TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > History > 1966-70 Cultural Revolution
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.
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