Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius

Following this session, Mao encouraged public discussions focused on criticizing Confucius and Confucianism, and on interpreting aspects of historical Chinese society within a Maoist theoretical perspective.

These initial debates focused on interpreting the issues of slavery, feudalism, and the relationship between Confucianism and Legalism according to the social theories published by Mao and Karl Marx.

The universities were mobilized to deliver special courses to workers and peasants, State propaganda photographs depicted Chinese farmers supposedly carrying on "intense debates".

[2] Because they had supported the purging of many career Communist Party veterans during the early Cultural Revolution, the radical faction, now dominated by the Gang of Four, opposed Zhou's efforts and began to subtly criticize him and his policies.

However, beginning in the summer of 1975 the Gang of Four started a new campaign, introducing public debates on The Water Margin and the "war on empiricism" as a tool to criticise Zhou and their other enemies, notably Deng, which sidelined "criticism of Confucius."

Maoist theorists attempted to use what they knew about the stone-age Dawenkou culture to produce evidence that a slave society had existed in Chinese history, just as Mao had described.

These Maoist theorists used the recurrent patterns of peasant revolts, which have occurred throughout Chinese history, as evidence that the common people had consistently rejected both feudalism and the Confucian ideology that supported it.

[9] There was a spike in new political economy texts produced for a lay audience (as opposed to party members or university students),[10] and mass dissemination of information made thousands of documents and articles available to ordinary Chinese, including worker-formed study "groups for theory" in factories.

[7] During the campaign, some dormant radicals on the local level resumed political activities, one such example was the Hangzhou incident of 1975, which was put down with a massive deployment of troops.