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Overview of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
By Kallie Szczepanski
Thought.co
Updated on August 08, 2019

[snip]

Between 1966 and 1976, the young people of China rose up in an effort to purge the nation of the "Four Olds": old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

Mao Sparks the Cultural Revolution

In August 1966, Mao Zedong called for the start of a Cultural Revolution at the Plenum of the Communist Central Committee. He urged the creation of corps of "Red Guards" to punish party officials and any other persons who showed bourgeois tendencies.

Mao likely was motivated to call for the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in order to rid the Chinese Communist Party of his opponents after the tragic failure of his Great Leap Forward policies. Mao knew that other party leaders were planning to marginalize him, so he appealed directly to his supporters among the people to join him in a Cultural Revolution. He also believed that the communist revolution had to be a continuous process, in order to stave off capitalist ideas.

Mao's call was answered by the students, some as young as elementary school, who organized themselves into the first groups of Red Guards. They were joined later by workers and soldiers.

The first targets of the Red Guards included Buddhist temples, churches, and mosques, which were razed to the ground or converted to other uses. Sacred texts, as well as Confucian writings, were burned, along with religious statues and other artwork. Any object associated with China's pre-revolutionary past was liable to be destroyed.

In their fervor, the Red Guards began to persecute people deemed "counter-revolutionary" or "bourgeois," as well. The Guards conducted so-called "struggle sessions," in which they heaped abuse and public humiliation upon people accused of capitalist thoughts (usually these were teachers, monks, and other educated persons). These sessions often included physical violence, and many of the accused died or ended up being held in re-education camps for years.