Sixty years ago today, Mao Zedong issued the May 16 Notification, a document frequently seen as the opening shot of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In this period, Mao fought his rivals in China's power structure by declaring them counterrevolutionaries and urging the country to rise up against them. Young radicals known as Red Guards heeded the dictator's call, and soon a mishmash of groups were chaotically clashing. The ensuing years saw violent rebellion, even more violent repression, and intense attacks on allegedly reactionary forms of culture. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—probably well over a million.
At a time when Americans and Europeans had very little direct contact with China, most Westerners viewed this through a fog. Some of them projected their political ideals onto what was unfolding. This was not merely the familiar pattern where starry-eyed leftists identified with a socialist revolution: This time, some of them thought they were watching an anti-authoritarian leader instigating a revolt against bureaucracy.
