Leadup: China in Ruins¶

The Great Leap Forward, a campaign to quickly industrialize an agricultural China by a Communist Party that had only just taken control, failed. The industrialization-heavy environment meant agriculture was deemphasized. Combined with misguided campaigns to kill sparrows and other “pests” (which disrupted the ecosystem), it led to the deadliest famine in history. Scholars estimated tens of millions died. As a result, people lost trust in the Chinese Communist Party.

Additionally, in the early 1960s, tensions with the also-Communist Soviet Union grew. The more revolutionary China believed that the older, more established Soviet Union had adopted too much bureaucracy, capitalist tendencies, and social classes, deviating from the Marxist-Leninist ideal of revolutionary spirit and equality for all. Some within the CCP also wanted to soften on those ideals, which Mao opposed.

Also, corruption among CCP officials was widespread, and some were even trying to sideline Mao after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Mao Zedong distilled the solutions to these issues into three goals, in a movement he would call the Cultural Revolution: revitalize the Party by replacing bureaucrats with revolutionaries, let Chinese youth experience revolution, and achieve anti-elitist policy changes. The Cultural Revolution officially started in August 1966.