The Cultural Revolution was a revolution that had happened between 1966 and 1976 and had a great impact on China. The Cultural Revolution used to be known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution but was changed after many years. The main goal of this Revolution was to preserve true communist mainly in China by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. It was also used to re-impose Maoist which was thought as the dominant ideology within the Party. The Cultural Revolution was basically a sociopolitical movement. But it was mainly for the return of the leader, Mao Zedong, who was the leader of the revolution on and off. Which had led him to a position of power after the Great Leap Forward which paralyzed …show more content…
Which in order to accelerate his plan he had to turn China into a modern sized industrialized state. Because of this Mao decided to launch what was known as the "Great Leap Forward". “Which began the mass mobilization of the people into collectives and many communities were assigned production of a single “commodity steel”” (Keynes 46). He wanted to increase agriculture by this and only made it worse with bad weather, chaos, and exports of food necessary to secure hard currency (Keynes 32). This resulted in the Great Chinese Famine which made food short and production fell dramatically. This caused the deaths of millions which didn 't make Mao so popular and some began to hate him as a ruler. In 1959, Mao resigned as the State Chairman and this was continued by Liu Shaoqi (Keynes …show more content…
Some counties in Zhanjiang had illiteracy rates as high as 41% some 20 years after the revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, basic education was emphasized and rapidly expanded. School wasn’t as popular as it used to be and education started to fall. The amount of Chinese children who had completed primary school increased from less than half before the Cultural Revolution to almost all after the Cultural Revolution (Lieberthal 34). The number of kids who complted junior school rose from 15% to over two-thirds (Lieberthal 34). “The educational opportunities for rural children expanded considerably while those of the children of the urban elite became restricted by the anti-elitist policies” (Liu 67). The leaders of China at the time denied that there were any illiteracy problems from the start. This effect was amplified by the elimination of qualified teachers—many districts were forced to rely on selected students to educate the next generation. In the post-Mao period, many of those forcibly moved attacked the policy as a violation of their human
Following the Chinese Revolution of 1949, China’s economy was in ruin. The new leader, Mao Zedong, was responsible for pulling the economy out of the economic depression. The problems he faced included the low gross domestic product, high inflation, high unemployment, and high prices on goods. In order to solve these issues, Mao sought to follow a more Marxist model, similar to that of the Soviet Union. This was to use government intervention to develop industry in China. In Jan Wong’s Red China Blues, discusses Maoism and how Mao’s policies changed China’s economy for the worse. While some of Mao’s early domestic policies had some positive effects on China’s economy, many of his later policies caused China’s economy to regress.
The Cultural Revolution was a social-political movement used to eradicate revisionists from China and was led by the communist Emperor Mao ZeDong. This cultural cleansing was used to break ties with capitalism to help make way for the new socialist country. The communist party that was leading China was not taking it in the right direction in Mao Zedong’s eyes, so he created an extremist cult to help reassert his force over the Chinese government. After his unsuccessful “Great Leap Forward”, Mao Zedong had lost much of his power, if he remodeled China he would be viewed as the great emperor he strived to be. This movement persecuted millions of people, killed 1.5 million, and impaired China economically and socially for a long time.
In the beginning of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the narrator of the book and his friend, Luo, are being moved from their past city life to living in a small village in the mountains the villagers called ‘the Phoenix in the Sky’. They were being re-educated, moved to the village and made to work as one of villagers and be “re-educated” as a poor peasant while working the land. The narrator says in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress that during China’s Revolution, universities were closed and that all the young intellectuals, or youths who had graduated from high school, were sent to the countryside to be “re-educated by the poor peasants.” In China’s Culture Revolution it says that “8 million or more students ‘went to the countryside’ before they en...
In the Chinese history there is an important date that many remember. That is the Cultural Revolution that started in 1966 (Chan 103). This Cultural Revolution wasn’t a war by any means, but a competition between the different factions of the communist party for power. The Cultural Revolution was also a very important event in the history of the Chen Village. We saw through the different chapters of Chen Village just how it affected the different people that were living there during the eleven year span that it lasted (Chan 103). The Cultural Revolution caused a lot of problems to stir up in Chen Village.
Success, as defined by the Oxford English dictionary, is the prosperous achievement of an objective. (Oed.com 1968) Conferring to this definition, the 1949 Chinese revolution was certainly a successful revolution. The communist party of China (CCP) was incredibly successful in its attempt in replacing the bourgeoisie dominated nationalist government – The Kuomintang (KMT) - with a proletariat class lead communist government. However, whether the achievement of such objective proves to be prosperous for China and its peoples requires further analysis. Ever since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the legitimacy of the revolution of which it was built upon has perennially been in question. For example, in a 1999 issue of the
Immigration, the act of coming to live permanently in a foreign country. Throughout the United States’ history, immigrants faced various challenges and especially after 1880. Most immigrants moved to achieve the American dream of having a better life and pursuing their dreams. But, this experience as they moved, was different for every immigrant. Some lives improved while others did not. Immigrants such as Catholics, Italians, and the Chinese were not welcomed into America in the late 19th century and early 20th century because of their differences in beliefs and cultures.
