Alright, so Senior year history class was boring and I did not pay attention when we took this. All I know is that Mao Zedong was fighting for a communist way of life in China(?), and there was a lot of propaganda in the form of posters and statues etc. What I mainly want to know is if this was a generally positive and beneficial movement in China, or whether it was just very screwed up like what we hear now in North Korea, and in what ways was it positive/negative? Were the people provided with their needs? Were they happy? Or was it all just a big fad in disguise?
Thanks in advance!
About 2 million people died during the chaos and anarchy unleashed under Cultural Revolution policies. Anything a person said could get them branded a counter revolutionary and sent off to the countryside for reeducation, or beaten up by one of many gangs of Cultural Revolutionary thugs. At it's height the Cultural Revolutionary gangs were seizing weapons from PLA and staging mini-wars in the middle of city centers with rival factions. Perhaps one of its most enduring legacies is the "Smash the Four Olds" campaign, in which priceless cultural artifacts, such as ancient monuments and Buddhist temples, throughout the nation were seized upon upon and destroyed (the Forbidden City was only saved through the direct intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai).
Once the Cultural Revolutionary youth had done their job for him, and Mao had regained absolute control of the party from his enemies, he suddenly found them an inconvenience. So, he had 20 million youth, an entire generation, shipped off to permanently "down to the countryside". Their Hukou household registration (basically a Chinese internal passport) was changed from rural to urban, and so it remains, their still there to this day, banished from their home.
It is not generally considered to be a good time.
The posters were pretty nice, though:
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted a resolution in 1981 officially branding the Cultural Revolution an "error", acknowledging that Mao Zedong was "chiefly responsible" for the "errors" of the Cultural Revolution - but also charging that others on the Central Committee who "harbour[ed] ulterior motives, made use of these errors and inflated them". It goes on to state that "the “cultural revolution” did not in fact constitute a revolution or social progress in any sense, nor could it possibly have done so. It was we and not the enemy at all who were thrown into disorder by the “cultural revolution"."
It requires some reading between the lines, but the Cultural Revolution was largely a power struggle within the upper reaches of the CPC.
There's so much more I could quote, but you should just read it for yourself, it's actually incredibly damning: https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm
A followup question, was there anything positive that came out of the Cultural Revolution? I'm getting the impression it was a pretty one sided negative affair.
It was about (1) power struggle between different factions of the Communist Party, (2) different political ideologies for different directions of the country, (3) Cult of personality of Mao, (4) more simply, Political correctness gone extreme.
After the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Mao (and the other Communist die-hards) were losing power in the CCP, even the military commanders began to question the policies.
In response, the hardliners felt that the CCP had too many traitors within, people who are not TRUE communists. So, they urged a rectification to correct the Party of non-Communist ideologies.
The paranoia was not entirely unjustified. Most part of China at the time were not completely ardent followers of Communism. Indeed, many rural and urban communities were still functioning the same way they did before the Communists won the Civil War. While many Communist Cadres were sent to different parts of the country to attempt to instill Communist values, some places in China began to experience corruption of Feudal traditions and values.
In effect, some Communists felt that their ideologies were being subverted and sabotaged from within, and blamed the traitors for the failure of the Great Leap Forward.
Rallying behind Mao, the hardliners urged the young to rise up against the Rightists and traitors.
But this was a witch hunt that turned the entire country upside down, friends against friends, family against family.
Die hard Red Guards grew up, and they stopped worshipping ideologies. Many of them turned to businesses and became very successful.
I would call the Cultural Revolution a real life "scared straight" episode for an entire generation of Chinese youths. Or it was a "Lord of the Flies" episode.
1 thing Mao did do right was not trying to name 1 of his own kids as his successor. (If he did, China might have ended up like North Korea).