What is Internal Cleansing?

Internal clean-up work. From 1951 to 1960, the Chinese People's Liberation Army carried out three operations to combat counter-revolutionaries and purify and consolidate the army. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, hostile elements at home and abroad ravaged our army frantically, not only from the outside, but also by every means to break into our army, corrode and draw together, divide and disintegrate our army members, and develop counter-revolutionary organizations. To this end, the General Political Department issued the "Instructions on Eliminating Counter-Revolutionaries in the Army" and deployed internal clean-up work. The first clean-up work from 1951 to 1952 focused on cleaning up the secret agents, gangsters, reactionaries, backbones, traitors, counter-revolutionaries, etc., and seized a batch of weapons, ammunition, radio and Counter-revolutionary credentials, etc. ^[1]