The Cultural Revolution and Deindividuation: A

Case Study of Mob Theory

William H MagginisProfessor Alexander V. Pantsov

History of Modern ChinaCapital University

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, more commonly known as

the Cultural Revolution, was a socio-political movement set into

motion by Mao Zedong in 1966. Intending to enforce socialism and

Maoist thought within the party, the Cultural Revolution was

implemented to remove capitalist, traditional, and cultural elements

from Chinese society in the hopes of creating a completely new and

unified communist nation. In part, the Cultural Revolution began

because of the paranoia of Mao Zedong, who felt his prestige

threatened following the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the

events surrounding Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 and

Khrushchev’s removal from office in an internal coup in 1964.

Mao achieved his cleansing of the party largely through the use

of frenzied mobs of students and young people, who banded together and

traveled around China in large paramilitary groups, the Red Guard.

Mao, whether voluntarily or accidentally, employed methods of

deindividuation (a term in social psychology in which there is a large

sense of a loosening of self awareness in a group) to employ the full

fury of the Red Guard. In this essay, I will examine the Cultural

Revolution and the roles of the Red Guard within that Revolution and

will demonstrate how deinidividuation, essentially a sub-type of mob

theory, was essential to the chaos introduced by these radical youth.

The Cultural Revolution and the Formation of the Red Guard

The lead up and commencement of the Cultural Revolution began

with a theatre performance, staged in Shanghai and written by an

historian of the Ming Dynasty, Wu Han. Wu Han’s play, titled Hai Rui

Dismissed From Office, was a common enough story, in which a faithful

and honorable government worker, Hai Rui, is fired by a corrupt

emperor after Hai Rui denounces him. At first, Mao greatly enjoyed the

play, even giving Wu Han a signed copy of the Third Edition of

“Quotations of Chairman Mao,” a terrific honor for any one living

under the Chairman.1

1 Roderick MacFarquhar, “The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng,” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 167.

However, events quickly went awry with the inclusion of Mao’s

wife, Jiang Qing, a former actress in Shanghai who fancied herself as

a cultural master.2 Jiang Qing began to talk to Mao, behind the backs

of his administration, telling him that, though he thought he was Hai

Rui, he was in fact the corrupt emperor. Similar to the story in 1959

Mao himself had removed a high ranking official, beloved by the people

as a war-hero, after the official penned a letter describing the

failure of the Great Leap Forward as a mistake of the rulers’ of the

nation. The writer of this letter was Marshal Peng Dehuai, the hero of

the Korean War, and, even though he was attempting to criticize the

entire cadre of leaders, Mao took it as a personal attack and had him

removed from his post.3 With this evidence and with the help of Jiang

Qing constantly planting it in his mind, Mao became throughly

convinced that the play was in fact about him.

At this point, events began to spiral out of control. Before he

had returned to government (following his hiatus after the failure of

the GLF in 1959) Mao began to become suspicious that there were a

group of leaders who were abandoning the Revolution for the cause of

2 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, “Mao’s Last Revolution,”(Cambrdige: Harvard University Press, 2006) p. 14.3 Qiu Jin, “The Culture of Power:The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution,” (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999) pp. 25-30.

economic advancement. He described these people as “capitalist

roaders,”4 rightists in the government who wished to denounce Mao’s

name after he died (as Khrushchev did in 1956), possibly remove him

from his post in a coup (which happened to Khrushchev in 1964), and

return the nation to capitalism instead of struggling for Communism.5

Thus, he began to formulate a way of cleansing the government of these

rightists, then create a socialist education system to educate the

masses, who would eventually be his army to build Communism in China.

The play gave him his chance. At the time of the writing, Wu Han

was deputy mayor of Beijing, working under the mayor Peng Zhen.6 In

the hierarchy of the party, Peng was one rung underneath Deng

Xiaoping, who was the right hand man of Liu Shaoqi; these people,

according to Mao, were working together against him, to denounce his

name, operating in a “Black Gang” against Mao Zedong Thought. Thus, to

counterattack against these “rightists,” Mao ordered Jiang Qing to

find a journalist in Shanghai who was to write a review of the play

while, at the same time, denouncing Wu Han and causing him to lose

face. Jiang Qing found Yao Wenyuan, who, after multiple drafts,

4 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, “Mao’s Last Revolution,” p. 13. 5 ibid, pp. 12-13. 6 ibid, p.15.

