On April 27, 1969, following orders from Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Army disbanded the Red Guards. For dissidents, years of injustice, humiliation, and endless suffering. China’s Cultural Revolution was born out of a resounding failure by leader Mao Tse-tung. With the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958-1960), he intended to industrialize China in record time and, at the same time, build the egalitarian society advocated by communism.
He forced peasants together into gigantic agricultural communes and installed rudimentary technology steel mills across the country. But the only result of the campaign was the total disorganization of the economy. Millions of farmers died of starvation.
On April 27, 1969, following Mao’s orders, the Chinese Army disbanded the Red Guards, which had led China to virtually anarchy during the Cultural Revolution. Officially, the death toll during the Cultural Revolution was 34,000, although many believe that in reality there were millions of victims.
Mao’s ostracism and counteroffensive
The “great leap” disaster had ostracized Mao. The Chinese Communist Party removed him from conducting the country’s internal affairs, but he remained in charge of foreign policy.
On May 16, 1966, he warned in an internal document that the CCP was full of revisionists capable of, at any moment, installing capitalism in China. Thus began his audacious counter-offensive to regain prestige, plunging the country into the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The revolution mobilized Beijing’s students and, in a short time, spread throughout China. Especially the youth were encouraged to rebel against “elitism, revisionism and the bourgeois mentality”. The consequences were dramatic: children denounced their parents, students attacked their teachers and forced them to suspend classes, bosses tortured their subordinates.
political persecutions
Some 20 million high school and university students, led by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, formed the Red Guards and started a wave of political persecution. CCP intellectuals and leaders were beaten, imprisoned and, in many cases, killed.
One of the illustrious persecuted, for example, was Deng Xiaoping, the leader who, after facing internal exile, returned to power in the 1970s and engineered the capitalist revolution responsible for the current growth of the Chinese economy.
In parallel with the political persecution, the movement promoted a cultural cleaning. The “red guards” destroyed temples and other vestiges of the “feudal past”, burned books that had no revolutionary content. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, was considered incompatible with the dreamed “proletarian paradise”. Mao also used his youth to push the cult of personality to the extreme, holding colossal marches in his own honor.
“Ten Lost Years”
The “Great Helmsman”, however, soon lost control of the movement. Ten years of turmoil followed that paralyzed the education system and crippled the economy. “These were years of injustice, humiliation and endless suffering,” summarizes writer Ba Jin. The excesses of the “red guards” led the army to intervene, as early as 1969, with Mao’s support. It was, in effect, the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Later, the communist government would refer to the Great Cultural and Proletarian Revolution as “ten lost years”. Mao’s main concern was not to save the ideology of the proletariat. It is known that he engineered the movement to get rid of political rivals and consolidate his power. His biggest rivals were CCP moderate wing leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, who advocated “economic liberalization”.
Obsessed with power, Mao eliminated 12 of the 23 pesky members of the Politburo. The Cultural Revolution looked like a coup d’état. In the end, Mao himself was forced to end the movement, ordering the dissolution of the Red Guards.
The decision to extinguish them was approved at the ninth Congress of the Communist Party, on April 27, 1969, formally marking the end of the Cultural Revolution. The country, however, only returned to normality in 1976, with the death of Mao.
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