The Cultural Revolution was so named because the assault on counter-revolutionaries by Mao’s allies began in the cultural arena. To Mao, revolutionary culture was a powerful status apparatus to mobilize the masses. If done right, it could help to ideologically prepare the masses for a revolution. Without a revolutionary culture, it would not be possible to have a revolution.[1]

 

How the GPCR Started?

 

Criticism over “traditional” (i.e. feudalistic and bourgeois) cultures began as early as May 1964 after Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee (八届十中全会) when Wenhui Bao (文汇报) published critical articles about several newly-arranged Kunqu (昆曲 a type of traditional Chinese opera) performances. Mao soon joined in the foray accusing the Culture Ministry of not doing their job in controlling the works by performers, artists and writers. On his instruction, a Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group (文化革命五人小组) led by Peng Zhen, the first secretary of Beijing municipal party committee, was formed in July 1964 to look into revolutionizing traditional mass cultures into socialist mass cultures.[2]

 

The first shot of the GPCR was fired on 10 November 1965 when Yao Wenyuan (姚文元) published an article “On the New Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” (评新编历史剧”海瑞罢官”) in Shanghai’s Wenhui Daily (文汇报). The article, approved by Mao and soon to become the “blasting fuse” of the Cultural Revolution, accused Wu Han (吴晗), the author of the historical play, of using a story of the past to criticize the present. Without knowing Mao’s firm support for Yao, Peng Zhen (彭真), first secretary of Beijing municipal party committee, refused to reprint the article in the city’s newspapers. He, as head of the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group, also led the Group in preparing a policy guide, known as the “February Outline” (二月提纲), to restraint the emerging leftism and to keep the criticism of Wu Han and others within the realm of academia.

 

Unbeknown to Peng also, Mao’s real objection to the historical play was the part on “Dismissed from Office”. He accused the historical play to be a satirical innuendo of his earlier dismissal of Peng Dehuai at Lushan.[3] On the pretext that Peng’s actions hindered the progress of the Cultural Revolution, Mao launched a major offensive against Peng and his Beijing party committee. Meanwhile, with the support of Lim Biao, Jiang Qing convened an army cultural seminar in Shanghai during which she accused anti-CCP and anti-socialism counter-revolutionaries of seizing power in the cultural arena and called to wage a socialist revolution against the counter-revolutionaries. By the end of March 1996, Peng and Lu Dingyi (陆定一), the Minister of Propaganda (中央宣传部部长) were suspended from their job.

 

On May 16, 1966, the Central Committee officially withdrew the February Outline passed and issued a document known as the “May 16 Notification” (简称“五·一六通知”). It warned that not only the cultural circles but the party, the government, and the army had also been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary “revisionists” who were plotting to overthrow the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (无产阶级专政) to create a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” (资产阶级专政). It was decided that the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group headed by Peng would be dissolved and replaced by a Central Cultural Revolution Group (中央文化革命小组) to be led by Chen Boda (陈伯达) and comprising of Jiang Qing (江青), Zhang Chunqiao (张春桥), & Kang Sheng (康生). The new group would not be under the control of the Central Committee and would henceforth lead the Cultural Revolution. From then on, the Cultural Revolution spread like wild fire.

 

On 1 June, the party’s official mouthpiece newspaper urged the masses to “clear away the evil habits of the old society” by launching an all-out assault on “monsters and demons” (referring to feudalism and capitalism “横扫一切牛鬼蛇神”). Chinese students sprang into action, setting up Red Guard (红卫兵) divisions in classrooms and campuses across the country. All schools were shut down for a year on the pretext that curricula had to be revised in a more revolutionary spirit. Gangs of teenagers in red armbands and military fatigues roamed the streets of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai setting upon those with “bourgeois” clothes or reactionary haircuts. “Imperialist” street signs were torn down. Millions of youngsters were encouraged to roam the countryside and go to Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities to link up (串联) and exchange revolutionary experience. Some marched on foot in imitation of the Long March, but most, apparently, preferred to take the train, particularly since a red armband was equivalent to a ticket.

 

Mao's ideas, popularized in the Quotations from Chairman Mao (毛主席语录), became the standard by which all revolutionary efforts were to be judged. The "four big rights" (四大自由) – speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates, and writing big-character posters (“大鸣、大放、大辩论、大字报”) – became an important factor in encouraging Mao's youthful followers to criticize his intraparty rivals.

