Wuhan incident
'July 20th Incident') was an armed conflict in the People's Republic of China between two hostile groups who were fighting for control over the city of Wuhan in July 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
Central authorities in Beijing eventually endorsed the Worker's Headquarters faction as the "true" revolutionary group and reprimanded Chen Zaidao for his military support to Million Heroes.
On January 27, 1967, they attempted to lay siege to the Wuhan party organization and the municipal government and then seize power in the city themselves, much in the fashion of the Shanghai People's Commune.
Instead, they attempted to pull Chen Zaidao aside from a top-level military conference in Beijing in April and prod him into admitting that some of the March actions had gone too far and acknowledge that the local PLA may have made "mistakes" in their handling of the situation.
The directive asserted that the Wuhan military had made a mistake in "general orientation" in carrying out Cultural Revolution policies - that it must publicly admit that its March actions against Workers' Headquarters were incorrect.
[4][5] Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi and leading propagandist Wang Li arrived on July 16 and immediately ordered General Chen to withdraw support from the Million Heroes and instead extend it to the Workers' Headquarters.
Generally, Million Heroes supporters saw that their being labelled a "conservative" organization would have totally tarnished their leftist credentials and lent rival groups ammunition to attack them - giving them impetus to protest the order en masse.
The local PLA organization, too, felt that if they were to accede to the order, it would be an implicit admission that they had committed a grave error in the course of the Cultural Revolution - something that could be used to attack them in the future.
[2] Mao and Zhou's presence in Wuhan having been kept a secret, for all intents and purposes, the Million Heroes regarded Xie and Wang to be the main representatives of the central authorities.
[6] Following the incident, Jiang Qing, in a speech to Red Guard organizations in Henan province, introduced the idea of "use words to attack but use arms to defend" (i.e. wen-gong wu-wei).
In order to appease the PLA and calm nerves among senior military leaders, Wang Li was arrested in August 1967, then scapegoated as the main instigator of the factional violence in Wuhan and sent to prison.
