50 Years After the Cultural Revolution: What It Destroyed in Traditional Chinese Culture

On October 6, 1976, less than a month after Mao Zedong’s death, the radical faction known as the “Gang of Four,” led by Mao’s widow Jiang Qing, was arrested in Beijing. Their fall brought the Cultural Revolution to an end after 10 years.

Fifty years later, much of what it destroyed has never been rebuilt: temples, relics, books, and the values passed down through them.

To understand what was lost, it helps to see the Cultural Revolution as one of many “movements” in Communist China. In the West, we may think of a social movement as a group of people rising up in the face of oppression, fighting for freedom or justice. But in China, the dynamic has been just the opposite—movements have largely been state-sponsored. Since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 by violent revolution, “class struggle” has been one of its defining doctrines. Various movements have been launched in an attempt to eradicate various groups or ideologies perceived by the Party as a threat.

In the early 1950s, the “Movement to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries” targeted religious sects and other groups the officially atheist Party saw as rivals. In 1957, the “Anti-Rightist Movement” branded more than 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals, as “rightists.” Together, these campaigns silenced much of China’s cultural elite and paved the way for Communist Party culture to replace traditional Chinese culture.

    

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was the most catastrophic of these campaigns. Mao Zedong launched the campaign in May 1966 and mobilized millions of students as Red Guards to carry it out. That August, they began a campaign to destroy the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.

During this campaign, much of China’s 5,000-year-old culture was destroyed. The Cultural Revolution established Mao Zedong’s cult of personality and indoctrinated the nation with Mao’s way of thinking and style of discourse. Ancient relics and antiques, calligraphy and paintings, classic books and scriptures were burned. Temples and statues were smashed to dust. In November 1966, Red Guards vandalized the cemetery of Confucius and his descendants in Qufu, his hometown. Millions of lives were lost. China’s traditional holidays, rules of etiquette, forms of entertainment, indeed, the culture itself, would never be the same again.

Reviving What Was Lost

The Cultural Revolution is over, but the Chinese Communist Party still treats China’s heritage as a threat to its rule.

In 2006, a group of Chinese artists came together in New York with a mission: to revive the traditional, divinely inspired culture of China and share it with the world. They created Shen Yun Performing Arts.

Through classical Chinese dance, live orchestral music, costumes, and legends, Shen Yun brings five millennia of civilization to life on stage, from the Yellow Emperor to the splendor of the Tang Dynasty. Its stories carry the very values the Cultural Revolution tried to erase: courage, loyalty, compassion, and virtue.

Independent of any government and entirely nonprofit, Shen Yun enjoys true artistic freedom. It tours the world every year, but it is still not allowed to perform in China, the land where this culture began.