History of Chinese Culture/Chapter 13

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History of Chinese Culture

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Chapter 13: Culture under Mao — Revolution, Destruction, and Reinvention (1949–1976)

1. Introduction: The Radical Transformation of Culture

The founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, inaugurated the most radical and systematic attempt to transform a civilization's culture in all of human history. Mao Zedong (毛泽东, 1893–1976) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not merely seek to change the political and economic structure of Chinese society — they sought to change its culture at every level: its values, its social relationships, its artistic expression, its religious beliefs, its daily practices, its very language and thought. The Maoist revolution was, at its core, a cultural revolution — an attempt to create a "new socialist man" (社会主义新人, shehui zhuyi xinren) whose consciousness, values, and behavior would be fundamentally different from those of any previous generation.

The cultural history of the Mao era (1949–1976) is a story of extraordinary contradictions. It was a period of genuine achievements — the expansion of literacy and basic education, the emancipation of women from some of the most oppressive features of traditional patriarchal culture, the creation of a national cultural infrastructure (publishing houses, film studios, theaters, museums, libraries), and the development of new artistic forms that gave expression to the experiences and aspirations of millions of people who had previously been excluded from cultural production. But it was also a period of devastating cultural destruction — the systematic dismantling of traditional religious, intellectual, and artistic practices; the persecution of intellectuals, artists, and religious practitioners; the suppression of creative freedom and individual expression; and, above all, the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which unleashed a decade of cultural vandalism, political terror, and social chaos that inflicted incalculable damage on China's cultural heritage and on the lives of millions of Chinese people.

This chapter examines the cultural history of the Mao era under nine headings: the socialist transformation of culture; the destruction of traditional rural culture; the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns; revolutionary art and literature; the model works; the Cultural Revolution as cultural catastrophe; the "Four Olds" campaign; the resilience of folk culture; and the cultural legacy of the Mao era.

2. The Socialist Transformation of Culture

The CCP's approach to culture was shaped by Mao Zedong's influential essay "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" (在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话, Zai Yan'an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua, 1942), which established the fundamental principles that would govern cultural policy throughout the Mao era. Mao argued that literature and art must serve the revolutionary struggle and the interests of the masses — workers, peasants, and soldiers — and that artists and intellectuals must submit their work to the judgment of political criteria rather than aesthetic ones. "There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake," Mao declared; "all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines." This insistence on the subordination of art to politics — the instrumentalization of culture as a tool of revolutionary transformation — would be the defining feature of cultural policy throughout the Mao era.

The practical implementation of this policy began immediately after the establishment of the People's Republic. The CCP created a comprehensive cultural bureaucracy — the Ministry of Culture, the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the Writers' Union, the Artists' Association, and a network of provincial and local cultural organizations — that brought all forms of cultural production under centralized political control. Private publishers, film studios, theaters, and newspapers were nationalized or closed. Intellectuals, artists, and writers were organized into work units (单位, danwei) and subjected to regular campaigns of political study and ideological criticism (批评, piping) designed to ensure their conformity with the Party line.

The cultural transformation of the early 1950s also involved the creation of new cultural institutions designed to serve the masses. Literacy campaigns — particularly the massive campaign launched in 1952 — taught tens of millions of adults to read and write, using simplified Chinese characters (简体字, jiantizi) that the government introduced in 1956 to reduce the barriers to literacy. New schools, libraries, cultural centers, and cinemas were established throughout the country, bringing cultural resources to communities that had never had access to them before. The standardization of the national language — putonghua (普通话, "common speech"), based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin — was promoted through the education system and the mass media, creating for the first time a genuinely national spoken language that could be understood by Chinese people of all regions.

3. Land Reform and the Destruction of Traditional Rural Culture

The land reform campaign (土地改革, tudi gaige, 1950–1953), which redistributed the land of China's approximately four million landlord families to hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants, was the most consequential social transformation in Chinese history — and it had equally profound cultural consequences.

