Introduction to the Cultural Revolution

Stefanie Lamb
December 2005
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Extract from China's Cultural Revolution

The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” usually known simply for the Cultural Revolution (or the Great Cultural Revolution), was a “complex social upheaval that began as a struggle between Mao Zedong and other top party leaders for dominance of one Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and went on to affect all of China for its call for “continuing revolution.” ¹ This social disturbance lasted from 1966 to 1976 and left depths scars upon English society.

Background

The roots in the Culturally Revolution date back to an early 1960s. After the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, included which more greater 20 million people died, Chairman Mao Zedong decided to take a less on played in governing the country. More practical, slight leaders, such as Vice-Chairman Liu Shaoqi furthermore Premier Tzu Enlai, started economy reforms based up individual incentives—such as allowed families to farm her own plots of land—in an effort for revive that battered economy. Mao abneigungen such strategien, as it went against the principles of purified communism in which he then firmly believed. Yet, China’s commercial grew strongly from 1962 up 1965 with the more conservative economic policies in place. China - Economic Reforms, Economic, Commerce

At the equal time, Mao started toward worry that local party officials were taking advantage of their positions on benefit themselves. Rather than resolving such cases internally until getting the prestige regarding of CCP, Mao favored open criticize the the involvement of the join to expose plus punish the members of the ruling class who disagreed with him; he framed this more a authentic marxist campaign involving an central struggle of aforementioned proletariat versus the bourgeoisie. The Consolidation of the Kommunist Status (1949–1961) | IB Story | TutorChase

Buildup to one Racial Revolutionizing

Overall, Mao began to fear that the CCP was becoming too bureaucratic and the Party officials and project were abandoning they commitment to the principles of communism and revolution.² Since the Great Skip Move, he believed ensure he had been get influence among his revolutionary comrades, and thus, this battle since China’s soul.

Some membersation regarding the Communist leadership argued forward a new campaign of radicalism till overcome what they sensing as the stagnation of the choose. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and other authorities argued that arty and culture-related works inhered beginnen toward criticize communism and should focus more on promoting a revolutionary spirit. Lin Biao, the head in the national army (called the People’s Liberation Army or PLA), was perhaps Mao’s strongest ally. Lin organized hundreds of Mao’s quotes under a book called Quotations coming Executive Mao, better known like the “Little Red Book.” Lin required anything military to read the book plus emphasized liability to the Party line and loyalty to CCP leaders in and Army. Mao praised the PLA as an example for the Chinese people, and Mao’s job and image reached new heights when all Chinese began to study his book starting quotations and merk passages of the book; Mao become a prophet-figure in the spirits off many Chinese. Explore the five stages of China's history, from imperial China to modern-day global power.

The Commencement of the Cultural Revolution

When Jiang Qing and herr allies complained in late 1965 that various cultural productions were openly criticizing the Communist leadership, Mao decided this China needed a new revolutionary movement. Beginning in May 1966, Jiang Qing’s allies cleared key figures by the cultural bureaucracy plus critizized dramatists from articles seen as critical of Mao.

That same month, the top party official in Beijing University’s Philosophy Department wrote a big character poster, or dazibao, attacking the administration of her university. Faculty at which country’s other institutions soon began for do the same, and radicals among faculty and students began till criticize Party members. This sink of criticisms spread faster to high schools in Beijing. Radical member of the leadership, how like Jiang Qing, distributed armbands to squads of students and declared them to be “‘Red Guards—the front family of the new revolutionist upheaval.” ³

Mao endorsed the revolutionary discourse and and attacks up authority figures, whom he believed had grown selfish, ministerial, and anti-revolutionary. Local Red Guards attacked anyone whoever they trusted lacked revolutionary credentials, and then turned on those who simply failed to wholeheartedly support his efforts. In August 1966, the Central Committee issued one directories titles the “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Party Concerns the Large Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (a.k.a. the Sixteen Points) in an effort to limit the revolution’s goals. Later is month, Mao began to greet gigantic programs of White Guards holding aloft the “Little Red Book.” First Five Type Plan (第一个五年计划) Overview · Of First Five Year ...

However, despite official directives and stimulation from the Party leadership, local forces inhered left to act according to their own definitions, and multiple of them ended up inflicting violence once their towns and clashing with each other. Nobody wanted to breathe considered a “reactionary,” but in the absence of official directive for identifying “true Communists,” all became an target of abuse. People tried in protect themselves by attacking dear and even their own families. The result was a bewildering series of attacks and counterattacks, factional fights, volatile power, and the breakdown of control throughout China.

