Mao’s Cultural War: The Origins of the Cultural Revolution Revisited

ABSTRACT Why and how Mao Zedong initiated the Cultural Revolution remains one of the most enduring puzzles in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Existing interpretations have generally placed Mao’s political intentions and ideological radicalism at the center of explanation, often treating the cultural conflicts, leadership struggles, and institutional crises of 1965-66 as elements of a political project whose basic purposes had already been formed. This talk reconsiders that interpretation by reconstructing the movement’s origins in its immediate historical context. Professor Wu will argue that the Cultural Revolution originated in a militant campaign to transform China’s cultural and ideological order, rather than in a premeditated assault on the Party-state. It later expanded into a far broader political upheaval through a cumulative, path-dependent process in which elite conflict, institutional responses, and mass political initiatives interacted to redirect and radicalize the movement. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Yiching Wu teaches East Asian Studies and modern Chinese history at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on Maoist China and the history of the Cultural Revolution. He is the author of The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2014), which won the Social Science History Association’s President’s Book Award. His forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press, The Unscripted Revolution: The Destruction of Liu Shaoqi and the Making of the Cultural Revolution, examines the fall of Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s designated successor and China’s head of state, and the political dynamics that reshaped the early Cultural Revolution.