The Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-76
In the early 1960s, Mao was on the political sidelines and in semi seclusion.
By 1962, however, he began an offensive to purify the party, having grown increasingly uneasy about what he believed were creeping "capitalist" and antisocialist tendencies.
Mao believed that the material incentives that had been restored to the peasants and others were corrupting the masses and were counterrevolutionary
To arrest the so-called capitalist trend, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement (1962-65), in which the primary emphasis was on restoring ideological purity, reinfusing revolutionary fervor into the party and government bureaucracies, and intensifying class struggle.
There were internal disagreements, however, not on the aim of the movement but on the methods of carrying it out.