Cultural Revolution in China
A decade of purges, Red Guards and smashed heritage
In May 1966 Mao Zedong declared war on 'bourgeois elements' in the party and society. Red Guards ransacked temples, museums and offices and persecuted teachers and officials; some 17 million urban youths were 'sent down' to the countryside. Estimates of the death toll range from hundreds of thousands to two million. The movement ended with Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 19 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 18 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 17 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 14 years later
- 1981 AIDS first described — 15 years later
Europe
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 25 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 13 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 2 years later
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 23 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 23 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 21 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 9 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 5 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 19 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 23 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 18 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 13 years earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 12 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 13 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 14 years later
Africa
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 8 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 6 years earlier
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 3 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 1 year later
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 1 year later
Americas
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 6 years earlier
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 4 years earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 3 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 4 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 17 years later
Oceania
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 25 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 24 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 12 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 7 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Pablo Picasso (aged 85)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 77)
- Mao Zedong (aged 73)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 48)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 37)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 36)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 32)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 82)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 77)
- Ho Chi Minh (aged 76)