Qin Shi Huang” referred to the Chinese imperial system, particularly its junxian system established in the Qin dynasty (see Chapter 4). Mao subsequently repeated this statement several times in two decades, reflecting the importance to him of this self-depiction. During the CR, he made it even clearer that China had always lived under the Qin system up to the present (“Qin still exists”; Wang, Reference Wang1988, p. 470). The way of ruling the vast empire under the junxian system was to delegate most of the administrative power to centrally appointed local bureaucrats, whereas the emperor had the final say on major political, military (except for during a few periods), and personnel matters, backed by his monopolistic power on sovereignty and land title (ultimate control rights) (see Chapter 4).

Since China’s existing totalitarian system was essentially co-established with the CPSU, and most CCP cadres and pro-communist intellectuals were trained in classic communist totalitarianism, a purging of Soviet-style governance thinking was necessary. Thus, the GLF began with an ideological attack on all viewpoints that did not align with Mao’s doctrine. This marked the prelude of the GLF and involved critiquing the ideology and governance structures of a Soviet-type totalitarian system, which paved the way for the establishment of totalitarianism with Chinese characteristics. This critique further weakened the already fragile checks and balances within the party and intensified the supreme leader’s political power, guaranteeing his absolute control over both the Central Committee’s members and the ideological direction.

12.2.3 Initiating the GLF

On the surface, the GLF appeared to be a mass movement driven by competing local authorities. However, its essence was the dismantling of the Soviet-type centrally planned system and its replacement with a regionally decentralized totalitarian system. This new governance structure required the delegation of substantial authority to the local level, particularly in terms of executive and managerial powers as well as control over local resources. As a result of this change, the power of the central ministries was significantly diluted. Moreover, during the GLF, an entirely new grassroots system, the People’s Commune, distinct from any Soviet enterprise, was created.

Mao initiated the GLF shortly after his return from Moscow in January 1958. He convened a Central Committee meeting, in which Zhou Enlai was criticized by Mao for his conservatism.⁵ Two months later, at the Central Committee Work Conference, Mao systematically criticized the operating mechanisms of the Soviet system and the party leaders who followed these mechanisms. He said that the rules and regulations of the Soviet Union were deadly and criticized those who questioned the GLF. His tone in criticizing Zhou’s conservatism became even more severe, asserting that Zhou was “only 50 meters away from being a rightist.” At the same time, Mao’s cult of personality was elevated to new heights. At the same meeting, the head of the Shanghai CCP said, “We should believe in the Chairman to the extent of superstition and obey him to the extent of blind obedience.”⁶

The 2nd Session of the CCP’s 8th Congress in May 1958 was a pivotal turning point for the GLF. The premier and vice-premiers of the State Council in charge of the economy, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and Bo Yibo, were all forced to self-criticize during that meeting to clear the way for the full launch of the GLF. Immediately afterwards, the Central Committee set up several working groups directly under the Politburo and Secretariat. These groups effectively took over the tasks of the State Council, thereby sidelining the Soviet-style central planning bureaucracy of the Planning Commission and various ministries under the State Council (Xin, Reference Xin2006, pp. 138–141). These structural and personnel changes profoundly influenced both the GLF and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, marking the beginning of a reconfiguration of China’s totalitarian system.

The dissolution of central planning and the decentralization of power were the first institutional changes during the GLF. The totalitarian system, which was originally managed through top-down central planning coordinated by the State Planning Commission, was replaced by a system dominated by regional management and regional competition. One key aspect of this decentralization was the devolution of corporate jurisdiction, which began immediately after the 2nd Session of the CCP’s 8th Congress. A few months later, by the end of 1958, the industrial output of enterprises directly under central government control only accounted for 13.8 percent of the country’s total industrial output. By 1959, 88 percent of central government-managed enterprises had been devolved to different local authorities (Wu, Reference Wu2010, pp. 38–41). Local party-state authorities were empowered to adjust industrial and agricultural production targets, manage construction and investment, regulate the use of materials, and allocate a certain percentage of surplus products. Overall, this effort made each local economy more “self-contained,” which was another feature distinguishing it from the Soviet model.

12.2.4 Regional Experimentation and Regional Competition: Mechanisms for Creating the People’s Communes

The totalitarian party exerts control over every aspect of society, drawing all elements within the scope of the party-state bureaucracy. As such, the totalitarian party-state bureaucracy is the most extensive and comprehensive form of bureaucracy human society has ever seen. All bureaucracies rely on a top-down chain of command. Due to the asymmetry of power and resource allocations along this chain, as well as the information asymmetry between different levels, all bureaucracies grapple with significant incentive problems. The longer the command chain, the more pronounced these problems become.

In the locally administered totalitarian system that evolved under the CCP, a high degree of political, ideological, and personnel centralization was maintained while other powers and resources were decentralized, thereby fostering competition among regions (as was the case in the liberated areas or large administrative regions). This regional competition motivated CCP bureaucrats to proactively take initiatives like land reform, civil war, and other campaigns, and to meet or exceed central government goals. In this way, the CCP regime largely mitigated the severe incentive problems typically encountered within any large-scale bureaucracy.

The full-scale Sovietization process in the 1950s replaced the tradition of federal-like totalitarianism with a top-down chain of command encompassing all specific operations. However, the capabilities of central planners are inherently limited, and incentive issues are inherently severe, making it difficult to fulfill the overarching but abstract directives of the supreme leader through centralized command orders.

