In 1967, emboldened radicals began seizing power from local governments and party branches, establishing new revolutionary committees in their place while smashing public security, procuratorate and judicial systems.

Deng and his allies introduced the Boluan Fanzheng program and initiated economic reforms, which, together with the New Enlightenment movement, gradually dismantled the ideology of Cultural Revolution.

The Great Leap Forward, similar to the Five-year plans of the Soviet Union, was Mao Zedong's proposal to make the newly created People's Republic of China an industrial superpower.

In early 1962, at CCP's Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, Mao made self-criticism, after which he took a semi-retired role, leaving future responsibilities to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

The Outline as sanctioned by the party center defined Hai Rui as a constructive academic discussion and aimed to distance Peng Zhen formally from any political implications.

The conference was laden with Maoist political rhetoric on class struggle and filled with meticulously prepared 'indictments' of recently ousted leaders such as Peng Zhen and Luo Ruiqing.

One of these documents, distributed on 16 May, was prepared with Mao's personal supervision and was particularly damning:[7]: 39–40 Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists.

On 25 May, under the guidance of Cao Yi'ou [zh]—wife of Mao loyalist Kang Sheng—Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy lecturer at Peking University, authored a big-character poster along with other leftists and posted it to a public bulletin.

By early June, throngs of young demonstrators lined the capital's major thoroughfares holding giant portraits of Mao, beating drums, and shouting slogans.

The work-teams issue marked a decisive defeat for Liu; it also signaled that disagreement over how to handle the CR's unfolding events would irreversibly split Mao from the party leadership.

It elevated what was previously a student movement to a nationwide mass campaign that would galvanize workers, farmers, soldiers and lower-level party functionaries to rise, challenge authority, and re-shape the superstructure of society.

"[29] In March 1967, the policy was adapted into the "Three Supports and Two Militaries" initiative, in which PLA troops were sent to schools and work units across the country to stabilize political tumult and end factional warfare.

In February, prominent generals Ye Jianying and Chen Yi, as well as Vice-Premier Tan Zhenlin, vocally asserted their opposition to the more extreme aspects of the movement, with some party elders insinuating that the CRG's real motives were to remove the revolutionary old guard.

In Wuzhong, Ningxia, on 28 August 1967, Kang Sheng gave orders allowing the PLA to fire on opposing Hui Muslim factions, killing approximately 100 people and wounding 133.

A year later, the Red Guard factions were dismantled entirely; Mao predicted that the chaos might begin running its own agenda and be tempted to turn against revolutionary ideology.

[41]: 205–206 On 28 July, Mao and the Central Group met with the five most important remaining Beijing Red Guard leaders to address the movement's excessive violence and political exhaustion.

[7]: 296 In early 1970, the nationwide "One Strike-Three Anti Campaign" was launched by Mao and the Communist Party Central, aiming to consolidate the new organs of power by targeting counterrevolutionary thoughts and actions.

[50][51] According to government statistics released after the Cultural Revolution, during the campaign 1.87 million people were persecuted as traitors, spies, and counterrevolutionaries, and over 284,800 were arrested or killed from February to November 1970 alone.

In August, the 11th National Congress was held in Beijing, officially naming (in ranking order) Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying, Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian and Wang Dongxing as new members of the Politburo Standing Committee.

[63] The "1978 Truth Criterion Discussion", launched by Deng and Hu and their allies, also triggered a decade-long New Enlightenment movement in mainland China, promoting democracy, humanism and universal values, while opposing the ideology of Cultural Revolution.

Hua remained on the Central Military Commission, but formal power was transferred to a new generation of pragmatic reformers, who reversed Cultural Revolution policies to a large extent.

Those identified as spies, "running dogs", "revisionists", or coming from a suspect class (including those related to former landlords or rich peasants) were subject to beating, imprisonment, rape, torture, sustained and systematic harassment and abuse, seizure of property, denial of medical attention, and erasure of social identity.

[140][141] The revolution aimed to destroy the Four Olds and establish the corresponding Four News, which ranged from changing of names and cutting of hair to ransacking homes, vandalizing cultural treasures, and desecrating temples.

[14]: 61–64 The revolution aimed to eliminate cow demons and snake spirits - the class enemies who promoted bourgeois ideas, as well as those from an exploitative family background or who belonged to one of the Five Black Categories.

"[157][page needed] Dittmer and Ruoxi claim that the Chinese language had historically been defined by subtlety, delicacy, moderation, and honesty, as well as the cultivation of a "refined and elegant literary style".

The majority of writers and artists were seen as "black line figures" and "reactionary literati", and were persecuted, and subjected to "criticism and denunciation" where they could be humiliated and ravaged, and be imprisoned or sent to hard labour.

"The East Is Red", especially, became popular; it de facto supplanted "March of the Volunteers" (lyrics author Tian Han persecuted to death) as the national anthem of China, though the latter was later restored to its previous place.

[168]: 351–52  In 1971, in part to alleviate their suffering, several leading artists were recalled from manual labour or freed from captivity under a Zhou initiative to decorate hotels and railway stations defaced by Red Guard slogans.

Viewing art through the principles of the Yan'an Talks, particularly the concept that there is no such thing as art-for-art's-sake, party leadership construed Antonioni's aesthetic choices as politically motivated and banned the film.

[194] After Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in early 1992, however, intellectuals in mainland China became divided and formed two major schools of thought, the Liberalism and the New Left, which held different views on the Cultural Revolution.