released the article attacking Wu Han on November 10, 1965.7 However,

to further infuriate Mao, Peng Zhen ordered the Beijing newspapers not

to release the articles. Soon after Mao ordered Zhou Enlai to go to

Peng Zhen and force him to publish the article; shortly after all

Beijing newspapers had published it. The next article to be of

importance would appear in the headlines of the People’s Daily, the

official newspaper of the CCP, which read “Long Live the Proletarian

Revolution.”8

Thus the Cultural Revolution had begun. Mao’s first target to

cleanse out of the government was, of course, the Black Gang. However,

due to the inability to know the depth of the Liu faction (as, in

Mao’s mind, Liu was the leader of the Black Gang), he began first to

remove certain immediate administrators, including Yang Shangkun, the

director of the Party’s General Office, under accusations of “bugging

Mao’s office.”9 Closely following this dismissal, many of Mao’s allies

began to accuse their factional rivals. One such instance was Lin

Biao’s (who had replaced Peng Dehuai as Minister of Defense)

accusations against General Luo Ruiqing, who, after a Politburo

8 “Long Live the Proletarian Revolution,” Peking Review (Peking, China), June 17, 1966.

meeting in which Luo was eventually forced into self criticism, he

attempted suicide.10

These dismissals were closely followed by Peng Zhen’s committee,

the “Five Man Group,” issuing a report known as the “February

Outline.” This outline essentially attempted to drag attention away

from Wu Han being anti-Maoist, to a new direction in which Hai Rui

would be an academic discussion. The “February Outline” would later be

brought up as evidence of Peng Zhen’s opposition to Mao at an enlarged

Politburo meeting where, as a result of these accusations, Peng Zhen

would be grouped with three other disgraced politicians that would

become known as the “Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party Clique.” Eventually,

with these accusations and dismissal, the CCP Politburo issued six

Central Documents regarding the anti-party clique and, in one, issued

May 16, 1966, Mao sent a peculiarly damning message.11 This message

concerned the infiltration of various bourgeoisie elements into the

government who were attempting to overturn the Revolution and

everything it had stood for. Thus, even though the Cultural Revolution

was technically declared on the date of the release of the article

“Long Live the Proletarian Revolution,” released April 18, 1966, the

May 16th notification of that same year effectively justified Mao’s

reasoning for the Cultural Revolution and kicked it into full gear.12

The Establishment of the Red Guard and the Actions Undertaken

Though the first major targets of the Cultural Revolution was the

Black Gang (or, as mentioned before, the “Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang Anti-Party

Clique”), Mao, as stated before, did not know the true breadth of the

“infiltration” into his government. Thus, in order to kick off Mao’s

last revolution13, he bypassed the party and went straight to who he

originally wanted to kick off the Proletarian Revolution with and

create Communism en masse in China: the youth. To Mao, the children in

the nation (college students included) were not experienced

politically, yet they had grown up under the Communist Regime and

would have fresh ideas about the continuance of the ongoing Revolution

down the road to Communism. The objective for the youth was simple:

expose the members of the society who were supporting Liu and others

and destroy the “Four Olds,” (that is, old habits, customs, culture

and thought.)14

13 Text taken from title of Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhal’s book on theCultural Revolution, “Mao’s Last Revolution.” 14 Linda Benson, “China Since 1949,” (Edinburgh: Pearson Eduction Ltd., 2011), p. 41.

The origins of this youth movement began in the universities of

China, particularly Beijing University15. Primarily, Mao attempted to

route out those supporting Liu and the old way of life (that is, of

the bourgeoisie before the Revolution commenced) by sending the

students against professors who surely supported the Liu clique by

teaching the students the old ways of life (i.e. Confucius)16. In

order to do this, Mao ordered his chief of secret services

(essentially his spy master) Kang Sheng to send his wife to the main

campus of Beijing University, where she was to find someone to write a

Dazibao (Big-Character Poster).17 When she arrived, she went straight

to an old friend, a Philosophy professor who was about to be moved to

another branch of the university in the middle of nowhere (the

university had even chosen a replacement). This professor, Nie Yuanzi,

created the poster and hung it from the campus center, its message

attacking the President and upper level administrators of the

school.18

The introduction of this Dazibao set off a fire storm of other

posters being put up around campus. Immediately, the movement is

sparked among the students of the school, who quickly begin denouncing

their professors and arresting them. Following these arrests, the

students would drag them to “Meetings of Struggle and Critique,” in

which the most inhumane of activities were practiced on the

professors. Many were forced to wear large hats, being stood in front

of the crowd where they were humiliated by being forced to bow and

perform self-critique. Others were tortured or assaulted in dozens of

different manners.19

These student uprisings did not end at Beijing University. They

spread to dozens of other universities across the nation, even

trickling down to high schools, middle schools, and elementary

schools. At one nearby university (close to Beijing University), at a

middle school connected to Tsinghua University, a group of school

children formed a group for the Revolution. They call themselves the

Hongweibing, or the Red Guard, whose aims, according to their leader

was to “...make China red from inside out and then we will help the

working people of other countries make the world red...And then the

whole universe.” 20

From the start, Mao supported these Red Guard units, whose

numbers had begun to grow exponentially as it spread across the

20 “China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives,” Ed. by Woei Lien Chong, (Maryland: Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2002), p.105.