With the advent of the GLF, the dismantling of the top-down command chain characteristic of the Soviet-style central plan led to the revival of local governments as competitive units. As had been the case in CCP history, the supreme leader could stimulate regional competition, expecting local leaders to devise their own solutions in response to his calls. In addition, the superiors could also disseminate more successful solutions from one region to others, creating a scenario reminiscent of regional experiments.

For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to the competition among regions to fulfill the leader’s directives as “regional competition” from here on. Concurrently, the proactive efforts by these regions to find their own methods of realizing the leader’s directives will be referred to as “regional experiments.”

The large-scale decentralization of power and the devolution of resources laid the foundation for economic growth in the Chinese way. The competition for economic growth among provinces, cities, and counties led to an average annual growth of 39.5 percent in fixed asset investments from 1958 to 1960. The number of employees in state-owned enterprises increased by 84.9 percent and 143.5 percent in 1958–1959 and 1959–1960, respectively, and the urban population across the country rose by over 30 percent (Wu, Reference Wu2010, p. 42).

However, China at that time was primarily an agricultural economy. Therefore, investment was heavily reliant on the surplus generated by agriculture, while labor input into industry was dependent on labor transferred from agriculture. As such, agricultural development was the determining factor not only for industrialization but for the entire economy. In order to secure resources for industrialization, the Soviet Union created government-controlled collective farms during the first five-year plan, enabling the government to squeeze as much funding and manpower out of the farms as possible, leading to the infamous Great Famine (see Chapter 8).

The CCP wanted to take an even more ambitious path in collectivizing agriculture than the Soviet Union. During the GLF, a new system called People’s Communes was created through a process of regional experimentation and regional competition. The new system was named “Commune” after the Paris Commune, which, according to Marxist-Leninist ideology, came closer to communism than the Soviet collective farms. Indeed, as early as 1932, the Chinese Soviet Central Government annnounced in its official newspaper that “the Chinese proletariat and peasantry, having inherited the heroic spirit of both the Paris Commune and the worker struggles of the Soviet Union, … have established the first Soviet Republic in the East. They will continue to strive to complete the Chinese revolution and fight for the realization of the Paris Commune” (Central Archives, 2016, p. 238).

Since 1954, the CCP had been promoting the collectivization of agriculture, drawing on the model of the Soviet collective farms as a means to erode the private land rights of peasants that the constitution claimed to protect. These collectives had steadily expanded in scale ever since. However, Mao was keen on transitioning to communism more rapidly than the Soviet Union. He sought to establish a grassroots system in China that was more closely aligned with communist ideals. Shortly after returning from Moscow in early 1958, Mao discussed the idea of creating communes and integrating political and communal functions in the rural areas. He had these discussions with Chen Boda, his secretary and the CCP’s leading propagandist, as well as with Liu Shaoqi, the president of the PRC (Li, Reference Li1988, p. 8). Following his directives, the Politburo officially issued a call in March of that year, encouraging local party-state entities to try out the new system.

Encouraging local governments to compete in pioneering new institutional reform experiments, such as communes, sets the CCP operations apart from those of the CPSU. This approach allows the CCP to operate more adaptively because local trials can help the party learn about local conditions and design concrete policies. Furthermore, fostering regional competition to create a model that could be replicated nationwide may, under certain conditions, better address incentive issues than relying solely on bureaucratic orders.

Shortly after the Central Committee issued its call for creating communes, the first People’s Commune was established in Chayashan town, Henan Province, named Chayashan Satellite People’s Commune. The commune was named “Satellite” to draw a parallel with the first human-made satellite launched by the Soviet Union just six months prior – representing institutional innovation, the other representing technological innovation. Henan Province immediately promoted this experiment on a large scale. Between April and August, more than 99 percent of rural households in the province were incorporated into more than 1,300 newly founded People’s Communes.

In August, Mao visited the People’s Commune near Chayashan and expressed his praise: “People’s Communes are good.” The following month, Hongqi (Red Flag), the leading magazine run by the Propaganda Department of CCP Central Committee, published the Preliminary Charter for the Chayashan Satellite People’s Commune. This charter, revised by Mao, became the official model for People’s Communes nationwide. It stipulated that private ownership was to be replaced by so-called collective ownership in the sense that all means of production belonged to the commune and would be distributed to its members following a system of wages and rations.

To speed up the establishment of the commune system nationwide, the CCP Central Committee organized 300,000 people from across the country to visit Chayashan between July and September, aiming to promote its experiment. In October, the Central Committee issued the Resolution on the Nationwide Establishment of People’s Communes in the Rural Areas, encouraging local governments to compete and experiment with various methods for organizing People’s Communes, including different modes of production and collective living (Xin, Reference Xin2006, pp. 149–153).

By design, the CCP’s commune system was intended to be distinctively different from the collective farms of the Soviet Union, which were party-controlled agricultural collectives. Unlike the Soviet collective farms, a People’s Commune was intended to function as a small, comprehensive basic unit or cell within a totalitarian society. The goal was for each commune to be an economically self-sufficient grassroots unit, following a utopian communist model.