 

By August 1966 – so-called Red August – the mayhem was in full swing. During the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee (八届十一中全会), a document called the “Sixteen Points” (“中国共产党中央委员会关于无产阶级文化大革命的决定”，即“十六条”) drafted by Mao Zedong was endorsed by the CCP Central Committee on August 8th 1966. It laid out the political values and objectives of the Cultural Revolution:

 

“Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture and customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society.”[4]

 

Under the guidance of the “Sixteen Points”, Mao’s allies urged Red Guards to destroy the “four olds” (破四旧) - old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. Churches, shrines, libraries, shops and private homes were ransacked or destroyed as the assault on “feudal” (封建) traditions began. During the process, countless priceless antiques, ancient texts, and Buddhist temples were destroyed.

 

Party officials, teachers and intellectuals soon found themselves also in the cross-hairs: they were publicly humiliated, beaten and in some cases murdered or driven to suicide after vicious “struggle sessions” (批斗会). Blood flowed as Mao ordered security forces not to interfere in the Red Guards’ work. Nearly 1,800 people lost their lives in Beijing in August and September 1966 alone.

 

After the initial explosion of student-led “red terror”, the chaos spread rapidly. Spurred by Mao’s slogan “rebellion is justified” (造反有理), workers and peasants soon also joined the fray, forming the Revolutionary Rebels. The mounting wave of harassment and denunciations, the purges and virulent attacks on “freaks, monsters, and devils” presented a picture of near madness unparalleled even by the excesses of the Great Leap.  China was plunged into what historians describe as a state of virtual civil war, with rival factions battling it out in cities across the country.

 

During the first year of the Revolution, at the Centre, as Mao was laying down the “correct ideas and policies”, the official and unofficial press transmitted Mao's “supreme directives” and various mass movements sprang up to implement them. Those who displayed activism in upholding Maoist virtue were commended as “good pupils of Chairman Mao” and those who opposed Mao's ideas were labelled “revisionists”. Through these movements, Mao sought to emulate the Paris Commune of 1871 as his ideal type.[5]

 

Before building his ideal polity, however, Mao first had to carry out “destruction before construction”. He formed a minimum coalition with Lin Biao and his lieutenants within the PLA leadership and of Zhang Chunqiao and other young radicals in Shanghai to topple the “ancien regime” set up by Liu and Deng. To overcome the organizational resistance of the Party apparatus, he also mobilized the non-Party forces, the Red Guards, made up by students, and the Revolutionary Rebels, comprising of workers and peasants. When the Party Committees countered the Red Guard attack by claiming that whoever rebelled against the Party was counter-revolutionary, the Red Guard retorted that whoever opposed Chairman Mao was counter-revolutionary. Thus, the Cultural Revolution represented the confrontation between the leader and the Party, and between mass participation and institutionalization.

 

The lawlessness of the revolutionaries soon forced the collapse of Party Committees and eventually the disintegration of the entire institutionalized political authority. In its place, a mass polity bordering on anarchy developed. The old Politburo Standing Committee and Secretariat ceased to function and central directives were issued in the joint name of the Central Committee, Cultural Revolution Group, the State Council, and the Military Affairs Committee; but the Centre actually comprised no more than Mao and a handful of his supporters such as Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng and Jiang Qing. In this way, the whole country was subordinate to the Chairman. The charismatic leadership of one man had replaced the hierarchical Party bureaucracy with decentralized and diffused mass organizations.

 

At the local levels, the January Storm of 1967 (一月风暴) spelled the end of all the Provincial Committees. The first prototype of the Paris Commune was set up in Shanghai when the rebel forces took over the old Party. However, there were serious setbacks in sustaining such a commune. Not only did the old power-holders put up strenuous resistance but even the rebel forces themselves fought each other. To prevent the "comeback" of the old power holders and to quell the factional in-fighting among the factional rebel groups, Mao reluctantly ordered the Army to intervene in the power seizure struggles, asking it to support the left. As a provisional measure, he then authorized the setting up of the "Revolutionary Committee" (革命委员会) so that representatives of the Army, the revolutionary cadres, and the masses could participate in the "three-way-alliance" (三结合).

 

Between January and September 1967, six Provincial Revolutionary Committees were set up: Heilongjiang, Shanghai, Shandong, Guizhou, Shanxi, Beijing and Qinghai. At places where no Revolutionary Committees had been set up, either the rebel supervisory committees or the Military Control Commission took over. Through these organizations, Mao was able to forge a direct relationship with the populace.