nation. Essentially, these Red Guard units became Mao’s military in

spreading the Cultural Revolution across the nation: “The young people

are the main force of the Cultural Revolution. They must be fully

mobilized.”21 These children did it with pride and efficiency, yet the

cruelty of their actions overcame their want of spreading the

revolution. Many of these children would arrested their teachers and

stick them in makeshift prisons, coming back each morning to severely

beat and torture the teachers.22 Others would break into people’s

homes, offices, and other dwellings where they arrest any who stood in

their way, eventually torturing and murdering most of these people. In

one grizzly incident, the students tortured several teachers and

students, eventually taking their blood and writing across the school

wall, “Long live the Red Terror!”23

Following the spread of these horrific incidents, Mao convened a

meeting of the top leaders in the CCP. This meeting, held August 5,

1966, saw Mao construct his own Dazibao, titled “Bombard the

Headquarters” which essentially took the focus of the Cultural

Revolution and the Red Guard away from the universities and schools

and aimed it at the main target: the bourgeoisie elements that had

invaded the central administration.24 Following a mass rally in

Beijing to show support for the Hongweibing, which Mao personally

attended, the youth would be unleashed against the bureaucracy,

especially in Beijing.25 Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping disappeared from

public (under ordered house arrest by Mao) to pop up again after a Red

Guard unit found them and dragged them from their homes. They were

imprisoned and tortured regularly (Liu would eventually die of

pneumonia while imprisoned).26

Following this movement of aims, a special groups of leaders in

the Standing Committee of the CCP formed together to lead the Cultural

Revolution. This group, officially called the Group on the Cultural

Revolution, would become known as the “Gang of Four,” and would

include Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife), Yao Wenyuan (the journalist who wrote

the initial article condemning Wu Han), Zhang Chunqiao (the new leader

of the Revolutionary Committee in Shanghai), and Wang Hongwen (the

leader of the Zaofan-worker rebels- in Shanghai.) This group would

direct all actions undertaken by Hongweibing units and Zaofan units.27

As can be seen with any reasoning, the Cultural Revolution

eventually turned into civil war and chaos. Every group had begun

splitting up, notably the Hongweibing, whose formal members would form

27 Maurice Meisner, “Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic Since1949, (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 355.

themselves into pro-Red Guard gangs and anti-Red Guard gangs. Each

group would have its own group of supporters whose fights, which

eventually led to straight out warfare, occurred primarily in the city

Wuhan. Shortly after these battles (and a quick visit by Mao, who left

in a hurry as he was afraid of being either killed or arrested), Mao

ordered the students to go back to school. After no one listened, he

sent PLA units to the universities and schools and forcibly put down

the revolutionaries in 1968. In the end, Mao would remove over 10

million people from the cities and forcibly relocate them to the

countryside.28

Mao would end his corrupt psychological injuries against the

youth with a nasty speech in rebuke for the Wuhan incident. In it, not

only did he force them back into classes and remove them from cities,

but he also claimed that they were, ultimately, a disappointment. “You

[student Red Guards] have let me down, and what is more, you have

disappointed the workers, peasants, and Army men of China.”29

29 Mao Zedong’s speech to the Red Guard leaders in 1968. Quote can be found in Richard H. Solomon’s “A Revolution is Not a Dinner Party: A Feast of Images of the Maoist Transformation of China,” on page 160.

An Analysis of Red Guard Units in Accordance with Mob Theory

Following the demise of the Red Guard units and the winding down

of the Cultural Revolution, many questions began to pop up. In

particular, how could one man create such a frenzy as to throw

students into murderous, roving gangs who would eventually become so

wild, that they fought against the leader himself? What was happening

psychologically as these Red Guard units and university students

imprisoned their professors and tortured them, murdering many in the

process?

