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Early Cultural Revolution
The Tsinghua University High School was the cradle for the Cultural Revolution's Red Guard movement. Beginning in the early 1960s, the attached high school's cadres promoted the ideology of class struggle based in familial pride. At the beginning of May 1966, some students, under the influence of the 5-16 Circular, posted a big character poster stating "participate in this class struggle in the most positive and self-aware way", receiving resistance from the school authorities. On the night of May 29th, a handful of upper-grade students, after group delibrations at the Old Summer Palace ruins, decided to name their movement the "red guards", meaning "Mao Zedong's red guards". On June the 2nd, they posted the big character poster "Pledge our lives to defend Mao Zedong thought, pledge our lives to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat" in response to Nie Yuanzi's big-character poster at Peking University, attracting students from surrounding secondary schools to sign their names in support.

Between June 24 and July 27, the Tsinghua University High School posted three big character posters, the ensemble of which was entitled "long live the proletariat class's revolutionary spirit of rebellion!" The first two portions were passed on to Mao Zedong, who responded with support on August 1st. The contents of the big character posters were carried in full by the People's Daily and Red Flag magazine. On 8 occasions, Mao Zedong met the red guards in person, pushing the red guard movement into the milieu of university students and the general public. The red guards began campaigns such as destroying the four olds and promoting the "right to link up". On the afternoon of August 24, 1966, the historical secondary gate to the university was pulled down by the red guards to symbolize their opposition to feudalism and capitalism and their support for Marxist-Leninist revisionism. On the same site, a giant sculpture of Mao Zedong was raised on May 4, 1967, reported in the People's Daily as a "spectacular event", inciting a wave of construction of similar sculptures across the country.

On June 8, 1966, a task force led by Ye Lin with participation from Liu Shaoqi and Wang Guangmei entered Tsinghua University, attacking principal Jiang Nanyu and other cadres as "capitalist roaders", "counterrevolutionary academic authorities", and "cow demons and snake spirits", took over the Tsinghua party commitee, and criticized rebellious students. Radical students like Peng Dafu from the university's engineering chemistry faculty resisted. On June 21, in what has since been called the "June 21st incident", Peng lambasted the task force, claiming that it did not represent the revolution, and demanded to seize power. The taskforce criticized Peng, revoked his party credentials, and detained him for 18 days. At least 50 people were condemned for being sympathetic to Peng;500 people were implicated, and several attempted suicides occurred, causing two deaths. . In July, Mao Zedong returned to Beijing, condemned the task force, supported the radicals, and hinted at disagreements with Liu Shaoqi. In late August, several large-character posters condemning Liu were posted in the Tsinghua Garden. In October, a large-character poster exclaiming "defeat Liu Shaoqi" was posted in the same garden.

On December 19, 1966, under commands from the "proletariat headquarters", the "Tsinghua University Jinggangshan Corps", Tsinghua's largest red guard organization with defeating Liu Shaoqi as its purpose, was established. Peng Dafu became its leader and was nicknamed "commander Peng".

On December 25, commanded by the Cultural Revolution Group, the Tsinghua University Jinggangshan Corps' 5000 members led a protest against Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, spreading the Cultural Revolution into the entirety of Beijing. On January 6, 1967, Peng Dafu and others implemented the so-called "strategically seize Wang Guangmei" plan, using the supposed injury of Liu Shaoqi's daughter Liu Pingping as bait to lure wife Wang Guangmei out and detain her. On April 10th, with the agreement of the "proletariat headquarters", the "Jinggangshan corps" rallied tens of thousands of people for the public denunciation of Wang Guangmei. More than 300 radical organizations participated in the event.

On April 14, 1967, due to internal disputes over major issues in the Cultural Revolution, the Jinggangshan red guards split into the "Corps headquarters" and the "414 faction". The two parties had rather large-scale disputes over the representatives who were to make up the revolutionary committee.

The "headquarters" and "414 faction", on the radical and conservative sides of the red guard movement respectively, both declared themselves to be the proper representatives of the proletariat. The two factions had disputes over three core issues: how should the "Cultural Revolution" be understood? How should the first ten years of the Cultural Revolution be seen? How should cadres be treated?

In the winter of 1967, to prevent chaos, the Chinese government demanded that all students return to school to engage in "revolution in the classroom". In March 1968, following the "Yang, Yu, Bo incident", the Cultural Revolution Group launched a campaign against "rightist inclinations". Tensions between the two factions at Tsinghua again began to rise, leading to incessant small-scale clashes.

Between April 23 and July 27 in 1968, the opposing red guard factions erupted into the "100-day clashes", the most severe clashes to occur during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing. Red guards used batons, stones, landmines, grenades, improvised guns, improvised cannons, toxic arrows, semiautomatic weapons, molotov cocktails, and improvised armored vehicles. They occupied and looted the grand auditorium and other important buildings. The clashes caused 18 deaths and more than 1100 injuries, and rendered 30 people disabled for life. Direct economic loses reached at least ten million. At the end of the skirmishes, the "414 faction" was forced to surrender by the "headquarters faction".

