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1966–1968: Cultural Revolution Directive Texts

Evidence micro-family on the founding directive of the Cultural Revolution and the 1967–68 governance directives that rebuilt state authority. Research-only file; no editorial conclusions beyond sourced evidence.

Prior-corpus check: report (Topic 4 packets: May 16 Notification VERIFIED quote, 16-Point Decision summary, 1981 Resolution VERIFIED quotes, RH-D1/RH-D4 research-register entries), report §T2 (RH-D1 partially resolved via a 1967 Foreign Languages Press compilation scan, sections unverified), .md research register, and DO-NOT-MERGE.md (DNM-, not applicable to this unit). Fresh research was limited to the identified gaps: the 16-Point Decision’s full text, and existence/text/dating of the 1967–68 governance directives.

Evidence-grade legend used here: VERIFIED · STRONG · PROBABLE · ATTRIBUTED · CONFLICTING · UNKNOWN.

(a) Canonical facts

1. The 16-Point Decision （关于无产阶级文化大革命的决定）

  • Chinese title: 中国共产党中央委员会关于无产阶级文化大革命的决定
  • Adopted: August 8, 1966, by the 11th Plenary Session of the 8th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party — STRONG (Peking Review contemporaneous carrier; widely corroborated). Published August 9, 1966 in the Chinese press.
  • Full text verified from: Peking Review, Vol. 9, No. 33, August 12, 1966, pp. 6–11 — the contemporaneous official English-language carrier (VERIFIED via the marxists.org mirror of the massline.org scan of that issue). This supersedes the previously located but unverified 1967 Foreign Languages Press compilation scan.
  • The canonical 16-point enumeration (section titles as given in the Peking Review carrier):
  1. A New Stage in the Socialist Revolution
  2. The Main Current and the Zigzags
  3. Put Daring Above Everything Else and Boldly Arouse the Masses
  4. Let the Masses Educate Themselves in the Movement
  5. Firmly Apply the Class Line of the Party
  6. Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
  7. Be on Guard Against Those Who Brand the Revolutionary Masses as “Counter-Revolutionaries”
  8. The Question of Cadres
  9. Cultural Revolution Groups, Committees and Congresses
  10. Educational Reform
  11. The Question of Criticizing by Name in the Press
  12. Policy Towards Scientists, Technicians and Ordinary Members of Working Staffs
  13. The Question of Arrangements for Integration With the Socialist Education Movement in City and Countryside
  14. Take Firm Hold of the Revolution and Stimulate Production
  15. The Armed Forces
  16. Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Is the Guide for Action in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
  • Key substantive provisions (from the verified carrier text):
  • §1 states the objective: “struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’” and to transform the superstructure.
  • §5 fixes the movement’s main target as “those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road,” while calling for uniting “more than 95 per cent of the cadres and more than 95 per cent of the masses.”
  • §6 requires debates to be “conducted by reasoning, not by coercion or force” (“In the course of debate, every revolutionary should be good at thinking things out for himself”), and protects the minority: “sometimes the truth is with the minority.”
  • §7 bars branding dissenters “counter-revolutionary” and warns of “pick-pockets” who misuse the label; with narrow exceptions (murder, arson, poisoning, sabotage, theft of state secrets “where there is clear evidence”), no measures are to be taken against students for problems arising in the movement.
  • §8 divides cadres into four categories (good; comparatively good; those who made serious mistakes but are not rightists; the small number of anti-Party, anti-socialist rightists).
  • §9 legitimizes the new mass organizations as “organs of power of the proletarian Cultural Revolution” and requires “a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune.”
  • §14 requires revolution and production to proceed together (“Take Firm Hold of the Revolution and Stimulate Production”).
  • Wording conflicts across carriers: the marxists.org page notes two very slightly different English-language versions of Peking Review No. 33 apparently circulated (North American edition vs. another English-language edition; e.g., capitalization of “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”) — CONFLICTING at the copy-editing level only; no substantive sectional differences reported. A European Parliament briefing dates the adoption to “16 August” at the 11th Plenum — CONTRADICTED by the carrier and the standard chronology (adoption August 8; public issuance followed). RH-D1: RESOLVED.

