The Great Cultural Revolution, the biggest power struggle in modern Chinese history, caused some profound impacts in Chinese society. Started by the Chinese Communist Chairman Mao and lasting for ten years (1966-1976) as a means of purging dissents within the party, the movement fundamentally overthrew long-established social order, ideology, and education. “Class struggle” was the term used most often during this movement, and it caused some serious consequences. The division of classes by pure social statuses or specific classifications, namely the Five Red Categories and the Five Categories, was founded and the long class struggle had thus begun. It has exerted profound and significant impacts on the Chinese society, now and then.
In Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, the must-read pamphlet during the movement, Mao said, “In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” He also claimed that “Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them.” Although better known as political power struggle, Mao’s launching of the movement and the establishment of the notorious Red Guards resulted class struggle in large scale. According to Graham Young’s research,
Mao saw the situation in the international communist movement as the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism, and also saw that China had to make a choice between the two.
Under such circumstances, those that could enter the Communist Youth League were required to have good family backgrounds, which meant their parent...
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Secondary Resources (Research Papers & Newspaper Article)
1. Moore, Malcolm, “China Analysis: Cultural Revolution Continues to Cast Shadow,” The Telegraph, March 14, 2012,
2. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9143371/China-analysis-Cultural-Revolution-continues-to-cast-shadow.html)
(A newspaper article that reflects the Cultural Revolution to the modern Chinese politics and society and an opinionated source.)
3. Wang, Z. Y., “The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Historiographical Study,” California State University at Pomona, (http://www.csupomona.edu/~zywang/cultrev.pdf), pp. 1-13
(A well-researched college paper that uses 12 different scholarly sources. Well-documented.)
4. Young , Graham, “Mao Zedong and Class Struggle in Socialist Society”, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 16 (Jul., 1986), pp. 41-80, http://www.jstor.org/
The Sun of the Revolution by Liang Heng, is intriguing and vivid, and gives us a complex and compelling perspective on Chines culture during a confusing time period. We get the opportunity to learn the story of a young man with a promising future, but an unpleasant childhood. Liang Heng was exposed to every aspect of the Cultural Revolution in China, and shares his experiences with us, since the book is written from Liang perspective, we do not have a biased opinion from an elite member in the Chinese society nor the poor we get an honest opinion from the People’s Republic of China. Liang only had the fortunate opportunity of expressing these events due his relationship with his wife, An American woman whom helps him write the book. When Liang Heng and Judy Shapiro fell in love in China during 1979, they weren’t just a rarity they were both pioneers at a time when the idea of marriages between foreigners and Chinese were still unacceptable in society.
Gittings, John. The Changing Face of China: From Mao to market. Oxford University Press, 2005.
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
The Communist revolution in China was loosely based on the revolution in Russia. Russia was able to implement the beginnings of Marxist Communism in the way that it was intended They had a large working class of factory workers, known as the proletariat, that were able to band together and rise up to overthrow the groups of rich property owners, known as the bourgeoisie. The communist party wanted to adopted this same Marxist sense of revolution, but they realized that there were some fatal flaws in the differences between the two countries. The first was that there was not the same sense of class difference between people, yes there were peasants and landowners but there was not a sense of a class struggle. The other difference was that China was not industrialized like Russia so there was no proletariat group, as defined by Marxism, to draw the revolution from. What the Chinese Communists needed to do is re-define the proletariat for their situation, who they looked at were the peasants.
This essay will concentrate on the comparison and analysis of two communist figures: Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Party in China, and Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. The main focus of this paper will be to explore each figure’s world view in depth and then compare and contrast by showing their differences and similarities. Joseph Stalin was a realist dictator of the early 20th century in Russia. Before he rose to power and became the leader of the Soviet Union, he joined the Bolsheviks and was part of many illegal activities that got him convicted and he was sent to Siberia (Wood, 5, 10). In the late 1920s, Stalin was determined to take over the Soviet Union (Wiener & Arnold, 1999).
Schoenhals, Michael. China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969: Not a Dinner Party. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Print.
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
Gandhi and Mao Zedong had different ideas when it came to the use of violence. Mao believed that “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” (reading packet, 12) What this means is that force is absolutely necessary and the outcome of force is violence. Mao is in total agreement with violence and sees the people opposing the movements he is favoring as “paper tigers”. As in, at first, these rebels might seem terrifying, but in reality, they are helpless and harmless. Mao actually blames the Hunan landlords and the higher, wealthier class for a bloody battle between the peasants and the landlords. He said that for a long time now, the wealthier class ha...
Mao just made them think that joining will help their country, even though it was the other way around, like someone apologizing to their neighbor and manipulating their minds that they’re now cool, but they were still rude to them afterwards. To repeat this, the Chinese youth got swept up in the Cultural Revolution by Mao because the Chinese adolescents were vulnerable to influence their minds into joining the Red Guards army and doing all of the dirty jobs that Mao should’ve been doing in the first place; developing their minds into believing that they are helping their country and being involved in violence.... ... middle of paper ... ...
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.
One of Mao Zedong’s motivations for beginning the Cultural Revolution was his view that a cutting-edge bureaucratic ruling class had surfaced because of the centralized authoritarian nature of the political system, which had little hope for popular participation in the process of economic development (The Chinese Cultural Revolution revisited). The motivations of Fidel Castro, on the other hand, were different in that he wanted all people of all classes to be equal. The notion that the poverty-stricken could live a life equal to all other humans was an immense sense of happiness and alteration. In China, Mao Zedong developed many things to entice people.
... This essay critically analyses and examines the effect of Communism on the Chinese Society during the period of 1946-1964. The overall conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese Communist Party managed to defeat the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and achieve victory in the Civil War, in spite of alienation by the Soviet Union and opposition from the U.S. This was primarily because of the superior military strategy employed by the Communists and the economic and political reforms introduced by this party which brought more equality to the peasants in the form of land ownership and better public services. This increased China’s production and manufacturing, which not only boosted the country’s economy but also provided a more sustainable supply of food, goods and services for the Chinese people.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto explores class struggles and their resulting revolutions. They first present their theory of class struggle by explaining that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx 14), meaning that history is a repeated class struggle that only ends with a revolution. Marx and Engels’ message in The Communist Manifesto is that it is inevitable for class struggles to result in revolutions, ultimately these revolutions will result in society’s transition to communism.
Zhao, Y., (1998), Media, Market, and Democracy in China - Between the party line and the bottom line (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press).
Hsueh, Chun- tu, The Chinese Revolution of 1911: New Perspectives (Hong Kong: Joint _____Publishing Co., 1986), pp.1-15, 119-131, 139-171