 

Mao’s Assault against the Top Party Leadership

 

Meanwhile, during the 11th Plenary Session in August 1966, in addition to the “Sixteen Points”, Mao also wrote and distributed “Bombarding the Command Post – My First Big-Character Poster” (炮打司令部——我的一张大字报) insinuating the presence of bourgeois revisionists within the top party leadership, thus bringing his conflicts with Liu and Deng into the open. By the end of the session, Liu was demoted from the second to the eighth position within the Party while Lin Biao was promoted from the sixth to the second. Even though Liu and Deng retained their position within the central committee, they were in effect suspended from their work awaiting criticism for their crimes as capitalist roaders.

 

Mao’s first big-character poster was subsequently published by the People’s Daily a year later in August 1967. Public fury against Liu and Deng climaxed with cultural revolutionaries burning the picture of the duo counter-revolutionaries at Tiananmen Square. On October 13, 1968, during the 12th Plenary Session, Liu was imprisoned and expulsed from the Party as the “No.1 Capitalist Roader” and “China’s Khrushchev”. He passed away in prison a year later on November 12, 1969 in disgrace. Deng was labelled as the “No. 2 Capitalist Roader” but managed to retain his Party membership under the intervention of Mao.  

 

The lives of many other powerful figures within the Party were also upended by the turbulence. They included Peng Zhen, Mayor of Beijing and First Secretary of the city’s Party Committee, Lu Dingyi, Alternate Member of the Politburo and Head of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department as well as Minister of Culture, and Luo Ruiqing (羅瑞卿), Minister of Public Security and Chief of Staff of the PLA since 1959. Xi Zhongxun (习仲勋), the father of China’s current president, Xi Jinping, was also publicly humiliated, beaten and sent into exile. President Xi’s half-sister, Xi Heping, is said to have taken her own life after being persecuted.

 

Literary figures were also not spared. Early in 1966, the Chairman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, seventy-four-year-old Guo Moruo (郭沫若), was made to confess publicly his alleged trespasses against Mao Zedong’s thinking. The editorial boards of a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Party’s theoretical organ Red Flag (红旗) and People’s Daily (人民日报), were also purged.[6]

 

The Spread of Cultural Revolution to the Rural Areas

 

Notably, at this point, the large-scale and intensive Socialist Education Movement (SEM) was still being implemented systematically in the Chinese countryside. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1966 these two mass movements co-existed in a loosely defined relationship of functional complementarity. The SEM continued to focus primarily upon the rectification of basic-level productive and administrative units in the rural communes, while the newly-intensified CR was directed mainly at eliminating "bourgeois influences" in higher level cultural and educational institutions and leading Party organs at the municipal level. As pointed out by the “Sixteen Points” document, even though differing in focus, the two movements were intended to complement each other, with the “Cultural Revolution enriches and elevates the SEM… [and] adds momentum to the movement in cleaning up politics, ideology, organization and economics”.[7]

 

By the end of 1966, however, with the SEM completed in only a minority of China’s villages, that movement was suddenly terminated and universally supplanted by the CR. It soon became apparent that the CR was aimed at exposing and repudiating freaks and monsters in all sectors and at all levels of Chinese society. Initial rural reaction was relatively mild and cautious.  The Four Cleanup work teams continued to carry out the movement with primary emphasis on Mao-study activities. By the end of June 1967, however, news of Mao’s personal approval of the use of wall posters by the masses to expose and criticize “bourgeois powerholders” had spread to the villages. The emboldened peasants in some (mainly suburban) areas soon turned to an energetic, if at times excessive, verbal assault upon local “freaks and monster” – including, for the first time, leading Party cadres at the commune and production brigade levels.[8]

 

Many rural cadres who had previously escaped criticism and/or organizational discipline during the anti-corruption phase of the " small Four Cleanups " now came under heavy attack, while other officials who had not fared so well in the earlier period took advantage of the new situation of "big blooming and contending" (大鸣大放) to post scathing written critiques against real or imagined enemies in order to gain revenge or justify their own requests for rehabilitation. To some degree, the initial impact of the Cultural Revolution in the countryside resulted in a purgative outpouring of pent-up personal resentments and antipathies, wherein private motives were rationalized in terms of officially-sanctioned political and ideological principles. To put simply, people were seeking revenge on the pretext of conducting revolutionary activities.[9]

 

In the weeks following the mobilization and nationwide dispersal of Mao's "revolutionary little generals", indigenous groups of Red Guards were formed in the countryside. Like their urban counterparts, they took as their primary objective the destruction of the "four olds”. In some cases, multiple Red Guard units were created within a single village or production brigade, organized along local factional lines. The newly-emergent rural Red Guards came into conflict not only with competing factions within their own villages but also, on several occasions, with resident Four Cleanup work teams and urban students and Red Guards who had come to the countryside to "link up" with their peasant brothers. The result, in many cases, was a new high tide of "revolutionary repudiation" wherein various and diverse interest groups engaged in self-interested "big blooming and contending" in the villages.

