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An ageing Mao Zedong
, hi power waning, initiated in 1966one last mighty campaign. The object:
to annihilate his enemies in the Chinese Communist Party, the political
machine he had spent a lifetime building. In April, after purging hostile
top officials, Mao established a new Party clique packed with his supporters,
the Central Cultural Revolution Group. Its job was to dismantle a recalcitrant
bureaucracy, thereby reviving China’s revolutionary fervour, which Mao
felt was waning. For further assistance, the Great Helmsman called upon
China’s most radical force: its university students. He commanded them
to destroy "revisionism", to root out travellers on the "capitalist
road". With this the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which
claimed an estimated 400,000 lives and effectively undermined traditional
Chinese customs and beliefs, was launched.
During the first stage
of the movement, the so-called Fifty Days, from June to August, 1966,
students took over campuses, attacked university authorities and denounced
anti-Mao Party officials. As the violence escalated, a new, supremely
destructive group emerged: the Red Guards, teenage shock troops. Instructed
by Mao to "learn revolution by making revolution", the Red Guards
led the charge against "bourgeois ghosts and monsters", in the
process plunging China in chaos. By the end of the year, some ten million
guards had paraded before the Chairman in /beijing to receive his blessing
for their zealotry.
As the Red Guards
rampaged, Mao strengthened his position within the Party. He purged the
leading advocates of reform, President Liu Shaoqi and Party secretary
general Deng Xiaoping, and their allies. Supported by General Lin Bao,
commander of the army, and by the Gang of Four, the radical reform group
led by Mao’s third wife Jiang Qing, Mao transformed the Party into a largely
military organisation dedicated to Maoist thought and continuous revolution.
Mao, centre of a massive cult of personality, disbanded the Red Guards
in 1968 (later apologising for their excesses), and reigned as quasi-emperor
until his death in 1976.
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