Many of these questions would be answered, inadvertently, by a

psychologist living in California who would conduct one of the most

brutal and inhumane experiments in psychology’s history. The

psychologist and his experiment was Philip Zimbardo, a young professor

at Stanford University, whose Stanford Prison Experiment would occur

from August 14 to August 20, 1971. This experiment staged a virtual

prison experience, in which 24 male volunteers were split into two

groups, guards and prisoners. Each volunteer was prescreened for

psychological health (to ensure that none had narcissistic,

authoritarian, or antisocial personality traits), with these 24 being

the best of those who volunteered.30

Regardless of the pre-screening, the section of the test

population-those put in the role of the guards-exhibited mental and

physical qualities that were relatively unnatural to them. Throughout

the experiment, the guards slowly went from “keeping the prisoners

inline” (simple matters of assigning the prisoners numbers, lining

them up against the wall and telling them the rules, etc.)31 However,

this behavior slowly progressed into brutal treatment of the

prisoners, escalating into sadistic actions performed by the guards.

This experiment, due to the violence and psychological torture

performed by the “guards” ended after six days, when it was originally

supposed to last longer than two weeks. 32

In effect, Dr. Zimbardo had stumbled upon, and witnessed, what

psychologists have termed “deindividuation,” which is the stripping of

individual moralities in the context of a larger group. In turn, this

environment an individual finds themselves in gives them free reign to

commit acts completely unnatural to them in a normal context. In

particular, deindividuation is a subgroup in the overall study of mob

theory, in which psychologists and sociologists attempt to solve

mounting questions such as the ones posed at the beginning of this

section. This hypothesis in mob theory is further explained throughout

Philip Zimbardo’s works since the completion of the Stanford Prison

Experiment. 33

Specifically, Zimbardo’s deindividuation theory is fully

expounded upon in his book “The Lucifer Effect,” in which his overall

theory behind the events recorded in the Stanford Prison Experiment

are fully explored and explained. Zimbardo formed “the Lucifer

Effect,” his term for his deindividuation theory, around the central

premise of evil, namely a definition of evil is and what exactly

causes it (surely, one thinks, it cannot be attributed fully to a

ethereal being and written off as a fact of supernatural

implications.) In the “Lucifer Effect,” Zimbardo describes evil as the

exercising of power to harm or injure another human being. This evil,

in turn, is formed when a person is placed in an environment where

those controlling the setting allow for the individual to perform

unrestrained acts of evil (as described previously) over other human

beings.34

According to historical accounts of the Cultural Revolution, Mao

had established an environment where ordinary children could exercise

power over other individuals who, in effect, had not been harming them

at all (this needs to be taken into consideration, as a theory of

defense would shatter the deindividuation theory behind the Cultural

Revolution.)35 These children, previously learning under those they

effectively terrorized, turned from student to monsters with the

allowance by Mao to conduct whatever actions he deemed necessary to

remove those from positions of power whom he felt as a threat to the

overall Revolution. To further uphold this theory, the Hongweibing had

formed themselves into mass mobs of children who spread violence far

across the nation. This formation of roaming gangs of youth caused the

children to lose any learned individual morality and act as a singular

unit, with group psychology far outweighing the intentions of the

individuals.

Conclusion

Thus, while Dr. Zimbardo was developing and initiating his

experiment at Stanford, Mao and his leftist administration were, in

effect, conducting a mass experiment of cleansing the power structures

of China through the youth. With the allowance by Mao and later

instruction to continue by the Cultural Revolution Committee, the

children acted without restraint, a force let loose in groups to

attack many who came into contact with them. For close to ten years,

these youth spread state-supported terror across all of China, killing

and destroying much of what China and its people worked hard to gain.

We have now come to a full understanding of the psychological

reasoning for the youth to act as they did during the Cultural

Revolution. As they were not fully psychologically developed, and were

released upon the countryside, these children formed themselves into

mobs that destroyed much of China.36 Each individual effectively lost

their moral compass, becoming creatures who did not know right from

wrong, but committed acts in a gang in a unified consciousness. This

is a reason why the Cultural Revolution would not have been as

effective if the children were not involved and Mao left the

University students in charge of cleansing the power structure (as

they were farther in their moral development and tended to

individualize more.)

It is a tragedy that such young people could be under such

control, such mental exploitation, that they would be indirectly

forced to commit such atrocious crimes against their fellow

countrymen. Many of the targets went beyond that of countrymen: many

were parents of the Hongweibing members attacking them, others were

the teachers of the very children who were torturing them. Yet, when

anyone is placed in that style of environment, especially children,

the lack of individual morality causes heinous crimes to be committed.