The landlord class had been, for centuries, the social foundation of Chinese rural culture. The great landlord families — who were typically also the most educated, the most culturally active, and the most religiously prominent members of their communities — had maintained the temples, funded the festivals, supported the schools, preserved the genealogies, organized the rituals, and sustained the cultural traditions that gave Chinese village life its distinctive character. The destruction of the landlord class through land reform — which involved not merely the confiscation of their land but public "struggle sessions" (批斗会, pidouhui) in which landlords were denounced, humiliated, beaten, and in many cases killed by their former tenants — destroyed the social class that had been the primary bearer of traditional rural culture.

The collectivization of agriculture (1953–1958), which organized peasant households first into mutual aid teams, then into cooperatives, and finally into people's communes (人民公社, renmin gongshe), further disrupted traditional cultural patterns by dissolving the family farm — the basic economic unit of Chinese rural society for millennia — and replacing it with collective institutions that restructured the daily routines, social relationships, and cultural practices of village life. The commune system was designed not only to increase agricultural productivity but to transform rural culture: to replace "feudal" practices (religious worship, ancestral ritual, fortune-telling, traditional medicine) with "scientific" and "socialist" practices, to weaken the authority of the traditional family and the clan, and to mobilize the peasantry for collective production and political participation.

The Great Leap Forward (大跃进, Da yuejin, 1958–1962) — Mao's disastrous campaign to achieve rapid industrialization and agricultural modernization through mass mobilization and revolutionary enthusiasm — carried the destruction of traditional rural culture to its extreme. The establishment of commune mess halls, which replaced family cooking and family meals with collective dining, was a direct assault on one of the most fundamental institutions of Chinese culture — the family meal. The massive mobilization of labor for iron smelting, dam building, and other construction projects disrupted the agricultural calendar and the seasonal rhythms that had structured rural life for centuries. And the famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward — which caused an estimated 30 to 45 million deaths between 1959 and 1961 — was a catastrophe that devastated rural communities and destroyed countless cultural traditions, artifacts, and practices.

4. The Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign

The Hundred Flowers Movement (百花运动, Baihua yundong, 1956–1957) and the Anti-Rightist Campaign (反右运动, Fanyou yundong, 1957–1958) that followed it constituted one of the most consequential episodes in the cultural history of the People's Republic — an episode that permanently damaged the relationship between the Communist Party and China's intellectuals and that established a climate of fear and self-censorship that would pervade Chinese intellectual life for decades.

In early 1956, Mao invited intellectuals to voice their criticisms of the Party and the government, declaring that the Party should "let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend" (百花齐放, 百家争鸣, baihua qifang, baijia zhengming). The intellectuals' response — which included criticism of the Party's monopoly on power, the suppression of academic freedom, the persecution of non-Marxist ideas, and the arrogance and incompetence of Party cadres — was far more extensive and far more radical than Mao had anticipated. In June 1957, the Party abruptly reversed course and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which labeled more than 550,000 intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, and professionals as "Rightists" (右派, youpai) and subjected them to public denunciation, loss of employment, imprisonment, exile to labor camps, and in some cases death.

The cultural consequences of the Anti-Rightist Campaign were devastating and long-lasting. The persecution of more than half a million of China's most educated and talented citizens — many of them the best writers, scientists, artists, and scholars of their generation — was an act of cultural self-mutilation whose effects would be felt for decades. The campaign taught China's intellectuals that honest expression of opinion was fatally dangerous, and the resulting climate of fear, conformity, and self-censorship stifled intellectual and artistic creativity for the remainder of the Mao era and beyond. Many of the "Rightists" — including the writer Ding Ling (丁玲, 1904–1986), the journalist Chu Anping (储安平, 1909–1966?), and hundreds of thousands of less famous victims — spent decades in labor camps or internal exile, their talents wasted and their lives destroyed.

5. Revolutionary Art and Literature

Despite the constraints of political censorship and ideological conformity, the Mao era produced a distinctive body of art and literature that, at its best, achieved genuine artistic quality and cultural significance. The dominant aesthetic was "Socialist Realism" (社会主义现实主义, shehui zhuyi xianshi zhuyi) — the Soviet-derived artistic doctrine that demanded the realistic portrayal of "typical" characters in "typical" circumstances, the positive depiction of workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the celebration of the revolutionary struggle and the construction of socialism.

