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In fact, the Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives “​Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority of , foreign diplomats found themselves at the eye of the storm.
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Dozens of the young guards started dug up tombs, broke coffins, and looted graves for jewelry, leaving the bones in the dry grass. He told me he followed guards to the tombs many times, but insists he did not take anything. Red Guards also banished Peking Opera, a once much-beloved art form, from the village.

My uncle says he did think for a moment about how his father loved Peking Opera, and memories came back to him of old days when his father would take him onstage and let him practice reciting the lines of a small role. I never had a chance to ask my grandfather — once a frequent Peking Opera actor in the village, who until the last day of his life still held his radio to listen to famous opera performer Mei Lanfang — about how it felt to see his own son burning those cherished parts of his life. Over time, Red Guards turned from attacking physical objects to attacking people.

Suppressed records revealed 50 years after China’s Cultural Revolution

My uncle says he could feel the turn happening, but he could not stop it, or stop himself. Then one day, the chanting stopped outside a nearby house, home to a lady who was more than 60 years old. The Red Guards found a pair of golden earrings hidden behind some photos frames.

The old woman was dragged out and beaten by wooden sticks as thick as arms. At first there was a cry and the sound of struggling in the water.


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Then everything was quiet except for the wind. He had negotiated with the occupying Japanese army when they passed through his village, giving them nice food and gifts in exchange for their mercy. My mother once had a conversation with my great-grandfather. None of that mattered during the Cultural Revolution. I will reflect deeply and profoundly on my past. But in , everything ended. The spell broken, Lishui found himself a farmer once again.

Still ashamed of my part in Mao's Cultural Revolution - BBC News

A photograph from that time shows him young and happy in a white shirt, green army trousers, and an army hat. Things have not gotten better for Chinese socialism, or for my uncle. He is bitter that China has cast off the values he fought for and for which he sacrificed his youth, the kind of socialism where the workers and farmers like him were the masters of their country.

In his youth, Lishui believed in a socialism in which there were no classes. During the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous and famine-inducing policy Mao implemented in the late s to spike economic production, Lishui was one of the children who pushed their parents to donate their iron tools, including farming implements, so they could be melted down to make steel. He still likes to talk politics. Mao charged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society and that they aimed to restore capitalism.

To eliminate his rivals within the CPC and in schools, factories, and government institutions, Mao insisted that revisionists be removed through violent class struggle. China's youth responded by forming Red Guard groups around the country, which split into rival factions and sometimes open battle. Schools and universities were closed.

Urban workers likewise split into factions, and the PLA had to be sent to restore order. Senior officials, most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping , were purged or exiled. Millions were accused of being Rightists and persecuted or suffered public humiliation , imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide. Many urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts and ransacked cultural and religious sites.

Mao officially declared the end of the Cultural Revolution in , but its active phase lasted until at least , when Lin Biao fled and died in a plane crash , accused of a botched coup against Mao. After Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in , Deng Xiaoping gradually dismantled the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution. In , the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic".

In , after China's first Five-Year Plan , Mao called for "grassroots socialism" in order to accelerate his plans for turning China into a modern industrialized state. In this spirit, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward , established People's Communes in the countryside, and began the mass mobilization of the people into collectives.

To hear him tell it, China has turned its back on the values for which he fought.

Many communities were assigned production of a single commodity—steel. Mao vowed to increase agricultural production to twice levels. The Great Leap was an economic failure. Many uneducated farmers were pulled from farming and harvesting and instead instructed to produce steel on a massive scale, partially relying on backyard furnaces to achieve the production targets set by local cadres. The steel produced was of low quality and mostly useless. The Great Leap reduced harvest sizes and led to a decline in the production of most goods except substandard pig iron and steel.

Furthermore, local authorities frequently exaggerated production numbers, hiding and intensifying the problem for several years. Food was in desperate shortage, and production fell dramatically. The famine caused the deaths of more than 30 million people, particularly in the more impoverished inland regions. The Great Leap's failure reduced Mao's prestige within the Party. Forced to take major responsibility, in , Mao resigned as the President of the People's Republic of China , China's de jure head of state, and was succeeded by Liu Shaoqi.

In July, senior Party leaders convened at the scenic Mount Lu to discuss policy. At the conference, Marshal Peng Dehuai , the Minister of Defence, criticized Great Leap policies in a private letter to Mao, writing that it was plagued by mismanagement and cautioning against elevating political dogma over the laws of economics.

Despite the moderate tone of Peng's letter, Mao took it as a personal attack against his leadership. Peng was replaced by Lin Biao , another revolutionary army general who became a more staunch Mao supporter later in his career. While the Lushan Conference served as a death knell for Peng, Mao's most vocal critic, it led to a shift of power to moderates led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who took effective control of the economy following By the early s, many of the Great Leap's economic policies were reversed by initiatives spearheaded by Liu, Deng, and Zhou Enlai.

This moderate group of pragmatists were unenthusiastic about Mao's utopian visions. Owing to his loss of esteem within the party, Mao developed a decadent and eccentric lifestyle. In the early s, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union were the two largest Communist states in the world. Although initially they had been mutually supportive, disagreements arose after the death of Joseph Stalin and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev to power in the Soviet Union.

In , Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his policies and began implementing post-Stalinist economic reforms. Mao and many other members of the Chinese Communist Party CCP opposed these changes, believing that they would have negative repercussions for the worldwide Marxist movement, among whom Stalin was still viewed as a hero.

Mao believed that Khrushchev did not adhere to Marxism—Leninism , but was instead a revisionist , altering his policies from basic Marxist—Leninist concepts, something Mao feared would allow capitalists to regain control of the country. Relations between the two governments soured.

Chinese photographers confront Cultural Revolution in Berlin | Arts | DW |

Mao went on to publicly denounce revisionism in April Without pointing fingers at the Soviet Union, Mao criticized its ideological ally, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Mao set the scene for the Cultural Revolution by "cleansing" powerful officials of questionable loyalty who were based in Beijing. His approach was less than transparent, achieving this purge through newspaper articles, internal meetings, and skillfully employing his network of political allies.

In the play, an honest civil servant, Hai Rui , is dismissed by a corrupt emperor. While Mao initially praised the play, in February he secretly commissioned his wife Jiang Qing and Shanghai propagandist Yao Wenyuan to publish an article criticizing it. Yao's article put Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen [19] on the defensive.

Peng, a powerful official and Wu Han's direct superior, was the head of the " Five Man Group ", a committee commissioned by Mao to study the potential for a cultural revolution. Peng Zhen, aware that he would be implicated if Wu indeed wrote an "anti-Mao" play, wished to contain Yao's influence. Yao's article was initially only published in select local newspapers.