This style of deindividuation, furthermore, can be tied to such recent

heinous crimes as the Abu Ghraib prison incident. Deindividuation

occurs in some of the most obvious of places, where it should be

ended, but it is not.

However, with the lessons learned from the Cultural Revolution,

the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Abu Ghraib incident, there is

a message of hope. Much of these crimes can effectively be stopped

either before they happen or during the course of their actions. The

person ending this does not need to be a super hero, either. According

to Zimbardo, the ordinary heroes in these incidents were ordinary

human beings who were willing to go to whoever they could to help end

the situation.37 In order to stop these events from occurring in the

future, we need to teach our children to speak up, stop these events

from unfolding, and be that only voice of dissent amongst a rising

cacophony of screams, searching for injustice.

37 Philip Zimbardo, “Why Ordinary People Do Evil...Or Do Good.”

7 Jonathan Spence, “The Search for Modern China,” (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), p. 601.9 Macfarquhar and Schoenhals, “Mao’s Last Revolution,” p. 36.10 ibid, pp. 25-27. Note: The indictment against Lao Ruiqing and his subsequent suicide attempt are included to present a foreshadowing to the depths Mao was willing to go to ensure the cleansing of “capitalist roaders.” 11 Li Xuefeng, p. 611. Cited in “Mao’s Last Revolution.” 12 Macfarquhar and Schoenhals, “Mao’s Last Revolution” pp. 27-31. 15 Macfarquhar and Schoenhals, “Mao’s Last Revolution,” p.54.16 Linda Benson, “China Since 1949,” p. 41-42.17 Macfarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, pp. 54-55.18 Howard French, “Hearts Still Scarred 40 Years After China’s Upheaval,” New York Times (New York, New York), June 10, 2006. 19 “The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976),” Indiana University, http://www.iun.edu/~hisdcl/g387/cr.htm.21 Quoted speech of Mao Zedong’s “Talk to the Central Committee Leaders,” (1960) found in: Richard H. Solomon, “A Revolution is Not a Dinner Party,” (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Publishing, 1975), p. 160. 22 Edward R. Kantowicz, “Coming Apart, Coming Together,” (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), p.82.23 Wang Youqin, “Student Attacks Against Teachers: The Revolution of 1966,” Chinese Holocaust Memorial, University of Chicago, http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/ywang/history/1966teacher.htm. Note: This source was pulled from the citations in Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals book “Mao’s Last Revolution.” This story appears on page 126 and, as noted by Macfarquhar and Schoenhals in the Notes section, most books on this period mention the terrors performed by the Red Guard, but this is particularly horrifying in its retelling of firsthand accounts. 24 Rin Supp Shinn, “History of China: The Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-1976, University of Maryland, http://www.-chaos.umd.edu/history/prc2.html.25 David Curtis Wright, “The History of China,” (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing, 2011), p.166. 26 Howard French, “Surviving Mao, Revamping a Nation,” Wall Street Journal (New York, NewYork), October 22, 2011. 28 Macfarquhar and Schoenhals, “Mao’s Last Revolution,” p. 211.

30 Philip Zimbardo, “The Lucifer Effect,” (New York: Random House Publishing, 2008) pp. 8-11.31 ibid. pp. 47-51. 32 ibid. Chs. 2-9. Note: In this essay, I have rigidly shortened the description of the Stanford Prison Experiment described in Dr. Zimbardo’s book. For a more in depthanalysis and play-by-play action of the experiment, refer to these chapters. 33 ibid., pp. 349, 351-353, 366, 367-368. Note: For more on deindividuation and its works in social psychology, Dr. Zimbardo has released numerous articles pertaining to this theory. Fascinating to read, this theory is slowly developed through Zimbardo’s research through the years up to the point of the release of “The LuciferEffect.” 34 Philip Zimbardo, “Why Ordinary People Do Evil...Or Do Good,” (presentation, TED Lectures New York City, February 2008.)35 Reasonably so, if a group rose up in defense of rights being damaged, deindividuation, though still a part of it, does not become the primary motivator inperpetuated acts of violence. Rather, social psychologists would study and attributethe violence to such simple animalistic tendencies as fight or flight. In this case though, the children were not being harmed. Rather, an outside source which had a large influence in their development instructed them to conduct this violence and condoned it, which allows for the designation of deindividuation having a large rolein the proceedings.36 “destroyed” in this sense does not indicate just a physical ruination, but, more particularly, an economic destruction conducted throughout the entire revolution. This, in turn, set China farther back after the Great Leap Forward.