1

ALICE SHEDD

Which was more important in the Cultural Revolution: ideology, or the pursuit of power?

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966 which spanned until the death of its architect Mao
Zedong was for years in the historiography of the People’s Republic of China categorised as ‘Mao’s
Great Left Error’, an accidental deviation and misunderstanding of socialist doctrine on the behalf of the
Great Leader that should be forgiven and forgotten. The pinning of such a tragedy on the irrepressible
Maoist vision, despite being one now deemed in PRC history as erroneous to the accepted doctrine
which Deng Xiaoping would continue to bear on with throughout the latter half of the 20th century, can
arguably be seen as an explanation which still highlights the ideological nature of such a phenomenon,
albeit labelling it a misapplication of Marxist-Leninist ideology. However, as Deng Xiaoping identified,
unlike the Soviets, the Chinese had no Lenin to fall back on - Mao was both Lenin and Stalin, and
therefore ‘discrediting Comrade Mao Zedong . . . would mean discrediting our Party and state’ 1, a
position which arguably led to this ideological stance on the events of 1966-76. In the current climate of
the opening up of PRC history and Chinese historical debate it can be seen however that this attribution
of strictly ideological motives to the Cultural Revolution has been challenged strongly by the assertion
that the Revolution was a guise under which Mao Zedong was able to consolidate his power as
Supreme Leader and purge the CCP of factional rivals. Although cynical, evidence of Mao’s personality
cult, his fears surrounding the discrediting of Stalin in the USSR and finally the ambiguity and
unpredictability of the direction and doctrines of the Cultural Revolution provide convincing evidence to
this attribution of deeply political and opportunist roots to the incitement of such a movement by the
Chairman in 1966.

Looking past the more cynical assertions that the Cultural Revolution was solely an avenue for the
purgation of the CCP of political rivals and the consolidation of absolute power in the hands of the
Chairman, it has been argued on the contrary that the events of 1966-76 were the logical culmination of
the Maoist vision, operationalised by people around him who believed in both the utopian socialist vision
and in Mao’s personal ideological integrity - as MacFarquhar states, it can be argued that instead of
simply a cold blooded and convenient power grab, it was in fact Mao's restless quest for revolutionary
purity in a postrevolutionary age which provided the motivation for the Cultural Revolution 2. In terms of
this revolutionary purity, the ideological motivations which propelled the movement can be identified as
firstly the continuation of the two-line struggle, secondly fears of revisionism influenced by Sino-Soviet
relations, and finally the idea of the Sinification of Marxism.

The Maoist concept of the two-line struggle identified the ‘unity of opposites’ between the leading
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party line on the one hand, and erroneous thinking still extant within society
which ultimately reflected competing class outlooks on the other, and argued that the only way in which
the party and socialist state could advance was through the waging of a struggle against the contrasting
lines of thought. Along with seeing this dichotomy and consistent enemy as vital to the communist
state’s progression, Mao also propounded the idea of revolutionary continuity, seeing it necessary to
‘set fires’3 every few years to keep the ultimate communist revolution alive, as can be seen in the
constant vigilance and self-criticism associated with the 5 Antis Campaign and the Great Leap Forward.
The Communist Party’s textbook published towards the end of the Cultural Revolution asserted that ‘as
long as there are classes, class contradictions and class struggle, as long as there exist the socialist and
capitalist roads, the danger of a capitalist restoration, and the threat of subversion and aggression by
imperialism and social-imperialism, the two-line struggle within the Party, which is the reflection of these

1
MacFarquhar, R. and Schoenhals, M., Mao's Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)
2
MacFarquhar, R., The succession to Mao and the end of Maoism. In R. MacFarquhar & J. Fairbank (Eds.), The Cambridge History
of China (1991) p303-401
3
Spence, Jonathan D., Mao Zedong (Penguin Books, 2006)
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ALICE SHEDD

contradictions, will also carry on’4, and it can be seen that the Cultural Revolution was an exemplar
incarnation of such a struggle.