In July 1958, Chen Boda publicly unveiled Mao’s comprehensive strategy for reconfiguring Chinese society, proclaiming that industry, agriculture, commerce, culture, education, and the militia “should gradually and sequentially … be consolidated into large communes, which will become the fundamental units of Chinese society.” From their inception, each commune established dozens, even hundreds, of industrial enterprises, termed “commune and brigade enterprises,” which laid the groundwork for the township and village enterprises of the later post-Mao reform period. Following some substantial setbacks and contentious debates, the CCP, at its 1959 Lushan Conference, officially characterized the People’s Commune as an organization that was “larger and more public (yida ergong 一大二公),” meaning it had “integrated political and social functions” and facilitated a “five-in-one” integration of industry, agriculture, commerce, culture-and-education, and the militia (Li, Reference Li1988, p. 90).

The key mechanism that drove millions of party-state cadres to participate fervently in the GLF movement was interregional competition. During that period, the substance of this competition was political, centered around the implementation of Mao’s party line, with the promised performance of the local economy serving as an essential part of demonstrating loyalty and implementation. Penalties for falling short in this competition were extremely severe and promotions often defied the norm. As the competition intensified, the behavior of party and government officials quickly escalated to a frenzy.

The extremely high-powered incentives ingrained in the multilevel regional competition propelled Henan to become the first province to establish a People’s Commune and to universalize the People’s Commune system. In early 1958, Pan Fusheng, the First Secretary of the Hunan CCP Committee, faced criticism for his hesitation about the GLF. His agricultural development plan was denounced as a “program for developing capitalism” and he was branded a right-leaning opportunist. In addition, 200,000 local cadres who followed Pan were labeled “Pan Fusheng Jr.s,” creating a climate of fear in the province.

At the same time, the Central Committee lauded the provincial governor, Wu Zhipu, who actively backed and boldly boasted about the GLF, as a model for the nation. It also promoted a group of “leftists,” represented by the Secretary of the Xinyang Party Committee, Lu Xianwen, to lead the GLF in Henan (Xin, Reference Xin2006, pp. 143–144). The ruthless penalties against “rightist” cadres and the rapid promotion of “leftists” turned Henan Province into the GLF’s vanguard. Following the CCP Central Committee’s promotion and instructions, other provinces quickly began to compete with each other to replicate Henan’s model.

12.2.5 The Great Famine: Regional Competition and Catastrophe

A fundamental incentive mechanism that drove the GLF was regional competition. For regional competition to provide effective incentives, it must meet two conditions. First, its competition objectives must be single-item indicators. Second, there must be proper institutional arrangements to ensure the credibility of the data of the single-item indicators used as competition objectives. Only when both of these two conditions are satisfied can effective competition between regions be organized, which rewards the winners and punishes the losers. Regarding the economy, the GLF proposed single-item guiding principles for both agriculture and industry: “The key link of agriculture is grain and the key link of industry is steel.” Thus, the GLF met the first condition.

However, the GLF violated the second basic condition. It not only eliminated the market, thereby destroying a primary source of information, but it also destroyed the remaining system of checks and balances and undermined information verifications within the bureaucratic system, creating conditions conducive to fabrication and exaggeration. For pushing forward Mao’s party line, while relatively honest cadres were excoriated, those who misrepresented and exaggerated their performance ascended swiftly. These distorted incentives, amplified by the powerful mechanism of regional competition, turned the GLF into a boastful race and a disaster-making machine.

Since its establishment, the newly created People’s Communes, an institutional innovation, had to showcase their superior performance in terms of per-unit-area grain yields. Indeed, the Chayashan Satellite People’s Commune claimed a wheat yield of 3,800 jin (one jin equals half a kilogram) per mu (one mu roughly equals one-sixth of an acre) – a figure eight to nine times the typical yield of that time (Xin, Reference Xin2006, pp. 149–153). Following the model commune, in the race to establish People’s Communes, regions also competed to fabricate per-unit yields. As regions vied to broadcast inflated figures in the media, yields escalated to astonishing heights. On June 16, the China Youth Daily published an article by the renowned scientist Qian Xuesen, providing scientific justification for the extraordinarily high yields publicized daily in the media. He argued that a slight improvement in the efficiency of photosynthesis could result in yields “more than twenty times the two thousand-plus jin per year!” Armed with such “scientific evidence,” regions became bolder in their falsifications. The People’s Daily reported on July 23 that the wheat yield of the Heping Agricultural Cooperative in Xiping County, Henan Province, was 7,320 jin per mu, and on September 18, it reported a mid-season rice yield of 130,434.14 jin per mu from the Huanjiang Red Flag People’s Commune in Guangxi Province.

It was Stalin, who invented the principle of prioritizing heavy industry, particularly the steel industry, to speed up the economic growth of a socialist economy and to subsidize industry with agriculture. However, Mao took it to an even more extreme level. The notion of focusing on grain in agriculture aimed at extracting as many resources as possible from agriculture to develop industry. The higher the per-unit yield claimed by a local government, the more resources that could be extracted from its agricultural sector. However, with the government forcibly removing excessive quantities of grain from the countryside based on ridiculously exaggerated figures, the basic life of rural people was severely threatened. To survive, some peasants, and even grassroots CCP party-state cadres, found ways to secretly hoard food and seeds. In response to this passive resistance, the CCP launched a large-scale “anti-concealment” campaign.

Reserving basic quantities of food and seeds was a matter of life and death for peasants and thus the anti-concealment campaign directly conflicted with the fundamental interests of all peasants. The campaign was able to proceed due to the omnipresent party organization and the newly established grassroots totalitarian units – the People’s Communes. Communes controlled all property rights, resources, and decision-making over all political and economic activities in the countryside, even basic family and personal activities. By forcing all peasants to dine in public canteens, communes eliminated individual family kitchens, making it difficult for them to privately store food.

