I was looking at pictures of the cultural revolution and some of it doesn't look like anything you'd have encountered during the Bolsheviks or under the Stalin regime. It was happening after the Sino-Soviet split so Russia has not been en vogue anymore. And it is evidently not something borrowed from anywhere in the West. So has it, ironically, been some traditional way of dealing with miscreants and criminals or has it been more of a modernist improvisation inspired by the scriptures of the founding fathers of the PRC?
The cultural revolution was roughly analogous to the Stalinist terror, in the sense that nobody was safe, and even high ranking party leaders could be purged/physically harmed for "counter-revolutionary activities". The intelligentsia and the army were both heavily affected during both events. And indeed high ranking members of the Communist party who were opposed to Stalin/Mao were purged and died during the great purge/cultural revolution.
Maoism is its own distinct ideology but the cultural revolution can't help but remind me of Trotsky's permanent revolution. Mao's theoretical basis for the cultural revolution was that once a revolution was completed (as it did in 1949), it entrenches a new group of elite which becomes the new oppressors, and thus must be overthrown again on roughly a 8 year cycle.
