Chairman Mao believed in “permanent revolution,” and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he exhorted young Red Guards to “Smash the Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Zealots denounced Confucius for fostering “bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks,” and one of Mao’s lieutenants gave the approval to dig up his grave. Hundreds of temples were destroyed. By the 1980s, Confucianism was so maligned that the historian Ying-shih Yu called it a “wandering soul.”
