Chairman Mao began to fear that his position was no longer secure in the Communist party so he used propaganda to fix this. He spread a rhetoric about how many communists had let themselves be corrupted by western ideals and now wanted to impose it in China.
This propaganda encourage millions of youth to go after people who were thought not to be communist enough including Mao's opponents and when it was done, some estimates put the number of people dead to 10 million.
