Chinese Cultural Revolution

Chinese Cultural Revolution

The Chinese Cultural Revolution, also called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a social-political movement led by Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China, in 1966. Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in order to re-establish his authority over the Chinese government because he believed that the Communist leaders were taking China in the wrong direction. He felt that they were moving too far in a revisionist direction and he called the youth of China to purge the “impure” elements of Chinese society. 

Previously, with the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) and the economic crisis that followed, Mao’s position in government had weakened. He gathered a group of radicals, his wife Jiang Qing, and defense minister Lin Biao, to help him attack current party leadership and get his own power and authority back. He shut down the nation’s schools and mobilized the youth to attack the leadership for their embrace of bourgeois values and lack of revolutionary spirit. The movement escalated quickly and the youth started forming paramilitary groups called the Red Guards. The Red Guards attacked and harassed the members of China’s elderly and intellectual population. A personality cult quickly sprang up around Mao, similar to that which existed for Josef Stalin, with different factions of the movement claiming the true interpretation of Maoist thought.

WIth the death of Lin, Mao’s official successor, in 1971, the cultural revolution lost a lot of movement. The Red Guard was moved to rural areas and Lin’s brutal end led many Chinese citizens to feel disillusioned over the course of Mao’s high-minded “revolution,” which seemed to have dissolved in favor of ordinary power struggles. Mao died in 1976, after years of Chinses politics teetering between the two sides of Mao and the Gang of Four. When Mao died, Deng Xiaoping regained power and maintained control over the government for the next 20 years. 

“Some 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation. The Cultural Revolution’s short-term effects may have been felt mainly in China’s cities, but its long-term effects would impact the entire country for decades to come. Mao’s large-scale attack on the party and system he had created would eventually produce a result opposite to what he intended, leading many Chinese to lose faith in their government altogether.” - history.com

What is really interesting to me, more than the push for communist values and ideological purity, was who was really apart of this revolution. China’s youth was really the man power behind the movement and without them this would have gone nowhere. Its interesting because a child can be so easily persuaded and coerced, and even though they may not have known what they were doing, they would later be blamed and identified as part of the Red Guard of China that caused so much destruction and crisis within the nation.