After the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which was launched by Mao Zedong and his supporters, the People's Republic of China went through the Boluan Fanzheng period and started its Reform and Opening period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Various evaluations and studies on the Cultural Revolution have since emerged and continued to appear, both within and outside mainland China. During general secretaryship of Xi Jinping, evaluation and open discussion of the Cultural Revolution in China has been censored.
Academic evaluations
Scholars and academics debate the origin, the events, Mao's role, and its legacy. These debates evolved as researchers explored new sources. In the 1960s, while many scholars dismissed Mao's initiatives as ideological and destructive, others sympathized with his goals. They saw Maoism as a populist insistence on mass participation, mass criticism and the right to rebel, and a determination to wipe out a new ruling class. By the 1980s, however, sociologist Andrew Walder wrote that the "public opinion in the field had changed markedly". Most in the field now "seem convinced that the Cultural Revolution was a human disaster, even a historical crime, something on the order of Hitler's holocaust and Stalin's great terror."
Walder argued that the failures of the Cultural Revolution did not come from poor implementation, bureaucratic sabotage, disloyalty, or lingering class antagonisms. If things turned out differently than Mao expected, Walder concluded, this was "probably due to the fact that Mao did not know what he wanted, or that he did know what he was doing, or both ... the outcomes are what one should have expected, given the Maoist doctrine and aims."
The debate continues because the movement contains many contradictions: led by an all-powerful omnipresent leader, it was mainly driven by a series of grassroots popular uprisings. Many English-language books published since the 1980s paint a negative picture of the movement. Historian Anne F. Thurston wrote that it "led to loss of culture, and of spiritual values; loss of hope and ideals; loss of time, truth and of life". Barnouin and Yu summarized the Cultural Revolution as "a political movement that produced unprecedented social divisions, mass mobilization, hysteria, upheavals, arbitrary cruelty, torture, killings, and even civil war", calling Mao "one of the most tyrannical despots of the twentieth century". According to historian Chun Lin, despite these human tragedies, individual freedoms and political self-organization expanded rapidly.
Some scholars challenge the mainstream portrayals and conceive it in a more positive light. Gao Mobo, writing in The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, argues that the movement benefited millions of Chinese citizens, particularly agricultural and industrial workers, and sees it as egalitarian and genuinely populist, citing continued Maoist nostalgia today as remnants of its positive legacy. Some draw a distinction between intention and performance. While Mao's leadership was pivotal at the beginning of the movement, Jin Qiu contends that as events progressed, it deviated significantly from Mao's utopian vision. In this sense, the Cultural Revolution was actually a decentralized and varied movement that gradually lost cohesion, spawning many 'local revolutions' that differed in their nature and goals.
Academic interest focused on the movement's relationship with Mao's personality. Mao envisioned himself as a wartime guerrilla leader, which made him wary of the bureaucratic nature of peacetime governance. With the Cultural Revolution Mao was simply "returning to form", once again acting as a guerrilla leader fighting an institutionalized bureaucracy. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, paint the movement as neither a bona fide war over ideological purity nor a mere power struggle to remove Mao's political rivals.
While Mao's personal motivations were undoubtedly pivotal, they reasoned that other factors contributed to the way events unfolded. These include China's relationship with the global communist movement, geopolitical concerns, the Sino-Soviet Split, Khrushchev's ouster, and Great Leap Forward catastrophe. They conclude that the movement was, at least in part, a legacy project to cement Mao's place in history, aimed to boost his prestige while he was alive and preserve his ideas after his death.
Varying academic focuses on power conflicts or clashes of personalities as underlying Mao's motivations, or alternatively on ideological reasons for launching the Cultural Revolution, are not necessarily conflicting. Mao's suspicions of those in power around him reflected his longstanding concerns with the decline of revolutionary spirit and the potential rise of a new class-stratified society arising as the popular revolutionary movement transformed into a socialist bureaucracy. Historian Rebecca Karl writes that for Mao, the pursuit of power was never an end in itself, but rather the seizure of state power was to be used in making the revolution.
Professor Yiching Wu argues that the typical historiography of the Cultural Revolution as an "era of madness" is simpleminded but writes that such narratives have a "remarkably tenacious ideological power:"
Chinese Communist Party
To make sense of the chaos caused by Mao's leadership without undermining the Chinese Communist Party CCP's authority and legitimacy, Mao's successors needed to provide a "proper" historical judgment. On 27 June 1981, the Central Committee adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China, an official assessment of major historical events since 1949. This document became the official interpretation of the Cultural Revolution.
