The Sun Is Red Again the Sun Rises Again Xi Jinping Has Taken Maos Placec
What was it and when did it begin?
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedong'south bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his command over the Communist party.
Its bewildering complication and almost unfathomable brutality was such that to this day historians struggle to brand sense of everything that occurred during the menses.
However, Mao's decision to launch the "revolution" in May 1966 is now widely interpreted every bit an try to destroy his enemies by unleashing the people on the political party and urging them to purify its ranks.
When the mass mobilisation kicked off party newspapers depicted it as an epochal struggle that would inject new life into the socialist crusade. "Like the red sun rising in the eastward, the unprecedented Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is illuminating the land with its brilliant rays," 1 editorial read.
In fact, the Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives and thrust Red china into 10 years of turmoil, mortality, hunger and stagnation.
Gangs of students and Cherry-red Guards attacked people wearing "bourgeois clothes" on the street, "imperialist" signs were torn downwards and intellectuals and party officials were murdered or driven to suicide.
After violence had run its encarmine course, the state's rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nil but "grave disorder, damage and retrogression".
An official party reckoning described it as a catastrophe which had acquired "the well-nigh astringent setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People'southward Democracy" in 1949.
Whose idea was it and what was the aim?
The Cultural Revolution was the brainchild of China's 'Peachy Helmsman', Chairman Mao Zedong.
Seventeen years after his troops seized power, Mao saw his latest political campaign every bit a way of reinvigorating the communist revolution by strengthening ideology and weeding out opponents.
"Our objective is to struggle against and beat out those persons in authority who are taking the backer road... so every bit to facilitate the consolidation and evolution of the socialist system," ane early directive stated.
Frank Dikötter, the author of a new volume on the period, says Mao hoped his move would make China the pinnacle of the socialist universe and turn him into "the homo who leads planet Earth into communism."
But it was also an attempt by the elderly dictator, whose authority had been badly hitting by the calamitous Great Famine of the 1950s, to reassert command over the party by obliterating enemies, real or imagined.
"Information technology was a power struggle waged... backside the smokescreen of a fictitious mass motion," Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans wrote in his damning business relationship of the Cultural Revolution, The Chairman'southward New Dress.
How exactly did information technology start?
About historians agree the Cultural Revolution began in mid-May 1966 when party chiefs in Beijing issued a document known as the "May xvi Notification". It warned that the political party had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary "revisionists" who were plotting to create a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie".
A fortnight subsequently, on ane June, the party'south official mouthpiece paper urged the masses to "clear away the evil habits of the old gild" past launching an all-out assail on "monsters and demons".
Chinese students sprung into activeness, setting up Cherry Guard divisions in classrooms and campuses across the country. By August 1966 - so-chosen Ruby-red August - the commotion was in full swing as Mao'south allies urged Crimson Guards to destroy the "iv olds" - quondam ideas, old customs, old habits and sometime civilisation.
Schools and universities were closed and churches, shrines, libraries, shops and private homes ransacked or destroyed as the assail on "feudal" traditions began.
Gangs of teenagers in ruddy armbands and military fatigues roamed the streets of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai setting upon those with "bourgeois" dress or reactionary haircuts. "Imperialist" street signs were torn down.
Party officials, teachers and intellectuals also institute themselves in the cross-hairs: they were publicly humiliated, beaten and in some cases murdered or driven to suicide after vicious "struggle sessions". Blood flowed as Mao ordered security forces not to interfere in the Reddish Guards' piece of work. Almost 1,800 people lost their lives in Beijing in Baronial and September 1966 solitary.
What happened next?
After the initial explosion of student-led "cherry terror", the chaos spread rapidly. Workers joined the fray and Red china was plunged into what historians depict as a state of virtual civil war, with rival factions battling it out in cities beyond the country.
By late 1968 Mao realised his revolution had spiralled out of control. In a bid to rein in the violence he issued instructions to ship millions of urban youth down to the countryside for "re-pedagogy".
He as well ordered the army to restore lodge, effectively transforming China into a military dictatorship, which lasted until about 1971. As the army fought to bring the situation under command, the death toll soared.
Betwixt 1971 and the Cultural Revolution's official end, in 1976, a semblance of normality returned to People's republic of china. US president Richard Nixon even toured the land in February 1972 in a historic visit that re-established ties betwixt Washington and Beijing.
It was, in Nixon's words, "the week that changed the earth".
How many victims were at that place?
Historians believe somewhere between 500,000 and two meg people lost their lives as a effect of the Cultural Revolution.
Perhaps the worst affected region was the southern province of Guangxi where there were reports of mass killings and even cannibalism.
Appalling acts of barbarity also occurred in Inner Mongolia where authorities unleashed a vicious campaign of torture against supposed separatists.
Even China's feline population suffered as Red Guards tried to eliminate what they claimed was a symbol of "bourgeois decadence". "Walking through the streets of the capital letter at the end of Baronial [1966], people saw dead cats lying by the roadside with their front paws tied together," writes Dikötter.
Nonetheless contrary to popular belief, the government was responsible for most of the mortality, non the Blood-red Guards.
"Nosotros read a lot of horror stories nearly students chirapsia their teachers to death in the stairwell," says Andrew Walder, the writer of Prc Under Mao.
