The document was not a public proclamation. It was circulated internally within the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, a directive from the Central Committee. Its full title was “Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” History knows it as the May 16 Notice.
Its language was bureaucratic and venomous. It alleged that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had “sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture.” The threat was framed not as an external army, but as a parasitic ideology within. The Notice called for the rooting out of “those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road.” It provided the theoretical justification for what followed: the mobilization of the Red Guards, the destruction of historical artifacts, the persecution of intellectuals, and a societal purge that would claim untold lives. The power of the text lay in its vagueness. It named no specific enemies, which meant anyone could be one. It transformed political disagreement into treason, scholarly pursuit into subversion. A single memo, dense with ideological code, became the warrant for a revolution that consumed its own.