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CHINA: The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or simply the Cultural Revolution was a violentmass movement in China that started in 1966 and officially ended with Mao Zedongs death in1976. It resulted in social, political, and economic upheaval; widespread persecution; and thedestruction of antiques, historical sites, and culture.

It was launched by Mao Zedong , the chairman of the Communist Party1, on May 16, 1966. Healleged that liberal bourgeois ( upper class/educated ) elements were permeating the party andsociety at large and that they wanted to restore capitalism. Mao insisted, in accordance with histheory of permanent revolution, that these elements should be removed through revolutionaryviolent class struggle by mobilizing China's youth who, responding to his appeal, then formedRed Guard groups around the whole country.

The Cultural RevolutionThe Cultural Revolution, as suggested by the title, was a movement to transform the Chineseculture by, according to Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), uprooting it from feudal and bourgeois

backgrounds of pre-Communist China and turning it completely into a socialist state.

Communist Youth Movement: The Red GuardsIn the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, the urban youth were mobilized against theintelligentsia and better-off or educated sections of the working class. To this end, Mao appealedto the loyalty of the youth to the Revolution, and taught the youth to regard all manifestationsof culture as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary . Lessons were stopped, all entertainmentand social life other than politics denounced, and politics reduced to mindless repetition ofMaos Thoughts and the witch -hunting of anyone unwilling or unable to reduce themselves tothe same idiotic level.

From the beginning of CR, the Chinese youth were an important force Mao relied on to combathis opponents in the Communist Party. The Red Guards, as these high school students werecalled, wore red armbands to distinguish themselves from other high school students. They wereguards of Mao against his (black) capitalist-roader opponents. Almost overnight, high schoolkids found themselves empowered by the number one leader of the country. They now were ableto knock on people's door and interrogate them in their private homes or in public places, theirred guard armband being the only thing needed to provide them with authority.

The Red Guards' acceptance of their call in the CR was the result of years of moralindoctrination of heroism and selfless sacrifice for the Communist cause. Individualism andindependent thinking were long criticized as "bourgeois," thus any one with doubts about the CR

would often feel ashamed of themselves, and at least not talk about their thoughts in public.

The Red Guards' participation in the CR, however, soon went awry. For one thing, most of themwere young, and students. They soon fell into factional struggles against one another. And theywere really not suited to govern the institutions they occupied. They were creatingembarrassment to Mao. Mao was ready to retire and disperse them by 1967, and to use them torealize another of his goals.

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PersecutionMillions of people in China were violently persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Thoseidentified as spies, "running dogs", "revisionists", or coming from a suspect class such aslandlords or rich peasants were subject to measures such as beating, imprisonment, rape, torture,sustained and systematic harassment and abuse, seizure of property and erasure of social identity.At least hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, starved or worked to death. Millionsmore were forcibly displaced. Young people from the cities were forcibly moved to the

countryside, where they were forced to abandon all forms of standard education in place of the propaganda teachings of the Communist Party of ChinaCultural Conformity

Re-education of YouthMao's vision to fully integrate the Chinese educated and uneducated, the city and the countryfound its way in the reeducation of urban educated youth. Starting from 1967, the graduatingclasses of junior and senior high school were required to go and work in the countryside, with nodate of return . By pushing intellectuals out of the cities, he sought to curb social unrest and

potential rebellion against him.

Women in Chinas Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution aimed at a complete cultural transformation of China, including on theissue of gender. Yet it was not the first time the Communist regime tried to erase the symbolicdifferences between gender. A poem written by Mao Tse-tung glorifying women in militaryuniform was set to music and became one of the popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s. It wentroughly as: Spirited and attractive, with a five feet rifle/arriving at the training ground with thefirst rays of morning sunshine/how magnificently ambitious Chinese women are/they prefermilitary uniforms to feminine clothes.

During the Cultural Revolution, violence also became women's identity, especially because theywanted to escape from a conventional perception of them as passive and gentle, which were alllabeled as "bourgeois" by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. It was not uncommon for girls tointerrogate and beat up the "bad elements". Women invariably dressed as men, or as male armycombatants because it was "considered very glorious." And often, the belt on their uniform

became their instrument to beat up their suspects. Rejecting a bourgeois lifestyle and engaging inaggressive, violent attacks both mandated that girls dress like boys, cut their hair like boys, and

borrow their fathers (not their mothers') leather belts.

During the Cultural Revolution, political correctness consisted largely in women wearing thesame dark colors as men, keeping their hair short, and using no make-up. That men were notrequired to use these things shows that it was women's symbolic difference that had beenspecifically targeted and suppressed on top of all other forms of political repression.

Excerpted from http://www.iun.edu/~hisdcl/g387/cr.htm