Henan Province as the first to establish and popularize People’s Communes was also the first to promote the anti-concealment campaign, once again serving as a model for the nation. The CCP provincial committee first put pressure on the party leaders of cities and counties within the province, requiring them to self-report the quantity of grain procured in their respective jurisdictions. This so-called grain procurement was mandatory, conflated with the levying of agricultural taxes. Since the early 1950s, the government had monopolized the purchase and sale of grain through the implementation of a policy of “unified purchase and sale” and the market had been almost completely eliminated since the GLF. The government’s mass, compulsory grain procurement at officially set prices amounted to imposing a massive and irresistible tax-in-kind. At a provincial party committee meeting, the party secretary stated, “We have to work hard to do well in grain procurement … brutally fighting against and ruthlessly attacking any … hesitation, or concealment” (quoted in Xin, Reference Xin2006, p. 180). Furthermore, regions that self-reported high procurement figures were used to pressure those that reported lower numbers, creating competition between regions and forcing them to constantly inflate their self-reported figures.

This pressure was then passed down through the hierarchy to the grassroots level. The Chayashan People’s Commune held struggle meetings similar to those during the land reform to combat landlords, where they harshly criticized and even tortured some brigade cadres who protected peasants’ interests, forcing them to disclose information about hidden grain. It created an atmosphere of fear, threatening all other grassroots cadres and peasants to voluntarily surrender their hidden grain. And it was announced that those who took the initiative to reveal the hidden grain could keep half of what was recovered and would be recognized as paragons of the anti-concealment campaign. Under such a strong incentive mechanism, many people confessed, resulting in numerous false reports of concealed production. Those false concealment figures were then reported through the party bureaucracy at all levels as achievements of the anti-concealment campaign, leading the central government to believe that the concealment problem was extremely serious, thus further fueling the campaign (Xin, Reference Xin2006, pp. 180–183).

The policies of the GLF were more absurd than those of Stalin so that even the CPSU sharply criticized the CCP, fueling a split among the two leading communist entities. However, from a social science perspective or a standpoint of rational reasoning, how could Mao, who came from a rural background, be so “duped” about grain yields? Why would Mao, who was well aware of incentive problems, attack honest subordinates while encouraging those who falsified their achievements? The key to addressing these issues is that as the supreme leader of the CCP, Mao’s primary concern was not with the yields (whether grain or steel) or the economy per se but rather with power and his political campaigns. Those who fabricated achievements were the primary proponents of the campaign that would have been curtailed by honesty. So, even though it was known that fictitious performance would distort information, the most zealous and insincere “revolutionary trailblazers” were rewarded for promoting the campaign. This mechanism has been repeated throughout the CCP’s history, including during the anti-AB campaign in the Jinggang Mountains and the Yan’an Rectification (see Chapter 10), as well as the nationwide Land Reform movement (see Chapter 11).

Mao’s way of handling the famine further confirms his priority. A major crisis occurred in the first year of the GLF because of the massive exaggeration of grain production and the massive drive against the concealment of production throughout the country. In the spring of 1959, the State Council reported famines in fifteen provinces, affecting an estimated 25.17 million people (Xin, Reference Xin2006, p. 185). On receiving that report, Mao wrote to Zhou demanding that the report be “dispatched by plane to the first secretaries of the provincial committees in each of the fifteen provinces, asking them to quickly address the situation to save 25.17 million people from a temporary (two-month) emergency … The document should be titled The Major Issue of 25.17 Million People without Food in 15 Provinces” (Mao, Reference Mao1993, vol. 8, p. 209).

Faced with severe economic challenges and humanitarian disasters, Mao convened an expanded meeting of the CCP Politburo, known as the Lushan Conference, in July 1959. The original intention of the meeting was to find solutions. However, when several high-ranking leaders, including then Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, who had been loyal to Mao since the Jinggang Mountain era, revealed the severity of the famine caused by the GLF, Mao perceived this as a challenge to his authority. In response, he launched the Anti-Rightist Opportunist Movement, branding all those who spoke out about the famine as anti-party factions. Rather than striving to rectify the disaster caused by the GLF, the meeting transformed adherence to its policies into a so-called party line struggle. High-level CCP leaders who sought to address the issues were purged as anti-party cliques and other leading cadres who attempted to rectify the problems were labeled as right-wing opportunists and punished (Xin, Reference Xin2006, pp. 185–211; Li, Reference Li1988, pp. 29–401). Subsequently, Mao’s personality cult reached new heights, driven by the efforts of new Defense Minister Lin Biao, Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, and others.

In a totalitarian system, the powers and resources of the entire society are concentrated in the hands of a very few top leaders, who are obligated to submit to the supreme leader. This power structure dictates that power struggles at the top are not only vicious but also frequent. Even slight differences in strategy or technical issues often evolve into power struggles. The brutal struggles lead to the ruthless suppression of genuine information, making the system not only prone to errors but also difficult to correct when errors occur, leading to disasters. The Anti-Rightist purge during and after the Lushan Conference magnified the chaos caused by the GLF and the People’s Communes, leading to an unprecedented famine that claimed the lives of approximately 40 million people over three years.⁷

Located in the Xinyang region of Henan Province, the trailblazing People’s Commune at Chayashan was one of the worst affected regions in China. According to the recollections of the Deputy Secretary of the CCP Committee in Suiping County, a founder of the Commune,

The famine caused by the GLF brought China’s economy to the brink of collapse. In 1961, the 9th Plenary Session of the CCP’s 8th Congress was forced to supplement the GLF policy with a new strategy of “adjustment, consolidation, enrichment, and improvement.” This new policy aimed to consolidate the achievements of the GLF, the essence of which was the RADT institution, including the People’s Communes.

