1966-70 Cultural Revolution
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• Motives
• Reassert authority over CCP
• Extension of permanent revolution
• Old guard had lost their fervour
• Preserve revolution as a peasant one
• Criticism of Stalin and Cult of personality in Russia, with Kruschev
• Viewed Kruschev as a traitor to the revolution by compromising with the west and adopting revisionism.
• Convinced that the west would attack

Course

• Phase 1
• Mao encourages students to put up posters attacking educational institutions for their divergence from the revolutionary past
• Deng and Liu Shaoqui want peace: send emissaries to calm down students
• Mao appears near Wuhan in the Yanghtze, swimming
• Press print it
• Downgraded Lio Shaoqui and Upgraded Lin Bao (who helped write the little red book etc).
• Deng and Liu accused of being the "spearheads of the erroneous line"
• Posters denounce them
• Liu dies in his own faeces in 1973
• Deng shouted at by 3000 red guards; son thrown from a window a paralysed.
• Mao withdraws to the country. Red guards surround Zhongnanhai (the equivalent of Whitehall), and, as directed by Jiang Quing and Lin Bao, jeer / maim / kill rightist officials that had betrayed the revolution and become soviet style revisionists.
• Phase 2 - "The Red Guard Terror"
• "To Rebel is justified"
• No departure from Confuscious - merely new master
• Art desecrated - labelled as "Confuscius and Co."
• Anyone with decadent tendencies manhandled etc.
• Radio and TV stations taken over
• Most action officially directed and sanctioned.
• Victimisers became victims
• Some sickened by occurrences, then accused
• Intra-faction wars
• Workers Vs. Students
• Regional Students Vs. Other Regional Students
• General Change in Culture
• Taken over by Jiang Qing
• Destruction of Four Olds
• Thought
• Culture
• Customs
• Habits
• Reinterpretation of history into Good and Bad
• Any nuance could be misinterpreted ; therefore much banned
• Underlined by Marxist idea that culture is symptomatic of the political and social circumstances
• Or can possess any intrinsic value away from its class circumstances
• Proletarian art only art that could exist
• "Children made to trample grass and knock the heads off flowers to show their rejection of the notion of bourgeois beauty"
• Most artists sent to re-education camps
• Final Phase
• Late 1960's Mao calls an end to the revolution and brings in the PLA.
• Replaced by a call for the students to go into the countryside and learn from the peasants.
• To experience the dignity of labour
• To enhance their understanding of the revolution
• 1972 Death of Lin Bao
• Growing power means he is submitted for reeducation
• Plots Mao's assassination
• Discovered, boards plane to flee for Russia
• Shot down over Mongolia
• Rememergence of Zhou Enlai and Deng
• Zhou Enlai
• Foreign Statesman
• Lifts bamboo curtain
• Gets Nixon in 1972.
• Dies 1976
• Demonstrations in support of policies, after funeral.
• Deng
• Party Secretary by 1975
• Despite an attack by Jiang Quing on the "pragmatist clique"
• Mao 1973 in a permanent "coma" only sustained by drugs. 

Other Notes in this Category

1. 1949 Immediate Actions
2. 1949-1952 Consolidation
3. 1953-7 First Five Year Plan
4. 1957 Hundred Flower's Campaign
5. 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward
6. 1962-1966 Power Struggle
7. 1966-70 Cultural Revolution

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