The handwritten poster was painted with large Chinese characters and was plastered on the public bulletin of Peking University. It was May 25, 1966. Just a few days earlier, China’s leader, Mao Zedong, had purged senior officials from the country’s Communist Party, accusing them of being bourgeois traitors in disguise.
But the poster went a step further. Written by Nie Yuanzi, a rising education administrator, it accused the university administration of blocking revolutionary acts by students and professors on campus. Mao endorsed the denunciation and had the poster republished in People’s Daily, the party’s publication.
It was the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution — the most destabilizing decade in modern Chinese history — when Mao unleashed unprecedented violence against political rivals, academics and intellectuals. But as the movement spread across the country, it also had another impact that has parallels with the present.
From the U.S. to large parts of Asia, Africa and Europe, millions of school and college students are today at home, their campuses closed amid the coronavirus pandemic. Yet more than five decades ago, the Cultural Revolution forced a very different educational shutdown that devastated a generation, hobbled their opportunities for life and has shaped China’s approach to schooling ever since, say experts.
More than 1 million schools and China’s 43 universities at the time were made to stop classes in 1966, soon after Nie’s poster. Schools reopened only in 1969, and colleges in 1970. A total of 107 million school students and 534,000 college students were impacted, according to Julia Kwong, professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba in Canada and author of the book Cultural Revolution in China’s Schools, May 1966–April 1969. Then, as now, China had the world’s largest education system.
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-mao-era-school-shutdown-that-forever-changed-education-in-china/302846/