Cultural Revolution Quotes

“Wikipedia: Cultural Revolution”

“‘Surviving the Cultural Revolution’: A Poem by Brian Yapko, the Society of Classical Poets (August 31, 2025)”

“"How Mao’s Cultural Revolution Made War On The Private Mind" by Stella Morabito at The Federalist (October 17, 2022)”

“The most obvious result of the Cultural Revolution, and perforce the starting point for any evaluation of the upheaval and its consequences, is that it took a fearsome toll of human lives. Of the number killed, no official count was taken at the time. Such official figures as have emerged from the post-Mao regime are fragmentary at best. The estimates of outside observers vary greatly; depending on the political proclivities of the observer. But even official statistics, however incomplete and scattered, suggest killings on a massive scale.”

“Yet unity was to prove an elusive goal, and the nature of the victory was difficult to define. The Cultural Revolution had begun with a wholesale attack on the Communist Party; it ended with the resurrection of the Party in its orthodox Leninist form, albeit shorn of Mao's more prominent opponents. In 1966-67 a massive popular movement had flourished on the basis of the principle that "the masses must liberate themselves"; by 1969 the mass movement had disintegrated, and selected remnants of it had been absorbed by old bureaucratic apparatuses.”

“The Cultural Revolution swept up all of China. So many people suffered that it is difficult to count the number of victims accurately. This is all the more true of the persecutors. Yet few reflect and apologize. The terror of the Red Guards, the armed fights between the rebellious sects, the teams established to “cleanse” the social classes, and all the bloody massacres are simply left to rot in China’s memory. The official ban blocks reflection, but human weakness and careerist self-interest among those who participated buttresses the official ban.”

“Any reasonable thesis raised about the Cultural Revolution will be met with an equally reasonable rebuttal; any historical account will be criticized by someone as one-sided, because most of the people who experienced the Cultural Revolution are still alive and well, and their different roles and situations during the Cultural Revolution gave them different perspectives and experiences. The criticisms of these participants are very valuable and push researchers ever closer to historical truth, but this invaluable resource for contemporary history presents its own difficulties.”

“During the Cultural Revolution, people were “rebelling,” whereas before that people were "making revolution." However, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, people avoided talking about rebelling, or simply forgot that part of history. Everyone has become a victim of that great catastrophe known as the Cultural Revolution and has forgotten that before disaster fell upon their own heads, they, too, were to some extent the assailants. The history of the Cultural Revolution is thus being continually revised. It is best that you do not try to write a history, but only to look back upon your own experiences.”

“The great failure of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not that it did not bring fundamental social changes. In conditions of economic scarcity, any attempt to radically transform the existing division of labor and abolish class distinctions surely would have resulted in economic chaos and social regression. The real failure of the Cultural Revolution was that it did not produce democratic political institutions that might have permitted the working population to acquire control over the means of production and eventually, as they developed modem productive forces, bring about their own socioeconomic emancipation and the emancipation of society as a whole.”

“Most of the 1960s saw China alone, internationally isolated and descending into ever deeper political campaigns to satisfy Mao’s thirst for societal transformation. Economic progress suffered. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, proclaimed by Mao in 1966, made politics the judge of all things. “It is better to be Red than to be an expert,” was one of its slogans. The result was a chaotic society, in which violence and dislocation were rife. By the end of their second decade in power, the Chinese Communists presided over a country that appeared on the verge of civil war. China’s entry into the Cold War seemed to deliver the opposite of what most Chinese had expected.”

“For each participant, the Cultural Revolution meant something different. For many, it was an attempt to realize political ideals: socialism, equality, a responsive modern state, or rule by the people. For Party leaders, it was largely a struggle for personal power. For most youths, it was a period of traveling and politicking. Many managed to sit on the sidelines, taking cover until the storm cleared. The perceived meaning of this event could change at different times like a kaleidoscope, even for a single person. Yet an overarching significance of the Cultural Revolution for most people, no matter what else it meant, lay in seemingly arbitrary violence. Many Chinese now feel that such destructive chaos should never be allowed to occur again.”

“Mao's last decade was as full of confusion and surprises as the 1790s in France. In size and complexity the Cultural Revolution was of course a much bigger event than the French Revolution. At any rate, it will be studied from many angles for a long time to come. Probably its most arresting feature in retrospect was its disastrous attack on learning and intellectuals in the very land that had exalted scholarship and invented civil service examinations thirteen hundred years before. In fact, the two were not unconnected—learning was attacked in China because it seemed to be so entrenched in the establishment. This historical circumstance makes the Cultural Revolution hard to understand without reference to history.”

“The persecution of intellectuals and cadres has been widely publicized both within and outside China. It is less well known that while virtually all factions involved in the Cultural Revolution engaged in violence and committed atrocities in what became a seemingly endless cycle of violence and revenge, the greatest atrocities and a heavy share of the killings appear to have been the work of the PLA, especially in the general repression of radical Red Guard and workers' organizations in the summer of 1968. It is hardly surprising that this should have been the case when an armed, organized military force was given (or assumed) a free hand to rid the country of an anarchistic and poorly armed popular movement whose members had perhaps taken too literally the Maoist slogan "Dare to rebel."”