Nonetheless, rescuing the Chinese economy from the great famine was an inescapable issue. To address this challenge, in 1962 the CCP convened an unprecedentedly large conference. Known historically as the 7,000 Cadres Conference, this expanded Central Committee meeting included all leading cadres at the county level and above throughout the country. At the meeting, Mao acknowledged that problems had arisen during the implementation of the GLF and announced that he would step back from daily government and party work to focus solely on strategic issues. The daily tasks would be presided over by state Chairman Liu Shaoqi and Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping.

Interestingly, during the CR, Liu, Deng, and almost all of the 7,000 CCP cadres who attended this meeting were purged. Many scholars have identified this meeting as a key event that played a significant role in igniting the CR. This interpretation certainly has merit but a more fundamental factor underlying these events lies in the nature of the communist totalitarian institution. First, Mao himself, his power, and the power structure of the system were products of this institution. Second, the motivation for the CR went beyond power struggles; it was directly related to consolidating and improving the newly created RADT institution. Moreover, the CR was both launched and carried out based on the existing RADT system, albeit a preliminary version.

12.3.1 Regional Competition and Regional Experimentation under a Fanatic Personality Cult

From an institutional evolutionary perspective, the GLF and the CR represent two successive phases in transforming China’s totalitarian regime from a classic one into RADT. Both movements relied on the entire population’s fanatical participation, which ended in catastrope for the population. The question to be addressed is, what kind of force drove an entire population to engage in actions leading to their own detriment? What were their motivations? This question is particularly acute regarding the CR, as it was more predominantly a top-down “revolution” provoked by the cult of personality, with the masses everywhere engaged in smashing the “old” system. New power structures and institutions were then created through regional experimentation and propagated by regional competition.

To address this issue, it is crucial to first examine a peculiar phenomenon: the elevation of Mao’s personality cult to new heights after the devastation caused by the GLF. This phenomenon is itself a byproduct of totalitarianism. Within such a system, the supreme leader, by controlling the party, dominates all aspects of power and resources in society, deciding the fate, including life and death, of everyone, including those at the top. Therefore, seizing control of the party and becoming the supreme leader is a life-or-death struggle.

In a totalitarian regime, the more disasters a leader incurs, the more the leader needs to guard his power by all means and with all his strength. Additionally, a disaster presents an ideal opportunity for political opportunists to ardently support the leader by promoting a cult of personality and attacking any political rivals. This dynamic results in a paradoxical situation where the leader’s power and cult of personality can grow even amidst widespread societal upheaval and disaster.

Indeed, following the GLF, all the top leaders, notably Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, and Chen Boda, collectively elevated the cult of Mao’s personality to unprecedented heights. Alongside endorsing Mao’s initiatives, they vigorously promoted class struggle and proletarian dictatorship, while opposing what they termed “Soviet revisionism.” Their focus at that time revolved around “preventing the emergence of revisionism and peaceful evolution,” “cultivating successors to the cause of communism,” and “vigorously implementing the class line.” The leaders aimed to maintain the revolutionary fervor and communist ideology in the wake of the societal disruptions caused by the GLF.

As a specific measure, in 1963, Mao proposed launching the Four Cleanups campaign, aiming to clean up politics, the economy, organizations, and ideology everywhere in order to “prevent the emergence of revisionism and peaceful evolution.” In retrospect, this campaign was a precursor to the CR.

Liu Shaoqi and his wife Wang Guangmei took the initiative to promote and implement this by introducing the concept of dispatching work groups to the People’s Communes and enterprises to engage in class struggle. The work groups, composed of members dispatched from party-state organs and universities, focused on targeting so-called class enemies and searching for evidence of their sabotage. Consequently, any sabotage discovered was deemed to be the root cause of the disasters and troubles that occurred in the People’s Communes.

The methodology that Liu and Wang invented in this campaign was popularized throughout the party with Mao’s strong support. This modus operandi carried over into the CR. In the early stages of the CR, when Liu was responsible for leadership, he again dispatched work groups to universities and high schools to incite class struggle and suppress “reactionary” teachers and students.

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Lin Biao transformed the People’s Liberation Army into a propaganda machine that amplified the cult of personality in innovative ways. Lin touted Mao Zedong Thought as the pinnacle of contemporary Marxism-Leninism and widely distributed The Little Red Book (officially titled Quotations from Chairman Mao), initially within the military and later to the general population. Subsequently, Mao and the CCP urged the entire nation to emulate the PLA, the core of which was to promote Mao’s personality cult just as the PLA had done.

Years of indoctrination escalated the ideologies of class struggle and anti-revisionism to unprecedented levels within the party, the military, and the populace. Loyalty to the leader was heightened to a state of religious zealotry, resulting in harsh punishment for anyone deemed insufficiently loyal. This pervasive fanaticism laid the social groundwork for the initiation of the CR.

12.3.2 The Privileged Class and the Red Guard Movement

The initial aim of the CR was to dismantle the system imported from the Soviet Union, that is to say, the CCP’s own party-state bureaucracy. For “smashing the old world,” it was essential to establish pioneering organizations to spearhead the CR and to mobilize the masses. The Red Guards, a product of the totalitarian system, fulfilled this role. The Red Guards’ worship of their leader, use of violence, and much of their attire bore a striking resemblance to the Nazi Stormtroopers.

