First, Mao incited a kind of culture war : He manipulated what had begun as an obscure debate about a theater play into a vehicle to attack bourgeois influences in the Chinese Communist Party and the officials that he believed were plotting his demise. Mao’s next move involved inciting university students in the capital of Beijing to attack the country’s establishment and nomenklatura as traitors and counterrevolutionaries.

In 1966, Chinese leader Mao Zedong engineered a decisive return to power after seven years of quiet retreat following the first period of his near-absolute rule, which ended with one of the worst famines in history.

In 1966, Chinese leader Mao Zedong engineered a decisive return to power after seven years of quiet retreat following the first period of his near-absolute rule, which ended with one of the worst famines in history.

First, Mao incited a kind of culture war: He manipulated what had begun as an obscure debate about a theater play into a vehicle to attack bourgeois influences in the Chinese Communist Party and the officials that he believed were plotting his demise. Mao’s next move involved inciting university students in the capital of Beijing to attack the country’s establishment and nomenklatura as traitors and counterrevolutionaries.

Mao’s imprimatur was enough to unleash a frenzy. From those first protests, a slogan was born that eerily captured the spirit of much of China’s next decade, known as the Cultural Revolution.