The Cultural Revolution was a movement started in 1966 by Chairman Mao (Mao Zedong). “It’s stated goal was to preserve true communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from
To begin, Mao was mostly responsible in terms of establishing a strong foundation in his soldiers, setting aside internal conflict to first deal with the matter of saving China, and considering the rights of those with lesser status. However, irresponsibility was shown through the effects of the Great Leap Forward and the following famine as well as the Cultural Revolution. In Jinggang of 1927, Mao united five rural villages as a self-governing Communist state and attempted to bring them into order. Additionally he changed the military tactics so that the soldiers would stand a better chance against the enemy . Mao rose to the occasion, took charge of the administration as a leader, and essentially pledged himself into giving the area a higher possibility of survival. Also in Jinggang Shan, Mao also took to issues regarding the women and their personal privileges. At the end o...
Dressed in the drab military uniform that symbolized the revolutionary government of Communist China, Mao Zedong's body still looked powerful, like an giant rock in a gushing river. An enormous red flag draped his coffin, like a red sail unfurled on a Chinese junk, illustrating the dualism of traditional China and the present Communist China that typified Mao. 1 A river of people flowed past while he lay in state during the second week of September 1976. Workers, peasants, soldiers and students, united in grief; brought together by Mao, the helmsman of modern China. 2 He had assembled a revolutionary government using traditional Chinese ideals of filial piety, harmony, and order. Mao's cult of personality, party purges, and political policies reflect Mao's esteem of these traditional Chinese ideals and history.
In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war and established People Republic of China. The new communist government, led by chairman Mao Zedong, launched the Communist Revolution to reform the country that had suffered wars and social turbulence for decades. China was reborn and changed in many aspects during these years of revolution, and the communist party also gradually consoled its control in these years.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution was an attempt to create a new culture for China. Through education reforms and readjustments, Mao hoped to create a new generation of Chinese people - a generation of mindless Communists. By eliminating intellectuals via the Down to the Countryside movement, Mao hoped to eliminate elements of traditional Chinese culture and create a new form Chinese culture. He knew that dumbing down the masses would give him more power so his regime would be more stable. This dramatic reform affected youth especially as they were targeted by Mao’s propaganda and influence. Drawing from his experiences as an Educated Youth who was sent down to the countryside Down to the Countryside movement, Ah Cheng wrote The King of Children to show the effects of the Cultural Revolution on education, and how they affected the meaning people found in education. In The King of Children, it is shown that the Cultural Revolution destroyed the traditional incentives for pursuing an education, and instead people found moral and ethical meaning in pursuing an education.
Philip J. Ivanhoe. Confucian moral self cultivation. New York : P. Lang, vol. 3, 1993.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, beginning as a campaign targeted at removing Chairman Mao Zedong's political opponents, was a time when practically every aspect of Chinese society was in pandemonium. From 1966 through 1969, Mao encouraged revolutionary committees, including the red guards, to take power from the Chinese Communist party authorities of the state. The Red Guards, the majority being young adults, rose up against their teachers, parents, and neighbors. Following Mao and his ideas, The Red Guard's main goal was to eliminate all remnants of the old culture in China. They were the 'frontline implementers' who produced havoc, used bloody force, punished supposed 'counter revolutionists', and overthrew government officials, all in order to support their 'beloved leader'.
Due to his failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong began to fear urban social stratification and resent his diminished role. He decides to enforce Cultural Revolution to gain control and improve their nation. The main goals were to replace designated successors with leaders faithful to his Zedong’s current thinking, to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience, and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. In the Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Revolution, it is stated that “In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the only method is for the masses to liberate themselves, and any method of doing things in their stead must not be used”(Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution). It encouraged the masses to educate themselves, which is different from their usual education system.
The 1911 Revolution kicked out the Qing Dynasty and broke the barriers to different developments in China. However, the 1911 Revolution has only provided a framework of a republic and made changes in some particular aspects related to immediate problems and difficulties in society. Hence, the relationship between the revolution and the subsequent development of China was very weak. On one hand, I do not agree with the latter part of the statement that the 1911 Revolution brought new problems to China. The conflicts and problems that China suffered in the early/ mid 1910s were mainly due to the weakness of the military force, conflicting political organizations and disorder in society. On the other hand, I agree with the first part of the statement that the 1911 Revolution did not bring peace to China afterwards. In the following paragraphs, I am going to focus on explaining the reasons of emerging new problems in China and also illustrate my points on the factors of the 1911 Revolution which could not bring in peace to China related to the conditions of the country.