2. The January 13, 1967 public-security regulations （公安六条）

  • Full title: 中共中央、国务院关于在无产阶级文化大革命中加强公安工作的若干规定 (Regulations on Strengthening Public Security Work During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution)
  • Document number and date: 中发〔67〕19号, January 13, 1967 — VERIFIED (archive.org Laogai Archive Database scan A670113.pdf; wording corroborated by an independent Chinese summary carrier).
  • Full text verified (preamble + six articles + posting instruction):
  • (一) Persons with clear evidence of murder, arson, poisoning, robbery, staged traffic “accidents” for murder, storming prisons or control organs, collusion with foreign countries, theft of state secrets, or sabotage — active counter-revolutionaries — shall be punished according to law.
  • (二) Sending counter-revolutionary anonymous letters, secretly or openly posting or distributing counter-revolutionary leaflets, writing reactionary slogans, shouting reactionary slogans, and attacking/slandering “the great leader Chairman Mao and his close comrade-in-arms Lin Biao” are all active counter-revolutionary acts, punishable according to law.
  • (三) Protect the revolutionary masses and their organizations; protect the left; armed struggle is strictly forbidden. Attacking revolutionary mass organizations or beating/detaining revolutionary masses is illegal; ordinary cases handled by criticism and education, but ringleaders who beat people to death, serious thugs, and behind-the-scenes manipulators shall be punished according to law.
  • (四) A 21-category list (landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists; re-education-through-labor personnel; former KMT military/police/secret-police personnel above specified ranks; and the families of executed/imprisoned/controlled/fled counter-revolutionaries who “persist in the reactionary stand”) — all barred from going out to “link up” (串联), changing names, falsifying histories, infiltrating revolutionary mass organizations, organizing behind the scenes, or forming their own organizations.
  • (五) Those using “great democracy” or other means to spread reactionary speech: ordinary cases struggled against by the masses; serious cases investigated by public security together with the masses and handled as appropriate.
  • (六) Party, government, military, and public-security personnel who distort these regulations, fabricate facts, and suppress the revolutionary masses shall be investigated and punished according to law.
  • The regulations were to be publicized to the masses and could be posted broadly in cities and countryside.
  • Later official status: rescinded by the Central Committee on February 17, 1979 — STRONG (attributed to the official rescission; cited in Chinese secondary sources). An attributed secondary reading notes Article 2 as the regulations’ core and argues its application was extended in practice well beyond its text (to Zhou Enlai, the Cultural Revolution Group members, and lower-level power-holders) — ATTRIBUTED.

3. The January 23, 1967 directive on PLA intervention

  • Title: 《关于人民解放军坚决支持革命左派群众的决定》 (Decision on the PLA Resolutely Supporting the Revolutionary Left Masses) — corrected from the working shorthand in the task text.
  • Issued: January 23, 1967; document number 中发〔67〕27号 — STRONG. Issuing bodies: the Central Committee, the State Council, and the Central Military Commission jointly. Carrier conflict: one secondary carrier adds the Central Cultural Revolution Group as a fourth co-issuer; the others list only the three bodies — CONFLICTING detail.
  • Function (attributed consensus of secondary carriers): authorized the military to “actively support the broad revolutionary left masses’ power-seizure struggle,” making the PLA a central force in the seizures; the follow-on March 1967 CMC decision on “three supports and two militaries” （三支两军： support the left, support industry, support agriculture; military control, military training) operationalized it — PROBABLE.
  • Full verbatim text not yet located in this unit’s research — PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET (see §f). Named-scholar position below on why the intervention occurred.