The emergence of the Red Guards was primarily underpinned by the privileged class within the totalitarian system, the party’s system for cultivating successors to the communist cause, and the class line doctrine. Despite the CCP’s official assertion that the “succession issue” was a key lesson learned from the CPSU aimed at preventing the emergence of revisionism in China, in reality, it fundamentally revolved around the distribution of power among generations of elites. This issue bore close ties to the institutional genes inherited from China’s imperial system.

In the imperial tradition, descendants of meritorious generals who played pivotal roles in the change of dynasty could inherit a portion of their ancestors’ privileges. This was not only an incentive to encourage generals to topple the old and to contribute to the new dynasty but it also formed an integral part of the power structure of the new dynasty.

Most senior members of the CCP viewed the establishment of a “revolutionary regime” as similar to the founding of a new dynasty, with the new titles being purely nominal. To them, “Marxism-Leninism” was seen as comparable to the names given to the rebellions that led to a change in dynasty, such as the Society of God Worshippers or the White Lotus. Additionally, the strict organizational discipline of a totalitarian party strongly echoes the secret societies (see Chapter 10), in which hierarchy and privilege were the norm.

A majority of senior CCP officials, especially those with military backgrounds, inherently subscribed to the principle of inherited privilege, encapsulated in the saying, “the father conquers, the son rules.” After Mao raised the issue of succession, many senior CCP officials passed on this concept of traditionally inherited privilege to their children, albeit cloaked in the language of Marxism-Leninism. In fact, when the CCP criticized the CPSU for neglecting the issue of succession in the 1960s, it was underscoring the differences in the institutional genes between China and Russia.

As the CCP’s criticism of the CPSU reached its peak in 1964, Mao formally introduced the issue of cultivating successors at a Central Committee Work Conference as a preventive measure against the emergence of revisionism in China. Subsequently, the party’s Organization Department, in tandem with other agencies, arranged for the systematic cultivation of successors for leadership positions across all party-state institutions (Xu, Reference Xu2014). The Organization Department functioned in a manner similar to the bureaucratic nomination system in Imperial China.

Beyond formal bureaucratic arrangements, Mao was more invested in the power consciousness and class consciousness among the offspring of senior cadres, as they were the ones poised to inherit the party’s core powers. Moreover, Mao held the belief that real power was secured through struggle, not bureaucratic appointments.

In 1964, Mao, through a conversation with his niece Wang Hairong, conveyed a message urging the offspring of senior cadres to rebel. He said, “We are very concerned about our cadres’ children … what’s there to fear, … go back and take the lead in rebellion … the student you mentioned may accomplish more than you [as] he dares to defy the school’s system.”⁸ Mao further advised his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, to study the “five conditions for a successor,” the first of them being Marxism-Leninism, and said,

With Mao’s guidance or tacit consent, the transcripts of these conversations were secretly circulated among the offspring of senior cadres on the eve of the CR and became one of the important factors in stimulating the offspring to become vanguards and lead the destruction of the offspring CCP order.

Another pivotal message that stirred the power consciousness of the offspring of senior cadres in the early stages of the CR was delivered by Lin Biao at an enlarged Politburo meeting on May 18, 1966. He clarified that the central issue of the CR was political power. He stated that, “With political power, … you have everything. Without it, you lose everything…. We must always be mindful of political power…. [political power] is a tool for one class to oppress another…. political power is the power to suppress.” He also declared that, “Every word of Chairman Mao’s is the truth; one sentence of his surpasses ten thousand of ours … His words are the guidelines for our actions. Whoever opposes him will be condemned by the entire party and the entire country.”¹⁰

In that revolutionary era, dominated by Mao Zedong Thought, this speech was a confidential document reserved only for the upper echelons. The Red Guards, mainly composed of the offspring of senior cadres, were the sole group privileged enough to access this unvarnished theory of power. They understood that the party’s revolution was fundamentally about the pursuit of political power. This revelation led the Red Guards to intertwine their fanatic personal worship of Mao with their pursuit of power and suppression of class enemies. Consequently, they persecuted students, teachers, and anyone deemed to have reactionary class origins, both on and off campuses, all under the guise of revolution and for the ultimate objective of seizing power.

The CR was initiated as a mass movement, prompting students to dismantle the party-state apparatus within the school system and target official propaganda agencies perceived to oppose Mao’s ideology. Eventually, the wider masses were galvanized to destabilize the basic order of society. Therefore, instigating this mass movement was a key step. The earliest precursors of the CR were the self-organized Red Guard groups, formed spontaneously and covertly by the offspring of senior cadres from Tsinghua High School, Peking University High School, and other elite high schools in Beijing.¹¹ Much like the inception of the People’s Communes, the Red Guard groups were created by the masses in response to the call of the supreme leader. With a pledge to defend Chairman Mao with their lives through rebellion, the Red Guards declared, “Whoever opposes Chairman Mao shall be brought down.”

However, no totalitarian system permits the existence of organizations independent of the totalitarian party. This is particularly true for the Red Guards, who openly advocated rebellion against the party-state apparatus. Drawing their experiences from the Anti-Rightist and Four Cleanups campaigns, the CR work groups sent to the schools by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping identified the Red Guards as rightist-style counterrevolutionary organizations and suppressed them accordingly. In contrast to Liu and Deng, Mao staunchly supported the Red Guards and welcomed millions of them in a series of rallies on Tiananmen Square. This led to a nationwide rush to establish Red Guard organizations in schools, effectively paralyzing the country’s education system.