The 1981 Resolution noted Mao's leadership role in the movement, stating that "chief responsibility for the grave 'Left' error of the 'Cultural Revolution,' an error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration, does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong". It diluted blame by asserting that the movement was "manipulated by the counterrevolutionary groups of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing", who caused its worst excesses. The Resolution affirmed that the Cultural Revolution "brought serious disaster and turmoil to the Communist Party and the Chinese people." These themes of "turmoil" and "disaster" underlie historical and popular understanding of the Cultural Revolution. The Resolution was followed by a three-year campaign to "totally negate" the Cultural Revolution. The CCP called on individuals and cooperatives to study the Resolution and engage in criticism and self-criticism. People were urged to root out followers of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, those seriously impacted by factional ideas, and the "smashers and grabbers" of the Cultural Revolution.
The official view in the Resolution and elsewhere aimed to separate Mao's actions during the Cultural Revolution from his "heroic" revolutionary activities during the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. It also separated Mao's personal mistakes from the correctness of the theory that he created, going as far as to rationalize that the Cultural Revolution contravened the spirit of Mao Zedong Thought, which remains the official guiding ideology. Deng famously summed this up with the phrase "Mao was 70% good, 30% bad."
CCP ideology characterizes the Cultural Revolution as an aberration and a period of chaos. The official view is the dominant framework for historiography of the period; alternative are discouraged. A new genre of literature known as scar literature emerged, encouraged by the post-Mao government. Written mainly by educated youth such as Liu Xinhua, Zhang Xianliang, and Liu Xinwu, scar literature depicted the Cultural Revolution negatively, based on their own perspectives and experiences. Movies criticizing Cultural Revolution hardliners were prevalent from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, although they were later banned by the authorities as promoting "historical nihilism."
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, both liberals and conservatives within the CCP accused each other of excesses that they claimed were reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Li Peng, who promoted the use of military force, claimed that the student movement had taken inspiration from the populism of the Cultural Revolution and that if left unchecked, would eventually lead to mass chaos.AsiaNews.it Zhao Ziyang, who was sympathetic to the protestors, later accused his political opponents of illegally removing him from office by using "Cultural Revolution-style" tactics, including "reversing black and white, exaggerating personal offenses, taking quotes out of context, issuing slander and lies ... inundating the newspapers with critical articles making me out to be an enemy, and casual disregard for my personal freedoms." Speaking during his 1992 Southern Tour, Deng Xiaoping characterized the Cultural Revolution as civil war and contrasting it with the contemporary situation: "Why was it that our country could remain stable after the 4 June Incident? It was precisely because we had carried out the reform and the open policy, which have promoted economic growth and raised living standards."
In the 2000s, publication of accounts and evaluations of the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of victims became increasingly proscribed. During general secretaryship of Xi Jinping, independent evaluation and open discussion of the Cultural Revolution in China has been censored in both academia and online.
Religion In 1981, The Basic Viewpoint and Policy on the Religious Question during Our Country's Socialist Period (commonly known as Document No. 19) revised the CCP's stance on religion and identified some specific policies and regulations. Document No. 19 states that attempts to eliminate religion through coercion are counterproductive. It particularly criticized the Gang of Four's measures against religious adherents during the Cultural Revolution, and which forced some religious currents underground.
Public views in mainland China
The New Enlightenment movement
After the Cultural Revolution, a massive social and cultural movement known as the "New Enlightenment" took place in mainland China since the late 1970s. Growing out of the "1978 Truth Criterion Discussion" during the Boluan Fanzheng period, the movement was led by intellectuals and opposed the ideology of Cultural Revolution and feudalism. The New Enlightenment movement called for the revival of "democracy and science", which was the old theme of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, and promoted humanism and universal values within the Chinese society. A number of new literature genres such as the scar literature and the misty poetry emerged which focused on the reflection of the Cultural Revolution. Ba Jin, a notable Chinese writer, further called on the Chinese society to establish Cultural Revolution museums:"Let history not be repeated" must not be an empty phrase. In order that everyone sees clearly and remembers clearly, it is necessary to build a museum of the "Cultural Revolution," exhibiting concrete and real objects, and reconstructing striking scenes which will testify to what took place on this Chinese soil twenty years ago! Everyone will recall the march of events there, and each will recall his or her behavior during that decade.The New Enlightenment movement ended due to the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. After Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in early 1992, however, intellectuals in mainland China became divided and formed two major schools of thought, the Liberalism and the New Left, which held different views on the Cultural Revolution.