4. The September 5, 1967 order （九五命令）

  • Title: 《关于不准抢夺人民解放军武器、装备和各种军用物资的命令》 (Order Forbidding the Seizure of PLA Weapons, Equipment, and All Kinds of Military Materiel), commonly called the September 5 Order.
  • Issued: September 5, 1967, jointly by the Central Committee, State Council, Central Military Commission, and Central Cultural Revolution Group — STRONG (existence, date, and issuers corroborated across multiple carriers, including print-source-cited summaries).
  • Context (attributed): issued after the “drag out the handful in the army” （揪军内一小撮） campaign of early-to-mid 1967 had, according to the cited sources, intensified attacks on military organs and seizures of military weapons; the order was aimed at checking that escalation — ATTRIBUTED.
  • Full verbatim text not yet located in this unit’s research — PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET (see §f).

5. “Cleansing the Class Ranks” （清理阶级队伍）, 1968

  • Existence and dating VERIFIED through attributed documentary chain:
  • November 27, 1967: Jiang Qing, at a Beijing workers’ forum, said class ranks must be gradually “cleansed” in the course of party-rebuilding and the Cultural Revolution — ATTRIBUTED.
  • May 13, 1968: Yao Wenyuan submitted the report 《北京新华印刷厂军管会发动群众开展对敌斗争的经验》 (The Experience of the Beijing Xinhua Printing Plant Military Control Commission in Mobilizing the Masses to Struggle Against the Enemy) to Mao, describing it as summarizing policy questions in “cleansing the ranks” — ATTRIBUTED.
  • May 19, 1968: Mao commented on the document: “文元同志：建议此件批发全国。在我看过的同类材料中，此件是写得最好的” (“Comrade Wenyuan: it is suggested this document be distributed nationwide. Of similar materials I have seen, this one is the best written”) — ATTRIBUTED.
  • May 25, 1968: the Central Committee and the Central Cultural Revolution Group issued the 《转发毛主席关于〈北京新华印刷厂军管会发动群众开展对敌斗争的经验〉的批示的通知》 (Notice forwarding Chairman Mao’s instruction on the document), launching the nationwide campaign — STRONG.
  • Targets (attributed): “traitors, special agents, unrepentant capitalist-roaders, counter-revolutionaries, and unreformed landlord, rich-peasant, counter-revolutionary, bad-element and rightist elements,” investigated through military-control commissions and worker/propaganda teams entering workplaces and schools — ATTRIBUTED.
  • Full verbatim text of the May 25, 1968 notice not yet located in this unit’s research — PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET (see §f).

6. Follow-on 1968 governance directives (bonus evidence)

  • July 3, 1968 Bulletin （七·三布告）: Mao-approved bulletin aimed at Guangxi, cited and reaffirmed in later central documents — STRONG as to existence and Mao’s personal approval; full text not pulled — PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET.
  • July 24, 1968 Bulletin （七·二四布告）: 中共中央、国务院、中央军委、中央文革布告, 中发〔68〕113号, “毛主席批示：照办” — full text located in the archive.org Laogai Archive Database scan (A680724.pdf) and read in this run — VERIFIED as to the document’s existence, number, date, and content. Addressed to Shaanxi: denounces a “tiny handful of class enemies” for armed struggle, professional armed-struggle teams, bank/warehouse seizures, interrupting rail/transport/posts, seizing PLA weapons and killing PLA personnel, and refusing to obey central orders; orders an immediate halt to armed struggle, disbanding of professional armed-struggle teams, return of seized cash/materiel and PLA weapons, restoration of transport and communications, and punishment according to law of proven active counter-revolutionaries. This document illustrates the center’s mid-1968 turn to forcible order-restoration.

Scope note

No mortality quantification is attempted in this file. The question of Cultural Revolution death tolls (RH-D2) is expressly out of this unit’s scope; it is flagged only as an open item for the appropriate research stream.

