Can you help me find sources for my thesis on my Chinese History research paper.

Short answer:

I think you might think a bit differently about the long lasting impacts of the Cultural Revolution. It does have them . . . but today's censorship policy comes from a very different source. You can't draw a line from the Cultural Revolution to today, without understanding the Death of Mao, the trial of the Gang of Four, the Four Modernizations and the purging of Zhao Ziyang during Tianmen.

Discussion:

The problem with your thesis, at least to my reading, is that today's censorship in China _doesn't_ connect directly to the Cultural Revolution; I'd argue strongly against the causality you're claiming. The evidence is that today's censorship is a statist-authoritarian response, not a revolutionary communist policy . . . different thing, different political constituency, different policy history.

China's post-1977 leadership are for the most part men who were damaged by and hostile to the Cultural Revolution, and as they came to power they set about undoing much of what Mao's more exuberant revolutionaries had created. China lives, very substantially, "in the world that Deng Xiaoping made", not in "the world Mao made". So they are more substantially heirs of Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and their "Four Modernizations" than they are of Mao. Erstwhile Maoists, like Bo Xilai, are disfavored; this was a battle Xi Xinping fought and won long ago. While the Party is strong, it operates hand in glove with a highly efficient national security state, rather than being a Party at war with the State as during the Cultural Revolution.

Early on after the death of Mao you can see tremendous liberalization, but Tienanmen is a watershed moment, a moment when Chinese Communist Party leadership felt that the world was spinning dangerously out of control. They looked at "radical students" and saw at least in part the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

That's where the crackdown begins. One can see China's contemporary authoritarianism as "the State vs the Students" -- precisely the opposite of the battle that Mao wanted when he called on the Red Guards to "Bombard the Headquarters". The CCP looked at western inspired liberalism and saw -- students in the streets. That was not a happy memory for them. In this reading, they cracked down not because of what we saw as a western democratic tradition, but rather what they saw as a possible return to the bad old days of the Cultural Revolution.

The growth of Chinese censorship is thus a statist and a nationalist not a revolutionary Communist undertaking, probably owing more to, say, Singapore than it does to Mao. There's some recrudescence of Mao imagery, but that's now nostalgia for a strong leader, the Party has got very little tolerance for neo-Gang of Fourism. That is, although Mao's star is rising as a national symbol, there's not much "Red Guards revisionism"; the Party washed their hands of that line explicitly. Censorship and concern about foreign influences is a long standing concern of other Chinese governments-- you can find the Chinese Nationalists unhappy with Western films that were being shown in Shanghai in the 1930s.

Conclusion:

To understand the origins of censorship in contemporary China, you have to look in places beyond the Cultural Revolution. What are the roots of China's censorship policies? Are they in Mao's radicalism? Or are they in statism, both modern and traditional Chinese varieties.

Just because the Cultural Revolution was repressive doesn't mean today's persecution of, say, Ai Weiwei has the same dynamic.

Things to read:

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang - Memoirs of the Premier deposed by the CCP for perceived weakness during the Tienanmen incident. Has to be read with a skeptical eye, but a rare window into the Chinese Communist Party.

Adam Segal. "When China Rules the Web: Technology in Service of the State", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 5 (September / October 2018), pp. 10–14, 16–18.

Elizabeth Economy. "The Third Revolution: Xi Xinping and the New Chinese State" (Council on Foreign Relations:2018)

Mason, David. “China's Four Modernizations: Blueprint for Development or Prelude to Turmoil?” Asian Affairs, vol. 11, no. 3, 1984, pp. 47–70.

Washington Post, Interview with Deng Xiaoping "Cleaning Up Mao's Feudal Mistakes", 31 August, 1980

THOMPSON, MARK R. “Democracy with Asian Characteristics.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 74, no. 4, 2015, pp. 875–887.

LAM, WILLY. “The Maoist Revival and the Conservative Turn in Chinese Politics.” China Perspectives, no. 2 (90), 2012, pp. 5–15.

DIRLIK, ARIF. “Mao Zedong in Contemporary Chinese Official Discourse and History.” China Perspectives, no. 2 (90), 2012, pp. 17–27.

Chan, Alfred L. “Power, Policy and Elite Politics under Zhao Ziyang.” The China Quarterly, no. 203, 2010, pp. 708–718.

James Palmer. "The Death of Mao" [2012] -- readable account of the end of the Mao era and the political strategies at work

Jude Blanchett "China's New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong" [Oxford University Press:2019] A recent and thoughtful look at "what is the contemporary political legacy of Mao's radicalism"

Wall, Michael C. “Censorship and Sovereignty: Shanghai and the Struggle to Regulate Film Content in the International Settlement.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 18, no. 1, 2011, pp. 37–57.