The visual arts of the Mao era — propaganda posters, oil paintings, woodcuts, New Year prints (年画, nianhua), and public sculpture — created a distinctive visual culture that permeated every aspect of daily life. The propaganda poster, in particular, became a ubiquitous art form: colorful, optimistic, and easily understood, it depicted idealized images of workers, peasants, and soldiers building a socialist future, and it served as the primary medium of visual communication between the Party and the masses. The best of these posters — created by skilled artists working within the constraints of political directives — achieved a graphic power and iconic clarity that transcended their propagandistic function and that have since become objects of aesthetic appreciation and collector interest.

Revolutionary literature — novels, short stories, poems, plays, and reportage that depicted the revolutionary struggle and the construction of socialism — was produced in enormous quantities during the Mao era. The most successful works combined political orthodoxy with genuine literary skill and emotional authenticity. Zhao Shuli (赵树理, 1906–1970), a writer from rural Shanxi who drew on local dialect, folk traditions, and firsthand knowledge of village life, created fiction that was both politically acceptable and artistically engaging — a rare achievement in the Mao era. The novels Hongyan (红岩, Red Crag, 1961) by Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, and Chuangye shi (创业史, Builders of a New Life, 1960) by Liu Qing, were among the most widely read and culturally influential works of fiction produced during the period.

Revolutionary film also achieved notable successes. The Chinese film industry, nationalized after 1949 and centered on studios in Beijing, Shanghai, and Changchun, produced a substantial body of films — war epics, revolutionary dramas, comedies, and children's films — that reached audiences of hundreds of millions. Films like Baimao nu (白毛女, The White-Haired Girl, 1950), Shangganling (上甘岭, Battle on Shangganling Mountain, 1956), and Wuduojinhua (五朵金花, Five Golden Flowers, 1959) became iconic works of Chinese cinema and left a lasting imprint on the collective memory of the generation that grew up with them.

6. The Model Works

The "model works" (样板戏, yangbanxi, literally "model theatrical works") — a set of eight revolutionary operas, ballets, and symphonic works designated as the only permissible theatrical and musical performances during the Cultural Revolution — represent the most extreme expression of the Maoist doctrine that art must serve politics.

The model works were developed under the personal supervision of Jiang Qing (江青, 1914–1991), Mao's wife, who served as the de facto arbiter of cultural policy during the Cultural Revolution. They included five revolutionary Peking operas — Hongdeng ji (红灯记, "The Red Lantern"), Shajiabang (沙家浜), Zhiqu Weihushan (智取威虎山, "Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy"), Haigang (海港, "On the Docks"), and Qixi Baihu tuan (奇袭白虎团, "Raid on the White Tiger Regiment") — as well as the revolutionary ballets Hongse niangzi jun (红色娘子军, "The Red Detachment of Women") and Baimao nu (白毛女, "The White-Haired Girl"), and the symphonic work Shajiabang.

The model works were simultaneously propaganda vehicles and genuine artistic achievements. They combined the traditional forms of Peking opera — singing, recitation, acrobatics, and stylized movement — with Western orchestration, ballet technique, and stage technology to create a theatrical hybrid that was unprecedented in the history of Chinese theater. The music, composed by some of China's most talented musicians, was often of high quality — melodic, dramatically effective, and masterfully orchestrated. The choreography of the revolutionary ballets, which combined classical ballet technique with Chinese folk dance and martial arts, created a new dance vocabulary that was both visually striking and emotionally powerful.

During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, the model works were performed thousands of times, broadcast on radio and television, adapted for film, and reproduced in every conceivable medium — recordings, songbooks, posters, paintings, ceramics, and even postage stamps. For the generation of Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, the model works constituted virtually the entire available repertoire of professional artistic performance, and their melodies, characters, and dramatic situations became deeply embedded in the collective consciousness. The cultural legacy of the model works is complex: they are simultaneously monuments to artistic creativity, instruments of political manipulation, and symbols of cultural impoverishment.