On July 27, the Chinese Central Committee, seeking to stop the clashes in higher-education schools, placed the Ministry of Education under military control. On the same day, a 30,000-strong Mao Zedong thought propaganda team led by 61889 Regiment deputy regimental commander Zhang Rongwen entered Tsinghua. The "headquarters faction" red guards refused to surrender and publically resisted the propaganda team, using spears, grenades, and rifles to attack its members. 5 propaganda team members were killed and 731 injured in an incident that astonished the city of Beijing. The "July 27th incident" directly led to Mao Zedong finally ordering the end of public clashes. On 3:00 AM Beijing Time on the following day, Mao Zedong and Lin Biao held an emergency meeting with the "five important leaders" of the red guards, including Peng Dafu, demanding an end to armed clashes and the welcoming of the propaganda team into Tsinghua.

Mid-to-Late Cultural Revolution
In August 1968, the propaganda team began to "re-educate" the students at the school. Students were sent en masse to countryside farms and factories.

Beginning in the end of 1968, the propaganda team launched the "every man must line up, every level must get down to earth" campaign, leading to numerous suicides or suicidal attempts, causing approximatly 16 "irregular deaths".

In 1969, the school constructed a model farm in Nanchang County and sent down 2821 educational staff to engage in labour. In that year, 747 people contracted confirmed cases of schistosomiasis and 1111 people were suspected of having contracted the disease. In the following year, the number of confirmed schistosomiasis patients surpassed one thousand people; the medical department of Tsinghua University had to continue to treat and examine schistosomiasis patients until 1997. One person remarked that "at the model farm, labour was seen as the punishment for academics; only those who completely obeyed the propaganda team were seen as having been completely reeducated. It was pure enslavement."

Beginning in 1970, Tsinghua engaged in an "educational revolution" based on Mao Zedong thought that lasted until the end of the Cultural Revolution. The "educational revolution" consisted of the following facets. Firstly, the working class was to direct all activities; the propaganda team, party committee, and revolutionary committee were to hold power. Secondly, the current faculty was to be reformed while also performing their duties. Thirdly, the school was to engage in industrial activities and faculty and students were to fully commit to industrial production (which, in reality, disrupted education and research). Fourthly, Worker-Peasant-Soldier students were to be enrolled. Fifthly, the old curriculum and educational materials were to be replaced with new proletariat educational material based on educational material from the Soviet Union. Finally, the institution was to follow the path of the people and uphold the Cultural Revolution's new educational method, which, in practice, meant public denunciations. .

Between 1970 and 1975, Tsinghua University made large-scale changes to its organization. In 1970, the school planned to put in place three factories, the experimental chemistry factory, automotive factory, and the precise instrument and machine tool factory. The school now had seven majors: electrical engineering, industrial automation, chemical engineering, infrastructure engineering, hydraulic works engineering, engineering physics, and engineering mechanics mathematics. There was a mechanical repair military company and also basic university courses. The school had two "branch campuses": the Mianyang campus and the Jiangxi campus (the model farm at Nanchang). In 1972, a rural campus was established in Daxing and a hydraulics works facility was established in Sanmenxia. The school opened further education courses for industrial workers, professional further studies courses, short-term training courses, part-time courses, and local sites to offer education to worker-peasant-soldier students outside major campuses. .

On June 27, 1970, after a four-year-long hiatus in normal admissions, worker-peasant-soldier students began to be admitted. Mao Zedong directed the school to shorten the length of its education to three years. Student recruitment was done through recommendation by the general public, approval by cadres, and examination by the school. After graduation, students were to be returned to their original working units. After October 15, similar schemes were implemented at other institutes of higher education. The last class of worker-peasant-soldier students graduated in 1981. .

In 1975, Deng Xiaoping's power in the country's government increased. In August and October, vice general secretaries of Tsinghua's party comittee Liu Bing, Liu Yi'an and Hui Xianjun as well as political work department director Lu Fangzheng wrote letters passed on through Deng Xiaoping to Mao Zedong expressing their strong dislike of the de facto leaders of Tsinghua, Chi Qun and Xie Jingyi from the propaganda team. Mao saw this as a form of rebellion against the Cultural Revolution and becan criticizing Liu Bing and other cadres who wrote the letter and Deng Xiaoping. By mid-November, this became a large debate about the "educational revolution". . In December, it evolved into the nationwide Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend movement. In this final mass movement of the Cultural Revolution, under the leadership of Chi Qun, Tsinghua University practically ceased its normal educational activities in order to "condemn Deng" and invite cadres and citizens from across the world to "study at" and "visit" Tsinghua. Within a period of ten months, hundreds of thousands of big-character posters were posted and Liu Bing was subjected to criticism and denunciation 214 times. .

On March 31, 1976, after the death of Zhou Enlai, Chi Qun demanded that "Tsinghua must not send a single flower wreath to Tiananmen". On April 3rd, some students sent white flowers to the Monument to the People's Heroes, becoming part of the Tiananmen Incident, known in Chinese as the April 5th movement. On the night of the 6th, Chi Qun referred to the movement as an "organized, purposeful, planned, sequential counterrevolutionary assault". Being defined as such, the movement was subjected to the arrests of "counterrevolutionaries" and the censorship of "counterrevolutionary political rumours". By June 10, more than 100 people had been investigated, 38 had been subjected to school-level isolation, and one person had been arrested.

In October 1976, the Gang of Four was toppled and the Cultural Revolution ended. On October 16, the Communist Party committee in Beijing began efforts to restore the University. The revolutionary committee system was abolished the following year.