may 16, 1966 - Mao launches the Chinese Cultural Revolution at the Poltiburo in Beijing

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"In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution…Mao claimed, was to prevent bureaucratic ossification, and the consequent loss of revolutionary zeal. By somewhere between 400,000 and a million people died in the resulting violence, his government for the most part ceased to function, and China conveyed the appearance, the outside world, of a state that had gone completely mad…From as early as 1967, [Mao] was seeking to regain control of the movement he had unleashed." (Gaddis 2006, p. 148)

"By the end of 1969 Mao had mostly restored order, but only through the drastic expedient of sending several million former Red Guards – the educated elite of China – to the countryside. It was absolutely necessary, the People’s Daily explained, for young people to be re-educated by workers, peasants, and soldiers under the guidance of the correct line so that their old thinking may be reformed thoroughly. (Gaddis 2006, p. 148)

"Youthful radicals through Western Europe and the US – themselves safe from re-education at the hands of workers, peasants, and soldiers – regarded Mao as a hero, a distinction he shared with Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionary Che Guevara, who had bungled an attempt to start a Cub-like insurgency in central Africa and then gotten himself captured and killed, in Bolivia in 1967 by the CIA" (Gaddis 2006, p. 149).

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