Why did Mao Zedong encourage the Red Guards to criticize Chinese Communist Party officials?

Mao Zedong encouraged the Red Guards to criticize Chinese Communist Party officials as part of a broader strategy to regain control of the party and reshape the Chinese state. Mao’s motivations for this mobilization included several key goals:12

• Eliminating Political Rivals: Mao sought to remove senior officials and designated successors whom he viewed as "revisionist" or insufficiently revolutionary, effectively purging those who had dared to oppose him.123
• Rectifying the Party: He aimed to transform the CCP from what he perceived as a bureaucratically run machine into a more popularly based system under his personal leadership and a simplified administration.14
• Preventing "Revisionism": Fearing that China would follow the path of the Soviet Union, Mao wanted to reverse what he saw as the bureaucratic degeneration of the party and prevent the development of an elitist, "bourgeois" authority.153
• Revolutionary Experience: Mao believed that mobilizing urban youth would provide them with a necessary revolutionary experience while testing party cadres through public criticism.14

Ultimately, this "revolution in the superstructure" was a deliberate effort to seize power and ensure that his own ideology remained the guiding force for China.14