(b) Official PRC position

  • The June 27, 1981 Resolution on Party History (adopted by the 6th Plenum of the 11th Central Committee) provides the standing official verdict, already verified in the corpus: the Cultural Revolution “was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic,” and “chief responsibility for the grave ‘Left’ error of the ‘cultural revolution’ … does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong.” The Resolution sets the official periodization at May 1966 – October 1976 — VERIFIED (reused; not re-researched).
  • Official post-1976 actions consistent with the verdict: the public-security six regulations rescinded February 17, 1979 (STRONG, §a.2); revolutionary committees abolished and civilian governments restored in 1978–79 (PROBABLE, from packet D2).
  • Official-history summary of the PLA intervention (as represented in the globalsecurity.org compilation of standard historiography): the chaos made it “necessary to send in the People’s Liberation Army to support the Left, the workers and the peasants and to institute military control and military training. It played a positive role in stabilizing the situation, but it also produced some negative consequences” — ATTRIBUTED as official-history language.

(c) Named dissident / scholar positions

  • **Andrew G. Walder and Qinglian Lu (2017, American Journal of Sociology, “The Dynamics of Collapse in an Authoritarian Regime: China in 1967”):** the early-1967 wave of power seizures was not primarily a culmination of student and worker insurgency but was “accelerated by an internal rebellion of bureaucrats against their own superiors”; the resulting collapse of local governments “forced intervention by the armed forces.” On their reading, the January 23, 1967 PLA-intervention directive was a response to an endogenous state collapse, not simply a planned escalation of the movement — ATTRIBUTED.
  • **William Hinton (1983, 《深翻》/ Shenfan, chapter on the 16-Point Decision, via the marxists.org Chinese archive):** presents the Decision as the framework document of the Cultural Revolution — defining its driving forces, aims, organizational forms, and methods — and emphasizes that it expressly cautioned against excesses, including the directive to use persuasion by reasoning rather than coercion. A sympathetic-scholar reading that stresses the Decision’s stated restraints — ATTRIBUTED.
  • 1981 Resolution’s three-way reception dispute (recorded in : supporters of “total negation,” defenders of Mao’s legacy, and later New Left scholars such as Mobo Gao contesting the verdict) applies to these directives as well; no named dissident position specific to the 16-Point Decision’s text or the 1967–68 directive texts was located in this unit’s research — EVIDENCE GAP for dissident-specific commentary on these documents.

(d) Civil-society / international positions

  • No civil-society or international-institution position specific to these directive texts (the 16-Point Decision, the 公安六条， the January 23 directive, the September 5 order, or the 1968 class-ranks notices) was located in this unit’s research. International human-rights and scholarly documentation of the period generally proceeds from the 1981 Resolution’s verdict rather than adjudicating the individual directives — marked UNKNOWN/insufficient evidence, not as an absence of views.

(e) Later-outcome evidence (1968–69 party reconstruction, attributed only)

  • By September 1968, revolutionary committees had been established in all 29 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions (the last two, Tibet and Xinjiang, established together in September 1968) — described as “the whole country is red” （全国一片红） — ATTRIBUTED to standard historiography.
  • The committees were formally “three-in-one” （三结合） bodies of revolutionary cadres, PLA representatives, and mass representatives; attributed analysis holds that in practice they were dominated by military control, with serving military personnel heading roughly two-thirds of provincial-level committees — ATTRIBUTED.
  • The 9th Party Congress (April 1969) rebuilt the Party around the new power structure and named Lin Biao as Mao’s successor — PROBABLE (recorded in packet D2).
  • The mid-1968 central bulletins (July 3 and July 24, 1968) mark the turn from mass mobilization to forcible order-restoration; mass organizations were subsequently disbanded and large numbers of urban youth sent to the countryside — ATTRIBUTED.
  • The July 24, 1968 bulletin’s own language records the center’s framing: continued armed struggle, seizures of PLA weapons, and refusal to obey central orders were classed as “counter-revolutionary crimes” of “a tiny handful of class enemies” — ATTRIBUTED as the document’s stated position, not as this file’s assessment.