When the top leaders were divided, the personality cult not only determined whom the masses would follow but also enabled the supreme leader to leverage the cult to achieve his ambitions. As the personality cult reached a feverish climax, Mao, along with figures like Kang Sheng and Jiang Qing, incited the Red Guards to “take up arms (yao wu)” and employ “violent action” against the reactionary classes. Such incitement transformed many Red Guards into vicious thugs who acted with extreme brutality.

The fanatic brutality of the Red Guards in their quest to eliminate class enemies had its roots in decades of communist education. This education criticized humanism as a bourgeois ideology and instilled in people the belief that individuals are defined solely by their class. It held that class enemies were not to be considered human and that revolution was about eradicating the enemy through violence. In schools, students and teachers from bourgeois and reactionary families were labeled class enemies. The Red Guards from various schools in Beijing competed in their violence against these perceived enemies and the levels of violence and terror escalated dramatically. During the “Red August” of 1966, the Beijing Red Guards ushered in a period of “Red Terror” under the slogan “Long live the Red Terror.” From August 25 to September 2 alone, the Red Guards killed 1,550 people in Beijing (Y. Wang, Reference Wang2004, p. 740). The first victims were high school principals, teachers, and students. From then on, the CR became a nationwide movement of violence and terror. Importantly for China and the world today, many of the most prominent political figures in twenty-first-century China were once Red Guards.

While the Red Guard movement was disrupting order in schools and society, Mao, at the 11th Plenary Session of the 8th CCP Central Committee in August 1966, accused Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping of following a reactionary bourgeois line during their leadership of the CR. As a result, all bureaucrats under the leadership of Liu and Deng were labeled “capitalist roaders” and leaders of party-state organizations at all levels generally became the targets of the revolution. As the Red Guards were predominantly made up of senior cadres’ offspring, they were deemed “conservatives” and opposed to the CR when their parents became targets. Some core members of the Red Guards were suppressed and even imprisoned for opposing the CR. However, this did not shake their conviction and determination to hold party-state power. They saw themselves as “masters of the Tianxia (world, empire, or nation),” having been groomed for power since childhood. A quote from a Beijing Red Guard in early 1967 illustrates this sentiment: “Don’t be so arrogant, you son of a bitch, … In 20 years, the Tianxia will belong to us, the offspring of cadres, so you stand aside!” The “son of a bitch” being cursed at here refers to fellow students from intellectual or bourgeois families. The once popular Red Guard couplet, “a hero’s son is a legend; a reactionary’s son is a bastard,” expressed the same belief that social status is determined by birth (Yang, Reference Yang2016, chapter 7).

It is worth noting that the journeys of the majority of the most important political figures in China today began with or are intimately related to what is discussed above. Shortly after the end of the CR, in the early 1980s at the dawn of the reform era, the party’s Central Organization Department established a special agency to systematically select and cultivate the offspring of senior cadres. CCP elders, including Chen Yun, Bo Yibo, and Wang Zhen, directly involved themselves in nurturing these individuals (Yan, Reference Yan2017). Many of those chosen later became leading figures in the party-state apparatus, including Xi Jinping, Wang Qishan, Li Yuanchao, and Bo Xilai, while many others ascended to roles as ministers and generals.

Guided by their consciousness of power and the philosophy of class struggle, the Red Guards not only indiscriminately degraded the “enemy” or “inferior” classes but also carried out a Red Terror, which they believed to be an essential part of power and class struggles. Their persecution of large numbers of students, teachers, and citizens provoked widespread and intense resistance.

Tragically, almost all of those resisting had also been brainwashed under the totalitarian regime and were also worshippers of Mao. In addition to resisting the persecution by the Red Guards, some radical resistors also opposed the work groups sent by Liu Shaoqi, the class line, and the party-state bureaucracy. These rebels formed the so-called Revolutionary Rebel Faction (or Rebel Faction for short).

Some rebels saw the CR as a class struggle between ordinary people and the privileged class, consisting of high-ranking officials and their offspring. Faced with the CCP’s class line and systematic persecution inflicted by the Red Guards, a few intellectuals began to fundamentally question the class line and the socialist system that had given rise to a bureaucratic or privileged class. By “bureaucratic or privileged class,” they meant the party-state bureaucrats (also known as “capitalist roaders”) and their offspring, who believed they were born to rule. However, such discussions were absolutely intolerable to the totalitarian system and were swiftly and brutally suppressed.¹²

One of the most notable rebel groups was led by Kuai Dafu, a student at Tsinghua University at the time. The members of this group were labeled as counterrevolutionaries by Liu Shaoqi’s wife, Wang Guangmei. In an effort to leverage rebel groups like this one against Liu Shaoqi, during the 11th Plenary Session of the 8th Central Committee, Zhou Enlai and the CRG led over 100 Central Committee members to Tsinghua University to redress the injustices suffered by the Rebel Faction at Tsinghua on behalf of Mao and the Central Committee. The evidence Zhou presented at the 11th Plenary Session of Liu’s persecution of the rebels was crucial in bringing down Liu, as it proved that Liu’s party line had suppressed the masses. From then on, the rebel faction thrived nationwide, becoming the main force in overthrowing the “capitalist roaders” and dismantling the party-state system.

