1966 China's cultural revolution: seventeen years after the Communist takeover, Mao Zedong launched another revolution that led to the deaths of thousands of people and the persecution of millions more.

• Author: Yardley, Jim
• Position: TIMES PAST

By the afternoon of May 25, 1966, a group of radical professors at Peking University had finally finished drafting a large political poster. They took it to a campus commons area, hung it outside, and waited for a reaction. It would not take long.

The poster was a blistering attack against university administrators for failing to obey a new political campaign by China's paramount leader, Mao Zedong.

Mao was ordering a new revolution in China--one targeting the "bourgeoisie," capitalists, and authority figures in general--and he expected the masses to revolt. The poster at Peking University became the spark Mao was hoping for. Masses of students began protesting on campus in support of the revolution.

Mao ordered that the poster's message be broadcast nationally on the radio and published in newspapers. Soon the whole country was swept up in the furor.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as the government called it, plunged China into a decade of chaos that brought the nation of 750 million people close to anarchy and civil war.

This period was so bloody and controversial that the Communist Party has barely acknowledged the Cultural Revolution's 40th anniversary this year and has banned most discussions of it in the Chinese media, and even in history textbooks (see p. 14).

It's no wonder: Students attacked teachers and teenagers attacked their parents in the name of heeding Mao's revolutionary call. People hung posters denouncing their neighbors. College and high school students across China formed groups called Red Guards that became the shock troops of the movement.

"To rebel is justified!" declared a famous slogan of the era.

Mao held massive rallies of Red Guards and called on students to destroy the so-called Four Olds: old culture, old customs, old ideas, and old habits. It was a rallying cry that unleashed the young against the old.

The Red Guards burned books and ransacked temples. Teachers, government officials, and almost anyone in authority were beaten and paraded in public wearing dunce caps. Untold thousands of people died, many killed by mobs, and millions more lost their jobs and were left destitute.

In the central Chinese city of Chongqing, Xi Qingsheng was only 15 when rival Red Guard units waged open warfare in the streets. His mother was shot and killed by a sniper as she tried to take her children away from the fighting.

"The guy who shot my mother was just shooting at anyone who came into sight," Xi, now 54, told The Times earlier this year. He tore off his shirt to sop up his mother's blood. "I was waving my white shirt, but they wouldn't stop shooting," he said. "When it finally quieted down, I climbed over to see my mother, but she was already dead."

Why did the Cultural Revolution happen? And what was Mao thinking?

Mao and the Communists had taken control of China in 1949. For the previous century, China had been dominated by foreign powers and badly weakened. Before and during World War II, Japan had occupied much of China and slaughtered many thousands of Chinese in a massacre that became known as the Rape of Nanjing.

* 'WHO LOST CHINA?'

Under Mao, the Communist Red Army helped defeat Japan and then won a civil war by forcing the army of China's Nationalist Party to flee the...