Prior to 1966, it can be argued that Mao was also beginning to become dissatisfied with the policies
implemented by the Party’s Politburo, seeing actions such as the return to private farming in agriculture
and the resurrection of material incentives in industry, which had been attempts at restoring social
cohesion and economic productivity after the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward, as
creating an environment of inequality, hierarchy, and dissent that was incompatible with his vision of a
socialist society, as demonstrated by his dramatic dismissal of respected Defence Minister Peng Dehuai
following his arguably sensible reigning in of the excesses of the Great Leap, which Mao criticised as
‘right opportunism’5. The incendiary editorial in the People’s Daily on June 1st 1966 entitled ‘Sweep
Away All Monsters and Demons!’ saw the first spark of the new wave of anti-revisionism which would
mutate so violently and unpredictably in the following decade, and it can be seen that this ideological
fear was spurred on by events in the Communist motherland, the USSR. At a 1963 State Council
meeting between African guerilla fighters and the Chairman, one asked whether China would follow in
the Kremlin’s example which he believed had betrayed the communist cause by selling weapons to their
enemies, to which Mao replied “the USSR has turned revisionist and has betrayed the revolution. Can I
guarantee to you that China won’t betray the revolution? We are searching very hard to find the way to
keep China from becoming corrupt, bureaucratic and revisionist’ 6. Kruschev's ‘revisionism’ and betrayal
of the socialist cause, seen to be epitomised by his eponymous thaw with the West, arguably implanted
the fear in Mao that China was on the brink of a capitalist restoration - he believed that the experience of
the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin proved that the restoration of capitalism could occur if
revisionists usurped power within the ruling Communist Party, and therefore encouraged the
continuation of a class struggle against those authority who might attempt to follow the capitalist road,
who he identified as ‘rightists’, ‘feudal remnants’, ‘snakes and monsters’, or ‘capitalist roaders’ 7. This
intense fear of revisionism spurred on by events in the Soviet Union can be seen exemplified in a 1967
statement by student Li Jingxi who was designated by the CCP during the Cultural revolution as a
‘landlord that slipped through the net’ - he wrote ‘although before Liberation I was always studying
elsewhere and never took part in my family’s exploitative activities, from the time I was young, every
mouthful of rice I ate and every penny I spent came from the exploitation of the blood and sweat of the
poor and lower-middle peasants. In the past I didn’t clearly recognize this, but now I truly recognize that
I am an utter parasite dependent on the blood and sweat of the poor and lower-middle peasants to
support myself. Coming to this realization has undeniably been very painful for me, but if I am to
thoroughly remold myself and make a fresh start in life, I must start with recognizing my revisionist
nature first and foremost’8.

It can also be argued that the Cultural Revolution had an important relationship with Mao’s ideological
goal of the Sinification of Marxism. An important ideological constant in Mao’s thought throughout his
leadership was the application of Marxism-Leninism to the economic and social reality of a backward
agrarian country, and to the heritage of the Chinese past, and it can be seen that with the Cultural
Revolution saw an attempt by the Chairman to differentiate China from beneath the shadows of the
USSR. As Schoenhals and MacFarquhar identify, by the 1960s, ‘Mao had tired of aping foreigners. The
GLF was his first attempt to find a distinctive Chinese road. By the mid-1960s, he could justify his

4
CPC Textbook, NBI edition, (Toronto, 1976) pp 51-52
5
MacFarquhar, R. and Schoenhals, M., Mao's Last Revolution
6
Dikötter, F., The cultural revolution : a people's history, 1962-1976, (London 2016)
7
Spence, Jonathan D., Mao Zedong
8
Tan, H., Mosher, S. & Jian, G.,The killing wind : a Chinese county's descent into madness during the Cultural Revolution, (New
York, 2017)
 3
ALICE SHEDD