 

​Rise of PLA as the Guarantor of Law and Order amid the Anarchy

 

To begin with, the army itself had very little to do with starting the process which set it on the path to power. In contrast to the usual pattern of military "takeovers," the PLA did not intervene in politics against the wish of the political leadership in order to pressure, displace, or supplant it. Nor did it intervene as a result of disaffection with the civilian regime or a desire to safeguard its sectional interests against encroachment by the civilians. Most of all, the PLA did not grab power in a coup.

 

Rather, the army was brought into the political arena by the Maoist leadership to aid it in an intra-Party conflict. Power gravitated to it in the course of a protracted process, which was neither planned nor predicted by the army high command. The initial impetus for the rise of army thus came from outside, rather than from within, the PLA.

 

One of the main reasons why Mao turned to the army was because under the leadership of Lin Biao, who promoted politicization at the expense of professionalism, the army restored its revolutionary qualities which had dissipated during Peng Dehuai’s leadership due to the latter’s emphasis on professionalism. By the 1962, the revolutionary vigour of the PLA contrasted sharply with the increasing bureaucratism and unresponsiveness of the Party apparatus. To overcome the resistance he encountered in the Party, Mao decided that it was necessary to shake up the Party and to re-infuse it with revolutionary values. He counted on Lin and the Army for support to achieve that objective.

 

This was prior to the Cultural Revolution. The objective was merely to reinvigorate the Party with revolutionary élan starting with a major "learn from the PLA" campaign during which all agencies and the masses were exhorted to emulate not only PLA as a model units but also the soldiers as selfless heroes dedicated to the communist cause. While the army readily undertook these new political functions, it made no attempt to overstep their limited purpose.

 

Things began to change with the onset of the Cultural Revolution. But even so, during the early phases, which lasted until January 1967, it was only the army high command that played a pivotal part in the unfolding struggle, while the officers and men of the PLA remained on the sidelines. In January 1967 the non-involvement of the army came to an end when the PLA was compelled to move straight to the centre of the political storm that was sweeping the country.  The Maoists’ efforts to purge the Party bureaucracy using the Red Guards were thwarted by the unexpectedly forceful resistance of the Party organizations. They decided that only the PLA had the power, the discipline and the nationwide organization needed to determine the outcome of the struggle. The PLA was therefore called in on 23 January 1967 to support the Leftist "revolutionary" forces, to the fultile objections of some of the top-ranking army leaders who worried that it would subject the PLA to dangerous strains.

 

From this juncture onward, the entire direction of the Cultural Revolution was determined decisively by the role of the PLA and its interaction with various political forces. At the Centre, these forces consisted of a handful of Maoist leaders, which had now polarized into radical and moderate wings. At the provinces, they were millions of Red Guards, which by now split into a bewildering multitude of massive and frequently rival organizations and factions.

 

Faced with imminent anarchy, however, the army at the local levels opted for order rather than revolution. In coordination with the moderate leaders in Beijing, PLA intervened in the nationwide struggle not as a radical revolutionary force but rather as a moderating and stabilizing element. Instead of supporting the Red Guards in their attempts to establish a new mass-based order to replace the shattered Party organizations, they moved in to fill the power vacuum created by the paralysis of Party and administrative organs by establishing military control and assuming major political and civil functions at the local levels. Rather than following orders to "support the left", PLA regional military commanders ordered their forces to restrain the leftist radicals, thus restoring order throughout much of China. As the only organization whose ranks for the most part had not been radicalized by Red Guard-style activities, PLA thus emerged as the principal guarantor of law and order and the de facto political authority.

 

In playing that role, however, the forcefulness of the army's response was still conditioned by the swings of the power pendulum between the radical and moderate wings of the Maoist leadership in Beijing, with Mao himself holding the balance. When the moderates were in the ascendancy, the army in the provinces got the green light to crack down on the Red Guards. Conversely, when the pendulum swung back to the radicals, in the provinces the army was restrained and the Red Guards were permitted to raise the level of "revolutionary" activity. At times, even the army units were assaulted when the Red Guards accused them of being a conservative force hindering the progress of revolution.[10]

 

The critical turning point came when the radicals overplayed their hand in the Wuhan Incident on July 20, 1967 (武汉7.20事件) during which the commander of the Wuhan Military Region Chen Zaidao (陈再道) was falsely accused of mutiny after a series of events beginning with the Wuhan army extending their support to the One Million Warriors (OMW百万雄师), a conservative group of workers who appreciated the work of the military in suppressing the anarchic activities of the Red Guards.

