May 16 was the 60th anniversary of the “May 16 Circular,” the foundational document drafted under Mao Zedong’s direct supervision that launched the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese Communist Party officially regards the circular as the starting gun for that catastrophe. Some historians date the revolution’s opening differently, pointing to May 25, 1966, when Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy instructor at Peking University, posted what Mao later called “the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster” on campus. On June 1, Mao authorized it to be broadcast nationwide, triggering a suspension of classes at universities, middle schools, and elementary schools across the country and unleashing the mass frenzy that would consume China for the next decade.
Respected scholars believed Mao’s own lies
Yang Jisheng, the investigative journalist whose landmark research on the Great Famine produced one of the definitive accounts of that disaster, argues that Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to “oppose bureaucratism.” Yang argues that Mao spent years searching for a way to mobilize the masses directly, bypassing the bureaucratic apparatus, to expose official corruption and prevent the cadre class from degenerating. The Cultural Revolution, in Yang’s account, was the form Mao finally settled on.
A classmate of Yang’s at Tsinghua University, known online by the pen name “Xiao Ying,” disagrees. He argues Mao’s real target was the “capitalist roaders” within the Party, those accused of pursuing a path of capitalist restoration. Xiao Ying argues that the Cultural Revolution was the culmination of seventeen years of factional conflict within the Party since 1949, pitting two rival lines and two rival power centers against each other. In his reading, Mao’s primary aim was to destroy the “capitalist roaders” and dismantle their networks throughout the system. Xiao Ying also argues that Liu Shaoqi, the senior Party leader Mao destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, was in fact correct to pursue more moderate economic policies, and that Mao was wrong to purge him.
The May 16 Circular named Khrushchev as the real enemy
In a passage Mao wrote personally, the May 16 Circular warns:
“Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once the conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of these people have already been seen through by us; others have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, people like Khrushchev, for example, who are still nestling beside us. Party committees at all levels must pay full attention to this.”
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Mao said nothing here about “opposing bureaucratism.” He said nothing specific about “capitalist roaders.” What he described was a hidden enemy who, “once the conditions are ripe,” would seize power. The figure he invoked was Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who had denounced Stalin three years after Stalin’s death. In Mao’s mind, the people playing Khrushchev’s role were Liu Shaoqi, a senior Party leader and then head of state; the reformist official Deng Xiaoping; the Beijing Party chief Peng Zhen; the head of the Party’s propaganda apparatus Lu Dingyi; and the senior military administrator Yang Shangkun.
Mao feared his own Khrushchev moment
Mao’s obsession with Khrushchev was visceral and personal. Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” had denounced Stalin’s crimes before the entire Soviet leadership. Stalin had been dead only three years when his successor shredded his legacy. Mao had every reason to fear the same fate.
The Great Famine, caused by Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign of forced industrialization and agricultural collectivization, had killed tens of millions of people between 1959 and 1961. Mao knew the scale of the catastrophe. He knew his own policies had caused it. And he knew there were people inside the Party who knew it too.
The trigger came at the “Conference of Seven Thousand Cadres” in January 1962, one of the largest internal Party gatherings in the history of the People’s Republic, where Liu Shaoqi delivered a blunt verdict on the famine: “Three parts natural disaster, seven parts man-made disaster.” Liu added that the Three Red Banners, the ideological framework that had produced the Great Leap Forward, had yet to prove themselves in practice, and that final judgment should wait. These words cut Mao to the bone. He concluded that Liu was China’s Khrushchev: the man who, after Mao’s death, would stand before the Party and tear down everything Mao had built. Liu had to be eliminated before that could happen.
Everything that followed, the theoretical scaffolding about “continuing the revolution,” “opposing revisionism,” “combating bureaucratism,” and “striking down the capitalist roaders,” was fabrication, constructed to make a squalid act of political self-preservation appear as a principled ideological campaign. Most Chinese people believed it. Many still do.
Two leading scholars got Mao’s motives wrong
Xiao Ying’s argument that the Cultural Revolution represented the culmination of a seventeen-year conflict between two rival lines within the Party simply does not hold up. Before the Cultural Revolution, there were no two headquarters and no two lines. There was one of each: Mao’s.
Liu Shaoqi had been consistently obedient to Mao. He actively supported the Three Red Banners, the disastrous policies that produced the famine. He had never expressed any intention to “take the capitalist road.” His only deviation from Mao’s script was a moment of conscience at the 1962 conference, where he spoke with some accuracy about the scale of the famine he had helped enforce. That one act of candor made him Mao’s enemy.
Yang Jisheng’s “anti-bureaucratism” thesis fails for a simpler reason. If Mao wanted to combat official corruption and the entrenched power of the bureaucratic class, he had far less destructive tools available: Party directives, rectification campaigns, targeted disciplinary proceedings. He did not need to shut down every school in China, mobilize teenagers as political enforcers, and plunge the country into a decade of murder and chaos. The scale of the Cultural Revolution was wildly disproportionate to any genuine anti-bureaucratic purpose. Yang, who did more than almost anyone to document the human cost of the Great Famine, never connected that catastrophe to the Cultural Revolution.
Mao dismantled Liu Shaoqi’s network before moving in for the kill
Mao had decided by 1962 that Liu Shaoqi had to go. He waited four years before moving, using the intervening time to build the political infrastructure, the loyal factions, and the ideological justifications that would allow him to strike.
When he finally moved, he did so in stages, like peeling an onion. First he cleared away figures at the periphery: Wu Han, a historian and Beijing city official whose historical play about a righteous official had been read as coded criticism of Mao; and Deng Tuo, a senior Party journalist. Then he dismantled the entire network around Liu and Deng Xiaoping, removing Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, the former chief of the general staff of China’s military, Lu Dingyi, and Yang Shangkun in a coordinated sweep. Only then, with Liu’s support structure gone, did Mao deliver the final blow. Liu died in detention in 1969, denied medical care, his body reportedly wrapped in a plain sheet.
The Party has softened its own account of the Cultural Revolution
Mao’s propaganda was so effective that it has outlasted him by half a century. The Party’s current handling of the Cultural Revolution’s legacy has made this worse. In the 1980s, the Party acknowledged the Cultural Revolution as a catastrophe. In recent years, as Mao has been rehabilitated and placed back on a political pedestal, the official account has softened. A 2019 documentary produced under the direction of the Party’s Propaganda Department described Mao’s actions as a “difficult exploration” by a leader determined to prevent capitalist restoration and root out corruption, sanitizing mass murder as ideological trial and error.
Yang Jisheng and scholars like him credit Mao with ideological sincerity, reading the Cultural Revolution as a misguided but genuine attempt to solve real political problems. Mao had no such sincerity. He had a problem, and the problem was personal: he was a man responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, surrounded by colleagues who knew it, and he needed to destroy the most dangerous of those colleagues before he died. Two generations of Chinese people paid for that with their suffering.