"[Only] based on the government's ain published histories well over one-half, if not two-thirds of the people who were killed or imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution suffered that from 1968 to early 1970" equally the ground forces moved in to halt the violence.
The lives of some of the Communist party'south most powerful figures were upended by the turbulence, including future leader Deng Xiaoping, who was purged in 1967, and Xi Zhongxun, the father of Red china'south electric current president, 11 Jinping, who was publicly humiliated, beaten and sent into exile.
President Eleven'southward half-sis, Xi Heping, is said to have taken her ain life after being persecuted.
How were foreigners affected?
As chaos enveloped Beijing in the summer of 1966, foreign diplomats found themselves at the eye of the storm. "Earplugs became standard diplomatic mission event," the former British ambassador Percy Cradock writes in his memoirs recalling how a cacophony of songs praising "our beloved Chairman Mao" became the soundtrack of life in the capital.
By the following year things had taken a more sinister plough. Crimson Guards laid siege to the Soviet, French and Indonesian embassies, torched the Mongolian ambassador's machine and hung a sign exterior the British mission that read: "Crush British Imperialism!" I dark, in tardily August, diplomats were forced to flee from the British embassy as it was ransacked and burned. Outside protesters chanted: "Kill! Kill!".
Anthony Grey, a Reuters journalist in Beijing, spent more than than two years in captivity after existence detained past Chinese authorities in July 1967.
What was the Little Cherry-red Book?
The Cultural Revolution's official handbook was the Piddling Red Book, a pocket-sized collection of quotations from Mao that offered a blueprint for Red Guard life.
"Exist resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory!" read one famous counsel.
At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Fiddling Reddish Volume reading sessions were held on public buses and fifty-fifty in the skies in a higher place Mainland china, as air hostesses preached Mao'south words of wisdom to their passengers. During the 1960s, the Piddling Red Book is said to have been the nigh printed book on earth, with more than than a billion copies printed.
When did information technology end?
The Cultural Revolution officially came to an end when Mao died on 9 September 1976 at the age of 82.
In a bid to movement on - and avoid discrediting Mao as well much - political party leaders ordered that the Chairman's widow, Jiang Qing, and a group of accomplices exist publicly tried for masterminding the chaos. They were known as the "Gang of Four".
Jiang contested the charges claiming she had merely been "Chairman Mao's canis familiaris" but was sentenced to expiry in 1981, later reduced to life in prison. In 1991, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, she hung herself.
How did the Cultural Revolution bear upon Communist china?
Mao had hoped his revolutionary movement would turn Prc into a buoy of communism. But fifty years on many believe it had the opposite upshot, paving the way for Communist china's embrace of capitalism in the 1980s and its subsequent economic nail.
"A common verdict is: no Cultural Revolution, no economic reform," Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals write in their book on the period, Mao's Concluding Revolution. "The Cultural Revolution was so great a disaster that information technology provoked an fifty-fifty more profound cultural revolution, precisely the one that Mao intended to prevent."
Some other enduring legacy, experts say, is the obsession of today's rulers with stability and political control.
Leaders such every bit Xi Jinping, a xiii-yr-old Beijing schoolboy when the cultural revolution began, had a front row seat to the mayhem, and some even partook in the violence.
"They saw a Communist china that was totally chaotic for about two years and they saw atrocities sometimes," says Walder, a Stanford University expert on the menstruation. "They view the loss of the political party's command as something that will pb to chaos."
Dikötter believes the nightmarish upheaval as well served to destroy any remaining faith the Chinese people had in their Great Teacher. "Fifty-fifty before Mao died, people buried Maoism."
How is the Cultural Revolution remembered today?
Afterward Mao'southward decease, the Communist party made some attempts to face the horrors of the previous decade. Some were punished for the violence while those unfairly purged or persecuted were rehabilitated.
Only those efforts petered out in the early 1980s as Beijing became wary of implicating itself in the killing at a time of growing opposition from Chinese youth. Academics were discouraged from excavation into the party's inconvenient truth.
Experts say Beijing would seek to mark this year'southward 50th ceremony with deafening silence.
"They won't become there - it is just too damaging to the political party," says MacFarquhar. "The party is guilty of iii massive blows to the Chinese people: the [Great] Famine, the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of the environment which is ongoing now and may in fact be more mortiferous that the other two in the long run. And the last thing it wants to say is that we were the guilty ones."
However, a biting public row over a Mao-themed extravaganza held in Beijing earlier this calendar month has unexpectedly thrust the decade-long upheaval back into the headlines.
What should I read to understand the Cultural Revolution?
The seminal piece of work on the period is Mao's Terminal Revolution past Roderick MacFaquhuar and Michael Schoenhals, a blow-by-blow business relationship of the turmoil.
An earlier book by Schoenhals - China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-69: Non a Dinner Party - contains a trove of documents, speeches and photographs, that chronicle the land'due south descent into anarchy.
Maybe the most withering critique of the political mobilisation tin can be found in The Chairman's New Wearing apparel: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, by Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans.
Ji Xianlin's The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a harrowing starting time-person account of the period. First published in 1998 and recently translated into English, the book recounts the hardship of a Peking University academic who spent nearly ix months as a prisoner of the Red Guards.
Some other powerful Cultural Revolution memoir is Life and Death in Shanghai past Nien Cheng, a Chinese graduate of the London Schoolhouse of Economic science whose life was turned upside down by the Red Guards in 1967.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion
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