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China The Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-76
In the early 1960s, Mao was on the political sidelines and in
semiseclusion. By 1962, however, he began an offensive to purify
the party, having grown increasingly uneasy about what he believed
were the creeping "capitalist" and antisocialist tendencies in the
country. As a hardened veteran revolutionary who had overcome the
severest adversities, Mao continued to believe that the material
incentives that had been restored to the peasants and others were
corrupting the masses and were counterrevolutionary.
To arrest the so-called capitalist trend, Mao launched the
Socialist Education Movement
(1962-65; see Glossary),
in which the
primary emphasis was on restoring ideological purity, reinfusing
revolutionary fervor into the party and government bureaucracies,
and intensifying class struggle. There were internal disagreements,
however, not on the aim of the movement but on the methods of
carrying it out. Opposition came mainly from the moderates
represented by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were unsympathetic
to Mao's policies. The Socialist Education Movement was soon paired
with another Mao campaign, the theme of which was "to learn from
the People's Liberation Army." Minister of National Defense Lin
Biao's rise to the center of power was increasingly conspicuous. It
was accompanied by his call on the PLA and the CCP to accentuate
Maoist thought as the guiding principle for the Socialist Education
Movement and for all revolutionary undertakings in China.
In connection with the Socialist Education Movement, a thorough
reform of the school system, which had been planned earlier to
coincide with the Great Leap Forward, went into effect. The reform
was intended as a work-study program--a new xiafang
movement--in which schooling was slated to accommodate the work
schedule of communes and factories. It had the dual purpose of
providing mass education less expensively than previously and of
re-educating intellectuals and scholars to accept the need for
their own participation in manual labor. The drafting of
intellectuals for manual labor was part of the party's
rectification campaign, publicized through the mass media as an
effort to remove "bourgeois" influences from professional workers--
particularly, their tendency to have greater regard for their own
specialized fields than for the goals of the party. Official
propaganda accused them of being more concerned with having
"expertise" than being
"red" (see Glossary).
Data as of July 1987
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