ABSTRACT
Between 1962 and 1966 Mao Zedong chose to limit his direct involvement in affairs of state. He left others to deal with the calamitous consequences of the Great Leap Forward. Mao announced the creation of a Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG) whose task would be to expose and remove the bourgeois enemies within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself. China by 1970 was in industrial crisis. The first move was to end the Red Guard menace. It was announced that the revolutionary tasks of the Red Guards would be carried on by the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The notion of the Cultural Revolution as China's self-inflicted wound was taken up by Harry Wu, a noted dissident, who spent nineteen years as a political prisoner in laogai, Mao's system of labour camps: Everybody in China has suffered, or knows somebody who suffered. Lin Biao had created Maoist cult and had been the great executor of Mao's wishes regarding the Cultural Revolution.