distaste for the Soviet model with the specter of revisionism’ 9. It can be seen that ideologically, the
Cultural Revolution was an attempt to vaccinate the Chinese people against the new-found Soviet
disease of revisionism, but in doing so, it also allowed for the advancement of Sinification as it gave Mao
an excuse to diverge from the accepted wisdom of the socialist motherland - ‘Lenin had carried out the
Great October Socialist Revolution, setting a precedent for the proletariat of the whole world. But
modern revisionists like Khrushchev had usurped the leadership of the party, leading the Soviet Union
back on the road of capitalist restoration. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the second
stage in the history of the international communist movement, safeguarding the dictatorship of the
proletariat against revisionism’10. It can be seen that ideologically, the Cultural Revolution allowed Mao
the ability to develop Marxism-Leninism into a new stage, that of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong
Thought, and enabled him more than ever to define and perpetuate a distinct Chinese essence in the
modern socialist world, no matter how disastrous the outcome of his plan by the end of the decade.
This element of Sinification combined powerfully with the ideas of anti-revisionism epitomised in the
two-line struggle, and it can be argued clearly that the Cultural Revolution did have an ideological
backing in line with Mao’s deeply held views on the functioning of a post revolutionary socialist society,
despite the loss of distinct control over such ideological bases towards the end of the Revolution.

However, in the eyes of many more recent assessments of the motives of the Cultural Revolution, a view
that would have been clearly unprecedented in post-Mao PRC historiography, the events of 1966-76
were an unparalleled unleashing of chaos orchestrated by an autocratic leader for no other purpose than
to consolidate supreme power within the Party state, and purge the upper ranks of the CCP from
political rivals. Although this view may still require a slight bit more nuance, factors such as the cult of
the leader, Soviet induced paranoia, internal leadership challenges and finally an ambiguity in terms
concerning the meaning and direction of the Cultural Revolution can be seen to evidence the political
and opportunistic aspects of Mao’s incitement of revolution.

Mao’s position as a deified and unquestioned bastion of the Chinese Communist movement by the time
of the commencement of the Cultural Revolution is exemplified in Edgar Snow’s infamous interviews
with the Chairman as chronicled in his seminal Red Star Over China - in 1936, Snow’s impression of
Mao was highly favourable, asserting that ‘while everyone knows and respects him, there is – as yet, at
least – no ritual of hero-worship built up around him. I never met a Chinese Red who drivelled ‘our-great-
leader’ phrases’. Upon his return to China thirty years later in 1965, however Snow explicitly commented
on Mao’s ‘immoderate glorification’: ‘giant portraits of him now hung in the streets, busts were in every
chamber, his books and photographs were everywhere on display to the exclusion of others. In the four-
hour revolutionary pageant of dance and song, The East Is Red, Mao was the only hero’ 11. Ritual modes
of worshipping the “great helmsman” of the Chinese Revolution had come to dominate everyday life in
the midst of the Cultural Revolution, including daily reading of the Little Red Book, confessions of
possible thought crimes in front of Mao’s portrait; and even physical performances such as the “loyalty
dance” (zhongzi wu)12 - Leese argues that this cult of the leader was of crucial importance in the Cultural
Revolution as ‘in one sense the whole struggle was over control of the cult and by whom and above all
‘for whom’ the cult was to be utilised’ 13. Although the employment of his personality cult in inner-party
struggles had been a salient feature since the beginning of Mao’s leadership in 1949 and even
previously, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao uniquely aimed at the destruction of the system he had
helped to create, mobilising his potent symbolism as Leader to destroy factional rivals in the upper ranks
of the CCP, as had not been done since the Rectification campaigns of the 1940s.

