Chinese History: Pointed at the Wrong Direction

China has always been proud of its history. Being one of the most advance civilizations way before America was even discovered, a lot of the Chinese today still cling on to their glory days even if they are one of the world’s superpowers. A massive country with patriotic citizens and a great economy is what people know of China today. However, what most people do not know and the rest wanting to forget, is that China had its fair share of atrocities done to its very own people. One of these, of course, would be the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, wherein under the great struggle of Mao Zedong return to power, he turned youths by the thousand to be his personal army, infamously known as the “Red Guards” and used them to persecute intellectuals as well as vandalize tombs of great Chinese philosophers, namely Confucius (Raymond Wylie 195-196). Although Mao Zedong had great intentions as well as some ideas to improve China, most of the actions done under his name and ideology were completely uncalled for.

After the failure of Mao Zedong’ the Great Leap Forward, where he proposed the idea that China should move from being an agrarian country to an industrialized one he sought to be in favor of the people again. The Great Leap Forward caused people to drop their agricultural lifestyle and began to work in factories. With a massive drop in farm activities, this resulted to a huge famine wherein millions of Chinese citizens perished. In his attempt to regain control of China, he proposed another idea which lead to the persecution of intellectuals by the youth. Mao Zedong called for the youth to carry out his idea of a “new” China. As much as Mao Zedong wanted China to progress, he wanted to do so by completely destroying the past....

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...it does the exact opposite. The education that the youth had been taken for granted and were later lost. Mao Zedong’s call for Cultural Revolution had all the right intentions and all the effective procedures but sadly, it was all pointed at the wrong direction.

Works Cited

Barcata, Louis. China in the Throes of the Cultural Revolution; an eye witness reort.. New York: Hart Pub. Co., 1968. Print.

Barnett, A. Doak. China after Mao: with selected documents. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967. Print.

Evans, Harriet, and Stephanie Donald. Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: posters of the Cultural Revolution. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Print.

Wylie, Raymond Finlay. The emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch'en Po-ta, and the search for Chinese theory, 1935-1945. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980. Print.