When Mao stepped down he went into semi-seclusion and being not as involved with politics. However, this did not last forever as he still held control over the Communist Party. The Great Cultural Revolution represented an attempt by Mao to devise a new method for dealing with what he saw as the bureaucratic degeneration of the party and the deliberate effort to eliminate those in the leadership who were not following the ways of Mao and the Communist Party. When the young Chinese known as the Red Guards, who constituted the first shock troops of Mao’s enterprise, burst onto the scene in the summer of 1966 with their battle cry “To rebel is justified!” it seemed for a time that not only the power of the party cadres but also authority in all