 

On July 19, two radicals of the Cultural Revolution Group, Wang Li (王力) and Xie Fuzhi (谢富治), visited the Red Guards when Wang openly criticized the military for supporting the OMW group before instigating the Red Guards to continue with their revolutionary struggles. His speech angered the OMW group whose members congregated the next day and forcibly ‘kidnapped’ Wang away from his hotel for ‘questioning’. Unbeknown to the ‘kidnappers’, Mao was on an unannounced visit to Wuhan and was then also staying in the same hotel. Lin Biao and Jiang Qing used that as a pretext to accuse Chen Zaidao of staging a mutiny against Mao. Many Leftist Red Guards, particularly the so-called “May 16 Corps” also called for “dragging out a handful of capitalist roaders within the Army”.[11] Red Flag editorials on 1 August 1967 written by Wang Li and Lin Chieh went even further to elevate the crisis by stating that “dragging out a handful of military persons in authority is now the general orientation of the struggle”, thus implying that there was now an all-out attack on the military.[12] In addition, "May 16" leaders also used the Wuhan crisis in allegedly attacking Zhou Enlai in wall posters as "the backer of the OMW” and accusing Zhou of being the backstage boss of Chen. Subsequent indictments of the “May 16” leaders also revealed attempts to overthrow Zhou by first deposing his vice premiers, including Foreign Minister Chen Yi, State Planning Commission Chairman Li Fuchun, Finance Minister Li Xiannian, and Public Security Minister Xie Fuzhi, who bore the brunt of their attacks.[13]

 

Most regional military leaders rallied together to defend the integrity of the Army. An enlarged Military Affairs Committee meeting was called in August 1967 to put a halt to the Red Guard assault on the Army. On September 5, the Centre issued a directive which gave the army the authority to use force in dealing with the Red Guards. To protect herself, Jiang Qing publicly declared the same day that the slogan for dragging out a handful of military leaders was counter-revolutionary. The September 5 directive became a watershed of the Cultural Revolution in that it accorded the military the power to pacify local conflicts. Mao endorsed this measure by issuing a directive to "protect the Army and cherish the people". He also purged the “May 16 Corps” leaders, namely, Qi Benyu (戚本禹), Wang Li (王力), and Kuan Feng (关锋), the most leftist supporter of Jiang Qing. [14] The September 5 directive in 1967 thus marked a triumph for the regional military leaders over Jiang Qing’s radical supporters in the Cultural Revolution Group.

 

Those military leaders who had some connections with the Corps were also purged. They were replaced with Lin Biao’s closest associates who assumed the operational leadership of the policy process at the Centre. At the provincial level too, the military dominated the Revolutionary Committees: of the 29 Revolutionary Committees completed in September 1968, the military assumed 20 chairmanships. When the new Central Committee was elected by the 9th Party Congress, the military took 12 of the 25 Politburo members and 44.1 per cent of the Central Committee members.[15]

 

At the local levels, the struggle for power between the army and the radicals was real and intense with army commanders concentrating their efforts to establish and extend their power in the face of attempts by radical elements to gain positions in the reconstituted Party organizations. To the radical Maoists, the distribution of power in the provincial Party Committees was a critical matter because they saw the army as a conservative force thwarting the achievement of their objectives. Since the new Party Committees were supposed to be predominant over the army-dominated Revolutionary Committees, the radicals viewed the reconstruction of the Party Committees as an opportunity for taking over power from the army. To this end, they sought to secure leading positions in the new Party Committees.

 

The army commanders, however, had no intention of accommodating the radical elements.  They used their political positions to ensure that the re-establishment of Party organizations would not result in a decrease of their power. Because of their cautiousness, although the process of reconstruction was launched in the autumn of 1968, the first provincial Party Committee was not established until December 1970 and the last one in August 1971. The bottom line was that the military power-holders succeeded in holding off the radicals and became the dominant force within the Party Committees as well as the Revolutionary Committees. Only Shanghai, the cradle of the Cultural Revolution and the citadel of radicalism throughout its development, succeeded in retaining a predominantly non-military leadership.[16]

 

Henceforth, as the pendulum swung back and forth, the power of the radical leaders at the Centre weakened steadily, while that of the moderates increased correspondingly. At the same time, Zhou Enlai's influence within the military rapidly rose for speaking out in support of the army commanders while mediating the conflicts.

