In a conversation with his wife, Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong shared his expectations for the Cultural Revolution. Society needed to be thrown into chaos, he said, before it could be properly governed. Every seven or eight years, a movement of this kind would be needed, to draw the “ox demons and snake spirits” out of their dens, in keeping with their class nature. The Cultural Revolution would be a war exercise on a national scale, in which leftists, rightists, and vacillating fence-sitters would all receive their proper due.
