The Stalinist nature of the Chinese Communist Party and Mao was further confirmed by a second major event that sent a shockwave through the political left worldwide, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). This was widely presented as a rebellion of youth against the Party diehards, and if those old diehards were proud to call themselves Stalinist how could the youth (and their Maoist sponsors) who were struggling against them not be a genuine revolutionary force?

However, the GPCR cannot be understood unless it is appreciated that the Red Guards were a top-down phenomenon, launched, supported, guided, and eventually ended by the Maoist faction. This was quite the opposite of the revolutionary upsurge of students who erected barricades in Paris in May – June 1968, who inspired workers across France to strike and very nearly brought down the General de Gaulle government.

The CCP was a Stalinised Party and in the final resort when opposition to Mao’s adventurist policies hardened into a concerted attempt to remove him from power, the democratic façade was dropped and the Mao faction launched the GPCR to physically annihilate the capitalist roaders such as “the renegade, traitor and scab Liu Shaoqi.”[1]

This chapter will show that the GPCR was a demonstration of the lack of proletarian democracy within the CCP; that deep divisions on how to take China forward were settled, as in Russia, by the physical subjugation of the losing faction. However, Mao would be forced to launch his attacks to annihilate his fellow veteran Communists before he had made full preparations. The result was that his opponents were strong enough, at least in some areas, to organise their defence and the struggle sometimes took on the appearance of a civil war. Various estimates exist for the number of people killed during the GPCR; these vary from 750,000 to three million. With Mao’s death in 1976 his opponents staged a semi-military coup to remove his designated heirs, the ‘Gang of Four’, and consign them to lengthy prison terms. When the dust finally settled it would be Mao’s opponents who had won the struggle.

  1. MacFarquhar, R. The Politics of China, 1997, CUP, p226.

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