The decade-long political upheaval that Mao Zedong launched in China in 1966, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to purge his rivals and reignite revolution by mobilizing the young against the country's teachers, officials, and traditions. Mao called on students organized as Red Guards to destroy the so-called Four Olds and to denounce authority everywhere, plunging China into years of terror, factional violence, and ruin. It ended only after Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976. In 1981 the Communist Party itself declared it a catastrophe and assigned chief responsibility to Mao.
For ten years the ruler of a quarter of humanity turned a nation against itself. In 1966 Mao Zedong, fearing his own revolution was slipping away, called on China's young people to rebel. Waving a little red book of his quotations, students formed bands called Red Guards and were told to attack the old world and the authorities who upheld it. They beat and denounced their teachers, paraded officials in dunce caps, smashed temples and books, and forced families to inform on one another. Senior leaders fell, some to die in prison. The country slid toward chaos until the army was sent in. Estimates of the dead range widely, commonly from several hundred thousand to more than a million, with far more imprisoned, broken, or scarred. China is in some ways still recovering, and the subject remains hard to discuss openly there today.