9
MacFarquhar, R. and Schoenhals, M., Mao's Last Revolution
10
Dikötter, F., The cultural revolution : a people's history, 1962-1976
11
Snow, E., Red Star over China. Revised ed. (New York: Random House, 1938)
12
Leese, D., Mao Cult : Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011)
13
Ibid
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ALICE SHEDD

The coincidence of the fall of Khrushchev as Soviet premier and the commencement of the Cultural
Revolution can hardly be overlooked as an indicator of the political roots of Mao’s 1966 campaign.
Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956 shattered Stalin’s image as omniscient and wise leader of the
communist movement and revealed the crimes committed during his rule, fiercely attacking Stalin for
having elevated himself above the party along with having failed to differentiate between enmity toward
the exploiting classes and diverging opinions among communists. Along with his position as Supreme
Leader, Mao had arguably modelled himself on Stalin and felt personally threatened by de-Stalinization,
causing him to become uncomfortable with the idea that his personal leadership could become
discredited by rivals in his party such as Khrushchev had done to his late colleague. During a delegation
led by Zhou Enlai to the USSR in 1964, an allegedly drunken Soviet defense minister told a member of
Zhou's delegation, Marshal He Long: "We've already got rid of Khrushchev; you ought to follow our
example and get rid of Mao Zedong. That way we'll get on better” 14, a sentiment that undoubtedly would
have made the Chairman uneasy had he been informed of it. After Khrushchev’s demise, Mao warned of
the possible rise of revisionism at the CCP Center, carried forth by a ‘Chinese Khrushchev’ 15, however it
can be seen that the guise of anti-revisionism conveniently doubled with Mao’s need to purge the party
of potential dissenters to his leadership, illustrating the political roots of Mao’s instigation of the Cultural
Revolution. Mao’s clear perception that his leadership was being challenged internally can be seen in his
complaints that some of the Party’s leaders failed to consult with him on major policy decisions, for
example in 1966 Mao stated that ‘for six years, since 1959, Deng Xioping has not made a general report
of work to me’, and on discovering that Deng had made some major decisions on agricultural
reorganization without consulting him, the Chairman is known to have asked sarcastically; ‘which
Emperor decided these?’16. In order to combat these perceived challenges, Mao arguably utilised the
framework of the Cultural Revolution, in turn suggesting that the masses could dispense with centralised
Party leadership and stating in 1966 that ‘the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee is the
palace of the King of Hell. We must overthrow the palace of the King of Hell and set the little devils free. I
have always advocated that whenever the central organs do bad things, it is necessary to call upon the
localities to rebel, and to attack the centre’ 17. It is unarguable in this light that Mao was ready to take the
risk of destroying the political instrument to which he had devoted more than four decades of his life, in
order to purge it of his enemies, and therefore how deeply political in essence such a call to arms as
seen in the instigation of the Cultural Revolution was.

Finally the ambiguity of the terms and direction of the Revolution can be arguably seen as evidence for
the political, power-oriented roots of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Unlike Mao’s first, successful revolution,
this second one in contrast had no clear guiding vision, and produced no unified organization to
implement a new set of programs and policies, leaving only chaos and disorder in its place. As Spence
identifies, ‘the leaders of the Cultural Revolution called for a comprehensive attack on the “four old”
elements within Chinese society——old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking—but they left
it to local Red Guard initiative to apply these terms’ 18. In turn this led to the turning on of all stratas of
Chinese society by both the PLA and the Red Guards in order to prove their revolutionary dedication, for
example those with Western education, dealings with Western businessmen or missionaries and all
intellectuals who could be charged with ‘reactionary’ modes of thinking, another ambiguously defined
term which led to doctrinal confusion and general overkill, along with countless self-incriminations and

14
MacFarquhar, R. and Schoenhals, M., Mao's Last Revolution
15
Leese, D., Mao Cult : Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution
16
Schram, S., Mao Tse-tung's thought from 1949 to 1976. In R. MacFarquhar & J. Fairbank (Eds.), The Cambridge History of
China pp. 1-104, (1991)
17
Harding, H., The Chinese state in crisis. In R. MacFarquhar & J. Fairbank (Eds.), The Cambridge History of China pp. 105-217,
(1991)
18
Spence, Jonathan D., The Search for Modern China (London: Norton, 1991)
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ALICE SHEDD

