A Cultural Revolution
With Mao maintaining a tenuous grip on power after the failure of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, he would attempt to consolidate his power by doing what all good dictators do, destroying his political rivals by any means necessary and building a group around himself that was loyal only to him.
By claiming that the Communist Party had been infiltrated by ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and ‘rightists’ opposed to their ideology, Mao would unleash a wave of violence, torture, and death as mobs of students, known as Red Guards, on anyone they deemed to be harboring bourgeois ideals or imperialist leanings.
It got so out of hand that the Red Guard groups starting attacking each other. The chaos would only end with the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, and by 1981 the CCP passed a resolution stating that the Cultural Revolution “was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”