7. The Cultural Revolution as Cultural Catastrophe

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (无产阶级文化大革命, Wuchan jieji wenhua da geming, 1966–1976) was the most destructive cultural event in Chinese history — a decade of political turmoil, ideological fanaticism, and social violence that inflicted incalculable damage on China's cultural heritage, its intellectual life, and its social fabric.

The Cultural Revolution was launched by Mao Zedong in May 1966 with the explicit aim of destroying the "Four Olds" (四旧, si jiu) — old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas — and creating a revolutionary culture purged of all vestiges of the "feudal," "bourgeois," and "revisionist" past. Mao mobilized millions of young people — organized as "Red Guards" (红卫兵, Hongweibing) — to attack the perceived enemies of the revolution: intellectuals, artists, teachers, officials, and anyone suspected of harboring "bourgeois" or "feudal" attitudes.

The Cultural Revolution also had a devastating impact on China's educational system. Schools and universities were closed from 1966 to the early 1970s, and when they reopened, academic standards had been drastically lowered and admission was based on political criteria rather than academic merit. The generation of young people who were denied proper education during this period — the "sent-down youth" (知青, zhiqing), millions of urban young people who were dispatched to the countryside to "learn from the peasants" — lost years of educational opportunity that could never be recovered. The closure of universities, the persecution of professors and researchers, and the subordination of academic inquiry to political ideology set back Chinese science, scholarship, and intellectual life by at least a generation.

The violence of the Red Guards was directed not only against people but against the material heritage of Chinese civilization. Temples, monasteries, churches, and shrines were ransacked and destroyed. Libraries, museums, and private collections were looted and burned. Ancestral tablets, religious images, classical texts, paintings, calligraphies, and antiquities — the accumulated cultural treasures of centuries — were smashed, burned, or thrown into rivers. The Confucian temple at Qufu (曲阜), the hometown of Confucius and the most sacred site of the Confucian tradition, was attacked by Red Guards who smashed the ancient steles, desecrated the tombs of Confucius and his descendants, and destroyed artifacts that had been preserved for two thousand years.

The human cost of the Cultural Revolution was equally devastating. Intellectuals, artists, writers, musicians, scientists, professors, and teachers were subjected to public denunciation, physical violence, imprisonment, and forced labor. Many were beaten to death; many committed suicide. The historian Wu Han (吴晗, 1909–1969), whose historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office had been the ostensible trigger for the Cultural Revolution, died in prison. The novelist Lao She (老舍, 1899–1966), one of the greatest Chinese writers of the twentieth century, was beaten by Red Guards and reportedly drowned himself in a lake the following day. The pianist Gu Shengying (顾圣婴, 1937–1967) took her own life together with her mother and brother. These are only a few of the most famous victims; the total number of those persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, killed, or driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution has been estimated in the millions.

8. The "Four Olds" Campaign and Resilience of Folk Culture

The campaign to "Destroy the Four Olds" (破四旧, po si jiu) was the Cultural Revolution's most direct assault on traditional Chinese culture. The "Four Olds" — old customs (旧风俗), old culture (旧文化), old habits (旧习惯), and old ideas (旧思想) — encompassed virtually every aspect of traditional Chinese cultural life: religious worship, ancestor rituals, folk festivals, temple fairs, traditional opera, traditional music, classical literature, calligraphy, painting, martial arts, fortune-telling, geomancy, traditional medicine (to some extent), and the countless local customs and practices that had constituted the living culture of Chinese communities for centuries.

The destruction wrought by the "Four Olds" campaign was staggering. Across China, Red Guards and revolutionary activists attacked temples, destroyed religious images, burned classical texts, smashed ancestral tablets, confiscated private collections of art and antiquities, and forced the cessation of traditional cultural practices. In Tibet, the destruction was particularly severe: an estimated 6,000 monasteries and temples were damaged or destroyed, and the religious and cultural traditions that had defined Tibetan civilization for more than a millennium were systematically attacked. In Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and other regions with significant non-Chinese populations, the "Four Olds" campaign targeted not only Chinese traditional culture but the distinctive cultural traditions of minority nationalities.