dubious prosecutions. The touchstone of communist loyalty became simply loyalty to the Chairman, with
a mere utterance of his deciding the fates of countless people, as he declared one or another faction to
be ‘counter-revolutionary’, a verdict which could change almost instantaneously. It cannot be ignored
therefore how integral the power and prestige of Mao was to the direction and execution of the Cultural
Revolution, and the hyperbole of the movement in terms of purging and negating such huge swathes of
Chinese society arguably devalued the ideology of Chinese communism in the years after Mao’s death.
The ideological basis of the Cultural Revolution are hard to fully overlook, with the Sinification of
Marxism and the two-line struggle having been consistent pillars of Mao’s thought since his accession to
the CCP’s leadership, however it cannot be convincingly asserted that such ideological concepts were
still the guiding principle of the Revolution towards its chaotic tail end, due to the obvious ambiguity
regarding the direction of anti-revisionist policies aside from the clear emphasis on loyalty to Mao’s word
and nothing else. It could however be theorised that the ideology which had led Mao to commence the
Revolution in 1966, and the convenient way in which the Revolution allowed him to consolidate his
power and purge the Party of his political enemies merged during the Cultural Revolution, and therefore
that the two are not fully independent of one another. It can be argued that Mao in fact saw no
distinction between himself and the revolution: ‘an inkling of dissatisfaction with his authority was a
direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat’ 19. As the revolution progressed, it could be seen that
Mao’s personal desires became more and more linked with his view of society, merging into one almost
indistinguishable whole - as Dikotter states, ‘these two aspects of the Cultural Revolution – the vision of
a socialist world free of revisionism, the sordid, vengeful plotting against real and imaginary enemies –
were not mutually exclusive’20. It could in fact be argued that Mao was so thoroughly persuaded that his
own views were the only correct exposition of Marxism-Leninism that anyone who failed to agree with
him automatically became a revisionist in his eyes, and as a result, ‘the more it proved impossible to put
his ideas into practice, the more he saw this as the reflection of class struggle, ... and of the emergence
of 'counter-revolutionary revisionist elements' within the Party’21. It can be theorised therefore that
neither a total attribution of motive to a strong, socialist guiding ideology nor the inherently cynical
categorisation of the Revolution as a simple power grab will suffice - as the revolution went on, Mao
began to see himself as indistinguishable from it, with loyalty to the Chairman becoming synonymous in
his mind with loyalty to the Maoist vision of a socialist anti-revisionist state - ‘he was the revolution’22.

Bibliography:
MacFarquhar, R. and Schoenhals, M., Mao's Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)
MacFarquhar, R., The succession to Mao and the end of Maoism. In R. MacFarquhar & J. Fairbank
(Eds.), The Cambridge History of China (1991) p303-401
Harding, H., The Chinese state in crisis. In R. MacFarquhar & J. Fairbank (Eds.), The Cambridge History
of China pp. 105-217, (1991)
Schram, S., Mao Tse-tung's thought from 1949 to 1976. In R. MacFarquhar & J. Fairbank (Eds.), The
Cambridge History of China pp. 1-104, (1991)
Spence, Jonathan D., Mao Zedong (Penguin Books, 2006)
Dikötter, F., The cultural revolution : a people's history, 1962-1976, (London 2016)
Tan, H., Mosher, S. & Jian, G.,The killing wind : a Chinese county's descent into madness during the
Cultural Revolution, (New York, 2017)
Snow, E., Red Star over China. Revised ed. (New York: Random House, 1938)
Leese, D., Mao Cult : Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2011)

19
Dikötter, F., The cultural revolution : a people's history, 1962-1976
20
Ibid
21
MacFarquhar, R., The succession to Mao and the end of Maoism. In R. MacFarquhar & J. Fairbank (Eds.), The Cambridge
History of China (1991) p303-401
22
Dikötter, F., The cultural revolution : a people's history, 1962-1976
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ALICE SHEDD

Spence, Jonathan D., The Search for Modern China (London: Norton, 1991)
Chen Ruoxi, The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, Revised ed. (Bloomington, 2004)