China's Cultural Revolution Denounces Confucius

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing launched the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign in 1973, bringing it fully into the open by January 1974 as an officially sanctioned nationwide effort. The campaign recast Chinese history itself as a long struggle between Confucianism and Legalism, and it denounced Confucius directly by name, casting him as a defender of slavery and an obstacle standing in the way of historical progress rather than a figure of neutral cultural memory.

The campaign's own architects gave the confrontation a deliberate shape: they styled themselves as modern Legalists, setting their own political project against the Confucian tradition explicitly by name rather than merely sidelining it through quieter neglect. The denunciation ran until the Cultural Revolution itself came to an end in 1976, closing the campaign along with the wider political movement that had carried it forward for those years.

What this campaign changed for Confucianism was the most sustained official denunciation the tradition has faced anywhere, including in its own homeland where it had shaped statecraft for two thousand years. For those three years a philosophy that had organised Chinese government and family life for two millennia was recast by the state itself as an active enemy of progress, a reversal with no real equal in Confucianism's own long history inside China.