12.3.3 Seizing Power and Catastrophe

Guided and supported by Mao, Zhou Enlai, and the CRG, the Rebel Factions effectively incapacitated nearly all leaders of central party-state agencies, including those within the judicial and security systems, branding them as capitalist roaders. This caused paralysis in the leadership and operations across all levels and sectors of the party-state bureaucracy, resulting in what Mao referred to as “complete chaos,” a state he delightfully described as “excellent.” Amid this chaos, spurring the rebels to seize power from the capitalist roaders emerged as a major turning point in the CR.

It was only at this juncture that the Rebel Factions fully grasped the core premise of Lin Biao’s 1966 speech, affirming that the essence of the CR lay in seizing power. However, in this power-seizing movement, factions that publicly declared their infinite loyalty to Mao were immersed in brutal power struggles, driven primarily by the pursuit and preservation of their own interests. As various military districts and commands of the PLA, along with the local militias usually controlled by them, began siding with different factions in the fight for local dominance, the country descended into a state of unmanageable chaos. Many regions plunged into localized civil wars and amidst this pandemonium, Mao began to lose his grip on the situation.

At a theoretical level, the CCP made it abundantly clear that the seizure of power was the primary objective of the CR. This was explicitly stated in the key historical documents that initiated the CR, such as the “May 16 Notification” and the “Sixteen Articles,” which highlighted the purpose of the CR was to wrest power from the hands of the so-called capitalist roaders. However, the practical implications of this objective, and how it would be implemented, remained nebulous. Similar to the establishment and promotion of People’s Communes and the Red Guard movement, the practical mechanics of seizing power were not crafted by Mao or the CRG but emerged from a process of experimental adaptation and nationwide emulation spurred by regional competition.

On January 8, 1967, a workers’ Rebel Faction in Shanghai, led by Wang Hongwen, with Mao’s and the CRG’s support, seized control from the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee and Shanghai Municipal Government, placing the municipality under the jurisdiction of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Once the People’s Daily and Red Flag magazine published reports of Mao’s backing of the Shanghai rebels’ seizure of municipal power, Rebel Factions across the country initiated their own power-seizing movements and raced to assume control over party-state institutions at every level. Within a month, the provinces of Shanxi, Guizhou, Heilongjiang, and Shandong sequentially fell to the Revolutionary Committees established by these Rebel Factions. Across the country, party-state agencies, enterprises, and People’s Communes all became targets of power seizures.

While launching a mass movement and creating chaos was relatively straightforward, leveraging the same mass movement to re-establish order and end the power-seizing movement proved to be a significantly tougher task. The widespread power seizures affected everyone’s interests and the various Rebel Factions, all claiming loyalty to Mao, represented a diverse array of interests. When it came to seizing power, these interests inevitably clashed, sometimes quite violently. Groups competing for control would often strategically label their adversaries as conservatives or as disloyal. Ultimately, only those rebels who managed to secure the joint backing of the CRG and the PLA could successfully seize power. However, members of the CRG and the PLA generals did not always see eye to eye. Adding to the complexity, many party-state bureaucrats criticized as “capitalist roaders” remained active, seeking support from Mao, the CRG, Zhou Enlai, and the military to help them retain power. The factions rallying to protect these individuals also declared themselves loyal to Mao.

The chaos escalated further when Rebel Factions emerged within the Foreign Ministry and even within the headquarters, commands, and military districts of the PLA, asserting their authority over diplomatic and military affairs. This development directly threatened Mao’s strategy of relying on the PLA to maintain stability.

The power-seizing movement across the country deteriorated into violent, armed conflicts. With military backing, some cities experienced civil wars involving thousands, even tens of thousands, of militiamen, some of whom were equipped with heavy weaponry. The official term for these local civil wars was Wudou (Violent Struggle). Official statistics suggest that the Wudou resulted in over 230,000 deaths and injured more than 7 million people nationwide (Yang, Reference Yang2013). Based on incomplete official local publications, Walder (Reference Walder2019) documents monthly death counts at the provincial and national levels during this period, providing valuable detailed information.

As the power-seizing campaign spiraled out of control, the CRG and Lin Biao sent in “PLA Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams” (Military Propaganda Teams) to all party-state institutions, schools, and universities. Eventually, through military intervention, the Rebel Factions that were backed by the CRG and Lin Biao took control, and established Revolutionary Committees across the nation. Subsequently, they surrendered their power to the reestablished CCP committees, dissolving their “rebel” organizations that had served as their power base during the power-seizing phase.

Simultaneously, while reestablishing control over the country, the CCP launched nationwide campaigns with the intent to disband all non-compliant organizations by purging any individuals who disobeyed, were seen as suspicious, or were dissidents. The roles and fates of the Red Guards and the Rebels during the CR bore striking similarities to those of the secret societies during the early days of the CCP (as discussed in Chapter 10). The most extensive of these campaigns was the so-called “One-Strike, Three-Antis.” These campaigns, in their nature and function, also resembled the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries campaign, which had been initiated shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1950 (as explored in Chapter 11).

According to official records, these campaigns unearthed over 1.84 million counterrevolutionaries, with more than 280,000 arrested (Wang, Reference Wang1988, p. 337). Independent studies estimate that the number of people who died of persecution during the “One-Strike, Three-Antis” campaign alone was in the tens or hundreds of thousands (Ding, Reference Ding2014).