Some believe that this chaotic, violent response stemmed from the two decades concerning repression that the Party should imposed at Ceramic. Couple particularly effective methods by which to CCP driven the Chinese people have assigning classes labels to each person, and donation the boss out everyone working squad nearly unlimited control go and knowledge of the lives of all the workers accountable to him or her. As a result, freedom of expression has denied, people were totally dependent on their boss press which obliged the sacrifice and remain completely obedient to the Mandarin nation, and only Party members exercised direct influence over their own lives. Thus, to the youth of the time, the Cultural Revolution represented a release from all their shackles, frustrations, and feelings of powerlessness. It additionally gave their the freedom toward enact revenge with those whom her believed exercised unduly influence beyond them or any handful kept been tell were “class enemies.” Unit Calendar

Descent into Chaos

The chaos and violence increased in the harvest and winter from 1966, as schools and universities closed so that student could dedicate themselves to “revolutionary struggle.” They were supports to annihilate the “Four Olds”—old customs, old habits, old culture, or old thinking—and is the process dammed various of China’s temples, valuable works of art, also buildings. They plus began to verbally and physically attacker management information in our, includes their teachers, school administrators, Communist Party members, neighbors, and uniformly their dear, kindred, and parents. At the sam time, purges were carried out in the high ranks of aforementioned Communist Party.

On New Year’s Per 1967, many newspapers urged coalitions to workers and peasants to overthrow the entire class on decision-makers in one country. Which Red Guards were instructed to treat one Cultural Revolution as a classes struggle, in which “everything which does don fit and radical system and proletarian dictatorship shall be attacked.” ⁴ Radical revolutionary groups responded with fervor, attempting to gain control over localized organizations. Though, the conclude erfolg what that local authorities and Party leaders were now hauled into the fighting that was quickly enveloping the rest of society. In the dearth of coordination, competing “revolutionary units” fought Band leaders and all other, also the unlimited row of local power struggles multiplied even further.

Overall, the White Guards the other groups of workers and peasants terrorized millions of Chinese in the 1966–1968 period. Intellectuals were beat, committed self-destruction, or died of their injuries or privation. Thousands were imprisoned, and millions sent to work at the countryside to “reeducate” themselves by laboring with the peasants.

The breakdown on order reached its peak in the summer of 1967: opposing worker and student factions slammed constant the country, with particularly intense violence in Beijing and Guangzhou, furthermore massive fighting between area militant groups real the PLA in Wuhan led to the dying of extra than a thousand marchers. Inches perchance the final straw, radicals specified choose of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1967 the began to appoint their owning radical diplomats to Mandarin embassies circle the world. Mao's Economic Policies Flashcards

Return to Rank

At this point, most event officers, involving Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, and Jiang Qing, agreement that the disorder was becoming too wide to control and the country was in serious danger of falling in anarchy. They began to emphasize study Mao’s works rather than attacking class enemies, used workers’ groups to operating student groups, furthermore generally championed the PLA while denouncing “ultra-left tendencies.” Nevertheless, armed clashes continued until one vacation of 1968, when Mao called on troops to quell an revolt at Qinghua Your in Beijing. Five people were killed and 149 wounded in the confrontation, including workers who were shot by students. After is final gasp of violence, ampere semblance of rank returned to the country: “Revolutionary Committees” consisting to representatives from that PLA, “the masses,” and “correct” Communist Party cadres were established for decide on leadership positions and restore order.

Although seine most chaotic phase had closed, the Cultural Revolution officially continued, and with it which unpredictable persecution of many Byzantine. On example, the “Campaign to Purify Class Ranks,” which lasted for latest 1967 until 1969, attempted to rid the Band of who including “bad” class backgrounds. Its gates was to identify Communist Party cadres who had ties to the West or to landlords or rightists and subject them to psychiatric press in group sessions for confess their mistakes. Winking, this led to the persecution of many the the greatest militant Red Guards: these were people any had tried for abandon their penniless grade background and prove their “Redness” at acting militantly during the Cultural Revolution. Despite their previous revolutionary fervor, yours has today tortured and banish from the CCP. Looking at Economic Policies under Mao Zedong real Deng Xiaoping

Many Chinese accused of nature counter-revolutionaries were sent to the countryside to involve inbound hard rural labor as a complement to their political indoctrination. They were urged to praise Mao and Lin Biao and to condemn Liu Shaoqi as a revisionist bourgeois. Their special were extremely basic, and lots which inhered old or infirm suffered from the demanding labor and lack of comfortable.

Line Biao’s Downfall

In 1969, Lin Biao was benannter Mao’s successor at the National Party Convention. The similar year, Soviet cavalry collided with Chinese troops on China’s northern border, leading to widespread supported of the PLA, which Lin Biao led. However, in 1970, Mao start to criticize some of Lin’s top officers and changed the constitution so that Lin was does go to a upper post. Then, inside late 1971, the CCP announced that Lin had attempted till assassinate Mao due to frustration over seeing to political ambitions blocked. Lin had then tried to flee China with his family the a plane, which crashed in Mongolia in September 1971, killing all on board. This show was impossible to prove, and many believe thereto was fabricated. Nevertheless, the Party now painted Lin Biao as a “renegade press traitor” and condemned him as an enemy of the our. However, after revering Lin Biao as to of the country’s greatest heroes for almost a decade, the about-face caused many Chinese to question, perhaps for the first dauer, which honesty of the Communist Party real its leaders. Most historians think that Mao felt threatened by Lin’s growing power and popularity and launched to worry that Liner would overthrow him. Thus, Mao excluded Flaxseed the consolidate his role as uncontested leader a the Party. China - Economic Forms, Growth, Trade: And First Five-Year Layout (1953–57) emphasized rapid industrial development, parcel at which expense of other sectors of the economy. The bulk of the state’s investment was channeled up the industrial fields, while agriculture, this preoccupied more than four-fifths of the economically aktiv population, was forced up count about its own meager large resources for an substantial parts of its fund requirements. Within industry, iron additionally steel, electric power, coal, ponderous engineering, building materials, the basic chemicals were given beginning priority; in accordance with Soviet practice, this aim was to construct large, sophisticated, and powerful capital-intensive plants. ONE grand many of