“Mao died aspiring to exterminate Chinese culture. His Cultural Revolution alone killed as many as two million people, shattered traditions, uprooted spiritual and ethical values, and tore apart family ties and communal loyalties. People who experienced it seal off the memory, for the pain, worse than a bullet to the heart, overwhelms souls.
Worst of all, Mao’s crimes against civilization, unlike those of, say, Hitler, are ongoing. The Communist Party still uses his brainwashing methods, and his legacy continues to be officially revered. His portrait and body remain on display in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and his face appears on banknotes in the wallet of every Chinese, many of whom saw parents, children, and other loved ones die under his knife.”

“I should remind you that Chairman Mao dedicated most of his life to China, that he saved the party and the revolution in their most critical moments, that, in short, his contribution was so great that, without him, the Chinese people would have had a much harder time finding the right path out of the darkness. We also shouldn't forget that it was Chairman Mao who combined the teachings of Marx and Lenin with the realities of Chinese history—that it was he who applied those principles, creatively, not only to politics but to philosophy, art, literature, and military strategy. Yes, before the 1960s—or, better, up until the late 1950s—some of Chairman Mao's ideas were, for the most part, correct. Furthermore, many of his principles brought us victory and allowed us to gain power. Then, unfortunately, in the last few years of his life, he committed many grave errors—the Cultural Revolution, above all. And much disgrace was brought upon the party, the country, the people.”

“The Cultural Revolution shows that the scope of the possible is determined by the presence or absence of pluralization. Yet we have to reckon with the historical reality that dismissal took a devastating form alongside an exceptional process of pluralization. How can we define our relation to this historical experience, that is, the experience of saturation and exhaustion of the party-state, which cannot simply be revived? Furthermore, how do we orient ourselves to the present, framed by the seeming impossibility of pluralization?
Above all, is it possible to invent new ways of doing politics? In the absence of an answer, we are left only with the grim necessity of finding ways to refuse the logic of the governmental sensibility, the alternative being at best the foreclosure of any possibility of pluralization, or at worst the revival of ever more morbid forms of dismissal.
Thus the search for a new historical mode of politics that can refuse dismissal is pressing. Because we will probably be defeated, now more than ever.”

“The living legacy of the Cultural Revolution, in other words, is a communist party that has survived the transition to an utterly transformed economic system that bears little resemblance to the Soviet model; however, it has done so by holding on tightly to a somewhat modified but fundamentally unreformed version of Soviet-style political dictatorship. This outcome, of course, was not at all what the initiators of the Cultural Revolution intended; in almost every sense, it is the virtual opposite and is impossible to square with any version of Maoist ideology. China today is the very definition of what the Cultural Revolution was intended to forestall. It is a caricature of a Maoist’s worst nightmare: the degeneration of the Party into a capitalist oligarchy with unprecedented levels of corruption and inequality. This does not mean simply that the Cultural Revolution failed to achieve its goals; it actually created political circumstances that facilitated the turn to market reform and enhanced the regime’s prospect for survival, making China’s trajectory so different from that of the Soviet Union.”

“The Cultural Revolution not only failed to produce permanent institutions of popular self-government but also failed to resolve the more immediate problems of political succession. One of the original aims of the Cultural Revolution was to "train revolutionary successors." But in the summer of 1968, when Mao summoned Red Guard leaders to his "proletarian headquarters" to inform them that the time had come to end their rebellions (and then dispatched most of their followers to the countryside), it was an admission that the young generation had failed the political test. Nor did the Cultural Revolution yield an answer to the short-term question of political succession at the top-in effect, the question of who would (or who possibly could) succeed Mao. If the masses were politically quiet after 1968, that was not the case in the Politburo, where the unresolved issues of the Cultural Revolution were to erupt into fierce political struggles in the 1970s and throw its participants into a Byzantine world of political intrigue.”

“Only when the Cultural Revolution was waning in the cities in 1966-69 was the movement extended to the countryside. There were political and social conflicts in the villages, but they were relatively benign in comparison to the struggles that had racked the cities. The situation varied enormously from region to region and from village to village. Some villages split into political factions, mimicking those in the cities or in nearby middle schools, but the divisions of ten were based more on old clan and neighborhood differences than on political ones. In many areas there was an intensification of class antagonisms, but this usually involved "poor and lower-middle peasant associations" reenacting old hatreds against former landlords and rich peasants, based on the memory of class divisions that had long ago ceased to exist. One result was of ten the persecution of individuals stigmatized with "bad" class labels, but it was hardly the "life and death" class struggle depicted in the official press. In the countryside, as Richard Kraus has pointed out, there was a particularly strong tendency to translate old class designations into new caste categories.”

“China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of the past three decades. Chinese poverty until Mao Zedong's death had nothing to do with Chinese culture; it was due to the disastrous way Mao organized the economy and conducted politics. In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted. This again led to terror and a huge waste of the society’s talent and resources. In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong's death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry.”