By the 1960’s Mao’s power seemed to be dwindling to the point of non-existence and seemed he would soon be on the outs of all political interactions. Understanding this Mao started an offensive in 1962 to rid his party of whom he believed were the capitalists and anti-socialists, to do so he started the Socialist Education Movement (1962-1965) which had a primary goal of restoring ideological purity in the party.Mao had began to believe that since 1949 the progress China had made led to privileged bourgeois class developing, this meant the engineers, factory managers, scientists etc. were gaining too much power at Mao’s expense. This feeling Mao had of a new mandarin Chinese class emerging in China who had no idea how a normal Chinese person should live his/her lives led to Mao’s uneasiness of a capitalist and anti-socialist take-over.
By mid 1965 Mao had slowly regained control of the party with the help of his supporters Lin Biao, Jiang Qing (Mao’s fourth wife), and Chen Boda, and by the late 1965’s one of Mao’s leading members in his “Shanghai Mafia”, Yao Wenyuan wrote an attack against the deputy mayor of Beijing, Wu Han. For the next 6 months the veil of upholding “ideological purity” Mao and his Maoist supporters started his purges of attacking a wide variety of public figures including the state Chairman Liu Shaoqi, one of the people who had original disagreements with Mao’s methods of carrying out his Socialist Education Movement. By mid-1966 Mao’s campaign had erupted into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Mao feeling that he could not trust his formal party organization because he felt it had been infected with capitalists and bourgeois turned to Lin Biao and the PLA. The PLA is a school for training a new generation of revolutionary fighters and leaders, other Maoists turned to middle-school students to make political demonstrations, attacking political figures who opposed Mao’s revolution; these middle-school students later became to be known the Red Guards. The Red Guards were driven to follow Mao and driven to ostracize Mao’s intraparty rivals by following his “four big rights” which were a list of ideal factors to live by.
The first in a serious of cultural revolutions, the activist phase, was finally brought to an end in 1969. By the end of the activist phase Mao was named as the supreme leader, Lin biao was promoted to be Mao’s successor and others who had risen to power by the Cultural Revolution were rewarded with positions on the Political Bureau. Finally Mao’s rebuilding of the CCP or Chinese Communist Party began in 1969 but not until December of 1970 did the party committee get reestablished at a provincial level.
Eventually however the work of the Red Guards got out of hand as they all fought each other on the terms of having differing opinions of how China should continue forward. In fact things got so out of hand that they turned their anger on foreigners, resulting in attacks on foreign embassies, in fact the British embassy was even burned down completely. Finally Zhou Enlai, an able diplomat and man instrumental in the Chinese Communist’s Party rise to power urged for China to return back to normality once he realized that the Cultural Revolution had spiraled out of control.
In 1976 three of the highest ranking members of the CCP died, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and most importantly of all, in September of 1976 Mao Zedong died. After Mao’s death the CCP and the Cultural
Revolution seemed to have come to a halt. Although it wasn’t only the death of the three highest ranking members that ended the Cultural Revolution. In April of 1976 masses of demonstrators brutally criticized Mao’s closest associates, In June of 1976 the government declared that Mao would no longer be receiving foreign visitors, and in July an earthquake devastated parts of China. All of these events put China into a state of political uncertainty and ended the Cultural Revolution.