​

In retrospect, it seems that this was the beginning of the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, even though the military-Red Guard confrontations became the main front of political conflicts, the Red Guard movement began to decline rapidly as the Centre and the Army came down hard on the ultra-Leftists in the aftermath of the Wuhan Incident in 1967. By this time, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and their fellow "revisionists" and "capitalist roaders" had been purged from public life and the Maoist group had since been in full command of the political scene. There was thus little value for further revolutionary violence. In a bid to rein in the violence, Mao sent millions of Red Guards from the cities down to the countryside for “re-education” in August 1968.

 

A new alignment of military leaders thus took shape by 1968 as Lin Biao's faction progressively dominated the top apparatus of the military. Mao continued to reign over the Army but in practice the Military Affairs Committee and the General Staff acted as the central executive bodies while the influence of the Cultural Revolution Group declined after several re-shuffles. Beginning in the autumn of 1968 the PLA also sent its propaganda teams to all functional organizations; they performed tasks of the former Party and government units.

 

Hence, during 1967-68 period, the most chaotic and violent phase of the Cultural Revolution, it was the military that provided the real leadership. As the only national structure left intact with its centralized network of Party Committees and commands, the military derived its authority from not only Mao's blessing but also its own organizational capabilities. The combination of Mao's charisma and the military kept China from slipping into anarchy. Effectively, this transformed China into a military dictatorship, which lasted until about 1971.

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REFERENCES

[1] See Hong, Junhao. (1994). “Mao Zedong's Cultural Theory and China's Three Mass-Culture Debates: A Tentative Study of Culture, Society and Politics.” Intercultural Communication Studies IV:2.

[2] For the origin of the Five-Person Cultural Revolution Small Group, see 王永魁. (2014). “ ‘文化革命五人小组’的来龙去脉.” 306doc.com. 24 October, 2014.

[3] See 王永魁. (2014). “‘文化革命五人小组’的来龙去脉.” 306doc.com. 24 October, 2014.

[4] See “The Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Revolution (The Sixteen Points)”. AlphaHistory.

[5] See See Byung-joon Ahn. (1974). “The Cultural Revolution and China's Search for Political Order”. The China Quarterly, No. 58 (Apr. - Jun., 1974), Pg. 266.

[6] See Harry G. Shaffer. (1967). “The Communist World: Marxist and Non-Marxist Views, Volume 2.” Ardent Media, Pg 178 – 181.

[7] See Richard Baum. (1969). “Revolution and Reaction in the Chinese Countryside: The Socialist Education Movement inCultural Revolutionary Perspective.” The China Quarterly, No. 38 (Apr. - Jun., 1969), Pg. 92-100.

[8] See Richard Baum. (1969). “Revolution and Reaction in the Chinese Countryside: The Socialist Education Movement inCultural Revolutionary Perspective.” The China Quarterly, No. 38 (Apr. - Jun., 1969), Pg. 92-100.

[9] See Richard Baum. (1969). “Revolution and Reaction in the Chinese Countryside: The Socialist Education Movement inCultural Revolutionary Perspective.” The China Quarterly, No. 38 (Apr. - Jun., 1969), Pg. 92-100.

[10] See Ellis Joffe. (1973). “The Chinese Army after the Cultural Revolution: The Effects of Intervention”. The China Quarterly, No. 55 (Jul. - Sep., 1973), pp. 451 – 455.

[11] See See Byung-joon Ahn. (1974). “The Cultural Revolution and China's Search for Political Order”. The China Quarterly, No. 58 (Apr. - Jun., 1974), Pg. 269.

[12] See Red Flag , No 12. 1967. Quoted in See Barry Burton. (1971). Pp 1037.

[13] See Barry Burton. (1971). “The Cultural Revolution's Ultraleft Conspiracy: The ‘May 16 Group’”. Asian Survey, Vol. 11, No. 11 (Nov., 1971), pp. 1039

[14] See人民网. (2014) “毛泽东1967年在武汉的一次遇险经历。” June 13, 2014; 薛庆超. (2015). “揭秘文革中震惊全国“兵变”事件.” 人民网. November 11, 2015.

[15] See Byung-joon Ahn. (1974). Pg. 271.

[16] See Ellis Joffe. (1973). Pg 466.