Yet traditional culture proved remarkably resilient. Despite the violence and thoroughness of the Cultural Revolution's assault, many traditional cultural practices survived — driven underground, preserved in private, maintained in memory, or continued in remote areas beyond the reach of the revolutionary authorities. Folk songs were remembered, traditional stories were told in whispers, religious beliefs were maintained in secret, and the knowledge of traditional medicine, martial arts, handicrafts, and ritual practices was transmitted from one generation to the next through private instruction and family tradition. The speed and vitality with which traditional culture revived after the end of the Cultural Revolution — a revival examined in the next chapter — is itself evidence of the depth and resilience of the cultural traditions that the Mao era sought to destroy.

The family, in particular, proved to be a repository of cultural continuity that even the most intense political campaigns could not entirely penetrate. Despite decades of campaigns against "feudal" family values, the Chinese family — with its traditions of filial piety, ancestral reverence, mutual obligation, and cultural transmission — survived the Mao era substantially intact, and it would serve as the social foundation for the cultural revival of the post-Mao period.

In the countryside, peasants continued to observe traditional festivals, albeit in modified and covert forms. Spring Festival was officially discouraged but never fully suppressed; the rituals of birth, marriage, and death, while stripped of their religious elements, retained their essential social functions; and the knowledge of traditional medicine, agriculture, and handicrafts — transmitted within families and village communities — persisted despite official campaigns to replace them with "scientific" alternatives. The underground survival of folk religion was particularly remarkable: despite the destruction of temples and the prohibition of religious practice, folk beliefs about ghosts, spirits, ancestors, and the supernatural continued to shape the worldview of millions of rural Chinese, waiting only for the relaxation of political controls to resurface.

The sent-down youth (知青), despite the hardships they endured, also played an unexpected role in cultural preservation. Many urban young people, dispatched to remote rural areas, encountered local folk traditions — songs, stories, crafts, medical practices — that had survived relatively intact in areas that the revolution had barely penetrated, and they carried knowledge of these traditions back to the cities when they were eventually allowed to return. The literature of the "sent-down generation" — which would become one of the richest veins of post-Mao literary production — drew extensively on these encounters with rural folk culture, creating a body of work that testified to the resilience of traditional Chinese culture even in its darkest hour.

9. Conclusion: The Mao Era's Cultural Legacy

The cultural legacy of the Mao era is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, the period saw genuine achievements: the expansion of literacy, the emancipation of women, the creation of a national cultural infrastructure, the development of new artistic forms, and the mobilization of cultural resources in the service of social transformation. On the other hand, the period inflicted catastrophic damage on Chinese culture: the destruction of irreplaceable cultural treasures, the persecution of intellectuals and artists, the suppression of traditional practices and religious beliefs, the impoverishment of intellectual and artistic life through political censorship, and the human devastation of the Cultural Revolution.

The deepest and most lasting cultural consequence of the Mao era was perhaps the disruption of cultural transmission — the breaking of the chain of knowledge, practice, and memory that had connected each generation of Chinese to its predecessors for thousands of years. The generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution — the so-called "lost generation" (失落的一代, shiluo de yidai) — received little formal education, was denied access to the cultural heritage of their civilization, and was taught to despise and destroy the traditions that their parents and grandparents had cherished. The cultural consequences of this disruption — the gaps in knowledge, the loss of skills, the attenuation of traditional practices, the weakening of the connections between the present and the past — would continue to be felt long after the end of the Mao era.

Yet the Mao era also, paradoxically, created conditions for cultural renewal. The very extremism of the Cultural Revolution's assault on culture generated a powerful counter-reaction — a desire to recover, preserve, and revitalize traditional culture that would become one of the driving forces of the reform era. The "culture fever" (文化热, wenhua re) of the 1980s, the revival of traditional religious practices, the restoration of temples and monuments, the renewed interest in classical philosophy and literature, and the explosion of cultural creativity that characterized the post-Mao period were all, in part, responses to the cultural devastation of the preceding decades — a testament to the enduring vitality of Chinese civilization and its capacity to recover from even the most severe trauma.