IV.

Down to the Countryside

In 1967, amidst the anarchy of the Red Guard activities and fighting between rival Red Guard groups, China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), was called in to restore order. From 1967 to 1969 thousands died in violent clashes between Red Guard factions, and between the Red Guards and the military. In an attempt to rein in the chaos, Mao and his supporters placed most government organizations under the control of the PLA and launched a new phase of the Cultural Revolution, the “Campaign to Purify Class Ranks.” Beginning in 1969 urban government officials and intellectuals were sent to the countryside to do hard labor and to study Mao’s works. Many urban youths from age 16 to age 19 were dispersed to the countryside where they were instructed to learn from the peasants. Family members were often split up and forced to live in harsh conditions thousands of miles from one another. Unable to receive permission to return, many youths remained in the countryside for years.

Throughout the early 1970s Mao continued his goal of reducing the economic gap between the city and the countryside. The children of urban elite lived and worked among rural peasants. The children of peasants, workers, and soldiers attended the reopened schools where they studied the works of Mao and the accomplishments of peasants. Thousands of students received rudimentary medical training and went to the countryside as so-called barefoot doctors; they provided basic health care to peasants who otherwise had no access to medical facilities. Urban culture was replaced by new revolutionary ballet, opera, and literature, much of it produced under the patronage of Jiang Qing. The new work expressed the struggles of the peasants and glorified Chairman Mao.

While most of the radical excesses of the Cultural Revolution had diminished by the mid-1970s, some of its rhetoric and policies continued even after Mao’s death in 1976. Jiang Qing and the rest of the Gang of Four were arrested that year. Their arrest was declared the official end of the movement, but it was not until 1981 that the Gang of Four were convicted for their crimes and the Communist Party leadership under Deng Xiaoping officially condemned the Cultural Revolution.