Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was a political campaign launched by Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, to remove those he saw as bourgeois or revisionist from the party and to renew revolutionary spirit, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward had weakened his position. Young people formed Red Guard groups that attacked teachers, officials and intellectuals, destroyed temples and books, and carried out public humiliations known as struggle sessions. Schools and universities were closed, and the head of state, Liu Shaoqi, was purged and died in custody. The army had to restore order in the late 1960s, and the movement subsided after Mao's death. Estimates of the dead range from hundreds of thousands to millions, and the party later called it a disaster.

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