Mao engineered the Cultural Revolution to destabilize his own Communist Party.

Evidence

Mao Zedong had instigated the chaos on purpose to destabilize the Party he had helped build. The leader of the People’s Republic of China sought to ride the upsurge of energy with charismatic leadership and the elevation of a little red book of powerful but indeterminate aphorisms (without complete success). When things got too hot, Mao was able to rely on the military and reestablish control while maintaining his position as éminence grise in the Communist Party of China (CPC) for the rest of his life. Things went rather differently for Alexander Dubček, the Communist leader of Czechoslovakia, who sought a liberal de-Stalinization of the national system in the Warsaw Pact country (Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had begun the de-Stalinization process in 1956, much to the chagrin of Mao himself). Leonid Brezhnev, the unimaginative and pliable leader imposed by the Soviet bureaucracy in 1964, chose to respond with force. He sent in the troops, and rather than addressing the inflexibility of the party model across the entire Soviet space, he doubled down. Thus began a long period of relative stability for the USSR, and of absolute comfort for the high-ranking nomenklatura (Party members with official titles). — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 95

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution ‘on purpose to destabilize the Party’ simplifies a contested historiography worth chasing later.
• XREF: connects to: The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to provoke fresh group-formation over reviving the party — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 537

Broader Connections

• The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to provoke fresh group-formation over reviving the party #qualifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 537