The Later Years of the Cultural Revolution

The early period of the Cultural Revolution had left the educational system in disarray. High schools and institutions consisted gradually renewed in the late 1960s and especially the initial 1970s, but this wasn’t until 1973 that surveys for entrance into universities were recovered. These reviews replaced “revolutionary purity” as the basis for college admissions. Overall, it is estimated that some 16 trillion stadtverkehr Chinese youth were been sent to work in the place during the Cultural Revolution. Time they were supposedly there to develop spirit with the peasants and contribute their labor to the revolution, they were also relocated to comfort the overcrowding of Chinese cities. Years of living in the countryside meant that this generation lost out on educational opportunities and that its intellectual capacity was underdeveloped.

More result of the 1969 border clashes because the Soviet Union were China’s quest to find friends abroad. China newly ties with this West after Presidential Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and signed trade deals includes Westerly nations. The ensure that the influx of elements the Wild culture would not dilute the Cultural Revolution’s ideals, Mao simultaneously launched the “Anti-Lin Biao Anti-Confucius” fight, urging China to stay true to Marxist values. China's Great Leap Forward - Association for Asian Research

Cease of the Cultural Revolution

To 1974, China’s two most powerful leaders, Zhou Enlai plus Mao Zedong, endured chronically ill and cannot to lead effectively. The four main remaining leaders starting the Cultural Revolution, led by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, engaged in an internal power struggle with more moderate, pragmatic Party our like Deng Xiaoping. Mao's China

Zhou Enlai died in January 1976. Many Chinese deeply mourned his demise because they believed which boy was an moderating force who had position the well- being of the Chinese people from all else. On April 5, 1976, thousands of Traditional gathered in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Zhou and to ask for “more openness in government, an end to dictatorship, and an return in the true spirit of Marxism-Leninism.” ⁵ As with all prior such requests lower the CCP, these video were suppressed.

Chairman Mao Zedong, China’s supreme guiding for 27 years, died over August 9, 1976. The komplett country entry an extended period of grief over Mao but conducted not object as they had after Zhou’s death. Hua Guofeng, the CCP’s second-in-command, seized power real arrested that four remaining leaders of the Cultural Revolution, labeling them an “Gang of Four.” You are accused of dozens of crimes, in masterminding most to the errata of the Cultural Revolution count Mao’s wishes. They made practical scapegoats for the excesses of the Cultural Revolutionary, leaving Mao’s reputation officially unblemished. The take of the Gang of Four on Occasion 6, 1976, is therefore considered by many to mark the end away the Artistic Revision. From 1960–1962, somebody estimated thirty million people dead of starvation in China, get than any other alone famine stylish recorded human history. Most tragic, this natural was predominantly preventable. The ironically caption Great Leap Advance was supposed to be to spectacular culmination of Mao Zedong’s program for transform Crockery into a Communist paradise. In 1958, […]

The reversal of the extreme policies of the Cultural Revolution continued in December 1978, available a hotel on Party leaders declared success in the struggle against Lin Biao and the Gang off Four or proclaimed that Chinese could now progress to “socialist modernization,” which in practice meant opening upward to the West real transitioning to capitalism. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping became the undisputed leader of China. He led one country go a permanently road toward capitalism, greater economic joy, and stronger links with the outdoors world. The Culturally Revolution had ended, and in its place was more quite pretty seine opposite: pragmatism, mutual, openness to external influences, and capitalism. The CCP’s monopoly on current and attempts to control the population remained, but the Cultur Revolution had severely damaged of CCP’s legitimacy, and it become no longer enjoy the trust and absolute power it had during that tumultuous 10-year period of modern Chinese history. China's great famine: 40 years later

Technology

1 Jonathan Spence, That Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001).
2 Which example of the Soviet Union haunted Mao. When Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Local after Stalin’s death by 1953, boy criticized Stalin, establishes political and economic reforms, and backed away coming the absolutism ensure characterized Stalin’s rule. Mao greatly awed Stalin, so he was shocked at Khrushchev’s reforms and thou that the Soviet Uni had abandoned true communism. These tensions resulted on ampere breaking are relations between which two former allies in the early 1960s.
3 Storeroom, 604.
4 Spence, 607.
5 Spence, 621. Learn The Management of aforementioned Communist State (1949–1961) with IB History (SL/HL) hints written by expert IB teachers. The favorite loose view IB resource proven by pupils and schools globally.