(f) PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGETs

PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET | 《关于人民解放军坚决支持革命左派群众的决定》 full verbatim text | 1967-01-23 | CCP Central Committee / State Council / Central Military Commission | Existence, date, and number (中发〔67〕19号…〔67〕27号) established; full text not yet obtained; needed for any dated quotation of the PLA-intervention authorization | Laogai Archive Database (archive.org) A670113.pdf series suggests a same-collection scan may exist | Affects claims about the exact wording of the PLA “support the left” authorization and whether the Central Cultural Revolution Group co-issued it (carrier conflict noted in §a.3)

PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET | 《关于不准抢夺人民解放军武器、装备和各种军用物资的命令》（九五命令） full verbatim text | 1967-09-05 | CCP Central Committee / State Council / Central Military Commission / Central Cultural Revolution Group | Existence, date, and issuers established; full text not located; needed for any dated quotation of the weapons-seizure ban | Secondary summaries cite print legal-history compilations (e.g., 吉林人民出版社 1993; 中国国际广播出版社 1989) | Affects claims about the order’s precise prohibitions and whether it addressed “armed struggle” （武斗） directly

PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET | 《中共中央、中央文革小组转发毛主席关于〈北京新华印刷厂军管会发动群众开展对敌斗争的经验〉的批示的通知》 full verbatim text | 1968-05-25 | CCP Central Committee / Central Cultural Revolution Group | Documentary chain (Jiang Qing Nov 1967 remark → Yao Wenyuan May 13, 1968 submission → Mao’s May 19, 1968 comment) established; the forwarding notice’s full text not pulled; needed for the exact nationwide-launch wording of “Cleansing the Class Ranks” | Cited in Chinese secondary histories with document references | Affects claims about the campaign’s stated targets and authorization scope

PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET | 《七·三布告》 full verbatim text | 1968-07-03 | CCP Central Committee (Mao-approved: 毛主席批示) | Existence and Mao’s personal approval established via the July 24, 1968 bulletin’s reaffirmation; full text not pulled | Reaffirmed by 中发〔68〕113号 (full text in archive.org Laogai scan A680724.pdf) | Affects claims about the center’s mid-1968 order-restoration terms for Guangxi

PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGET | 中发〔67〕19号 red-header original scan of 《关于在无产阶级文化大革命中加强公安工作的若干规定》 | 1967-01-13 | CCP Central Committee / State Council | Full wording verified via two independent carriers (archive.org Laogai scan text + corroborating summary); the red-header original would settle any transcription doubts for publication-grade quotation | Laogai Archive Database scan A670113.pdf is the closest located carrier | Affects publication-grade quotation confidence for the 公安六条

Resolution status

  • RH-D1 (16-Point Decision full text): RESOLVED — full text verified from the contemporaneous official English carrier (Peking Review No. 33, Aug 12, 1966); canonical 16-point enumeration recorded; minor carrier conflicts noted.
  • RH-D4 (1967–68 governance directives): PARTIALLY RESOLVED — existence, dating, issuers, and full text verified for the 公安六条 (Jan 13, 1967) and the July 24, 1968 bulletin; existence, dating, and issuers verified for the January 23, 1967 PLA directive, the September 5, 1967 order, and the May 25, 1968 class-ranks notice; full verbatim texts for the latter three remain PRIMARY-SOURCE-TARGETs. No collision detected (unit owned by this run’s claim).

Sources consulted this run: Peking Review Vol. 9 No. 33 (via marxists.org/massline.org); archive.org Laogai Archive Database scans (A670113, A680724); William Hinton 《深翻》 ch. 66 (marxists.org Chinese archive); Walder & Lu 2017 (sociology.stanford.edu); Chinese-language reference carriers for directive dating/issuers. Earlier-corpus material (May 16 Notification quote, 1981 Resolution quotes) reused from without re-research.