Bombard The Headquarters – My Big-Character Poster () was a short document written by Chairman Mao Zedong on August 5, 1966, during the 11th plenary session of the 8th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and published in the Communist Party's official newspaper People's Daily a year later, on August 5, 1967.
In this big-character poster, Mao called on the masses to "bombard the headquarters", urging rebellion against the Communist Party and his Party rivals who he alleged were exercising a "bourgeois dictatorship". It is commonly believed that the poster directly targeted Chinese President Liu Shaoqi and senior leader Deng Xiaoping, who were then in charge of the Chinese government's daily affairs and who tried to cool down the mass movement which had been coming into shape in several universities in Beijing since the May 16 Notice was issued, through which Mao officially launched the Cultural Revolution.
After the poster was published, big-character posters flourished throughout China, becoming a key medium of political radicalization and expression in the early Cultural Revolution. Many larger-scale mass persecutions followed the publication of this big-character poster, resulting in turmoil throughout the country and the death of thousands of "class enemies", including President Liu Shaoqi.
Text The original text of the poster was:
English translation:
Content The "first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster" Mao makes mention of was the 25 May 1966 poster created and displayed by Peking University radicals, Nie Yuanzi among them, which was a key trigger of the Cultural Revolution.
Though Mao's poster only vaguely targeted "some leading comrades" who had "enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great Cultural Revolution of the proletariat", everyone at the time knew that the person under attack was Liu Shaoqi. Mao alludes to the White Terror of the 1920s–1930s, during which communists were persecuted and killed by the Kuomintang.
Mao's reference to "Right deviation in 1962" refers to Liu Shaoqi's statements during the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference that the Great Leap Forward famine was caused predominantly by human error. Mao's reference to "the wrong tendency of 1964" refers to Liu Shaoqi's leadership of the Socialist Education Movement, and the Taoyuan Experience report, during which Mao and Liu came to be divided.
Impact The poster became iconic overnight, provided fuel to the Red Guards movement, and made the big-character poster a key medium of political radicalization and expression in the first two years of the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards and student radicals created posters criticizing Liu Shaoqi at Tsinghua University and in Beijing,Leijonhufvud, Göran (1989). Going Against the Tide: On Dissent and Big Character Posters in China. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. p. 65.Wang, Tuo (2014). The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics Between Politics and Performance. Lanham: Lexington Books. p. 35. and big-character posters soon covered walls in schools, university campuses, "government offices, factories, along streets, places of worship and throughout the countryside". Artwork and posters depicting Mao penning the poster flourished. Relations further deteriorated between Mao and Liu, who was then still Mao's ostensible successor; there was surprise that Mao would attack his successor so openly. Zhou Enlai promoted the poster, and Wu Faxian recalled that Zhou stated, "Liu Shaoqi can no longer be in charge of the Central Committee's work, because he has disappointed the Chairman's hopes. The Central Committee has now decided to bring comrade Lin Biao to Beijing to take over from Liu Shaoqi." Maurice Meisner writes that Mao's call to bombard the headquarters is remarkable in that it came from the Party chairman and most preeminent veteran of the revolution, who came to regard the very state and Party institutions he had helped to build as obstacles that needed to be overturned, rather than as tools of, revolutionary social change.
See also Cultural Revolution Socialist Education Movement History of the Chinese Communist Party Red Guards Propaganda in the People's Republic of China Big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution
References
External links Bombard The Headquarters – My First Big-Character Poster from the Marxists Internet Archive.