The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Essay

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The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution, was a social-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966, having a massive impact on China.

Reasons for Mao call for the Cultural Revolution

There are several reasons for Mao call for the Cultural Revolution, as the situation at that moment is full of bourgeoisie thought, the free market policies implemented by Liu and also the ideological different with Krushchev, all these factors make Mao wanted to safeguard the purity of the Communist Revolution. Furthermore, he also wanted to remove Liu and find his own successor through this mass movement.

After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, which leading to the Great Famine and economic disaster, Mao resigned as Chairman of PRC in 1962. Retaining his title as Chairman of Communist Party, he gave up its daily management and handed over responsibility for the economy to President Liu Shaoqi.

To tackle the threat of famine, Liu think that some free markets should be allowed as the only way of combating famine. He implemented polices that allowed peasants to cultivate private plot in the backyard of their homes and sell produce to farmers’ markets. Liu also decentralized economics decision-making and planning to economic organizations below the level of communes, restored material incentives to peasants and collective farming, and carried out more realistic economic planning and programs. (Guo, 2013) As a result, about half of the farm land in China was in the hands of individual families once again. The results of these changes were sudden increases in the amounts of food being produced in China. (Karl, 2010)

However, these changes reduced the influence of M...

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...ral Revolution, Mao wished to eliminate the threat like the bourgeoisie thought, capitalism in the society. While in the Great Leap Forward, Mao wished to implement communism. For instance, building state-owned industrial economy, organize all peasants into agricultural cooperatives; establish people’s communes throughout China’s rural areas. All these are aim to build new socialist economic system through socialist transformation and nationalization of major industries and creating a Soviet-type centrally planned socialist economy.

The difference between these two movements is that Cultural Revolution also aims to eliminate Mao’s rival and people who hold different belief as Mao. For example, Mao removed Liu and Deng. On the other hand, the Great Leap Forward aims at the economy growth of China and hope to catch up with the United States and the United Kingdom.

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