“How did the disruption of the educational system during the Cultural Revolution affect the life outcomes of people who were getting their educations in the period 1966-75?” By using this as a topic to question, I will be reviewing the impact of the lack of education had on people as they got older and began looking for jobs in China. Although it may seem clear to many on why missing an education would make it harder for one to obtain a job, I still think it needs to be looked into as why this education was stopped, and following with the affects it had on people.
There are three elements to this idea of disruption of education. One side is that education was no longer the main point, but that the revolution and the building of socialism was. Another side is that because of the Cultural Revolution, unfit people were taking the roles of teachers and giving a less than proper education to the youth of China. The third side is that after graduation of education, students were forced into jobs. I will include the aftermath of each one side. Clearly all three can be valid points and could easily be the reasons why education was disrupted, not taken seriously, not sought out, or thought of as important by many.
Robinson (March 2014) mentions that at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, people everywhere seemed to be involved very quickly; this included children. Early on everyone wanted that new and idealist thought of China, the vision Mao had seen and wanting his people to feel they had achieved something as a united country when this movement was over. Every person wanted to have better opportunities and a higher standard of living. Parents soon stopped having their children go to school. Education was seen as silly, and r...
... middle of paper ...
...those who were against him in fear that they would corrupt the system he had planned.
Works Cited
Lui, C, "Prometheus of the Revolution: Rural Teachers in Republican China". JSTOR. ( March , 2014 )
U, E, "Hiring of Rejects". JSTOR. ( March , 2014)
Han, D, "Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Rural Education and Economic Development: The Case of Jimo County". JSTOR. ( March , 2014 )
Robinson, J, "Education". JSTOR. ( March , 2014 )
Lin, Q, "Lost in Transformation? The Employment Trajectories of China’s Cultural Revolution Cohort". Sage Journals. ( March , 2014)
Yoshida, Junko. "Cultural revolution survivors leap forward." Academic OneFile. Web. (April, 2014)
Jones, Peter M. "Mao's student revolution." Academic OneFile. Web. (April, 2014)
Sato, H and Li, S. “INFLUENCE OF FAMILY BACKGROUND ON CURRENT FAMILY WEALTH IN RURAL CHINA” Web Of Science. Web (April 2014)
The Cultural Revolution in China was led by Mao Zedong, due to this Liang and many others faced overwhelming obstacles in many aspects of their life such as work, family and everyday encounters, if affected everyone’s families life and education, Liang lets us experience his everyday struggles during this era, where the government determined almost every aspect of life.
For the entire span of the Cultural Revolution, schools in China were closed and not managed. This left an entire generation with no education. All types of artifacts were burned to ashes such as religious texts. They were described as “old thinking”. Millions of people died during the cultural revolution. The victims who suffered from public humiliation committed suicide. Terrible mistakes and brutal violence weakened the history of communist China. For youths at this time it was confusing because
Struggles of the Cultural Revolution Revealed in Bei Dao’s “Notes from the City of the Sun”
Fairbank, John King, and Edwin O. Reischauer. China: Tradition and Transformation. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979. Print.
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
Chinese Revolution is about making the entire country into Communists and killing each and one the people who hates Mao Tse-Tung. Mao Tse-Tung is the leader of China at this time who believes in equality and everyone should have the same rights. The Red Guards is a military group in which includes a group of children that eliminates the Chinese population due to hatred for Mao. If any of these events happen to our generation, most youth are smart enough to know that Mao is a bad leader and killing innocent people by the case of bitterness for Mao is wrong. The Chinese youth got swept up in the Cultural Revolution by Mao because the youth were easy to persuade into doing something. To expand this idea further, the Chinese youth weren’t old enough, not on this specific age, to realize whether Mao’s actions were virtuous or inaccurate. On the other hand, they thought that working for Mao and joining the Red Guards will help their country out, but they never knew the truth behind Mao’s plans. The truth about the Cultural Revolution was to kill anybody that gets in the way of Mao’s plans and destroying all the old buildings so that it would be replaced with new buildings or reconstruct the old buildings to become brand new again. In addition, the Chinese youth had no idea that joining the Red Guards will give a highly chance of getting killed. In other words, the adults were smarter than the youth because joining the Red Guards means the opposite of helping the country out. Mao just made them think that joining will help their country, even though it was the other way around like someone apologizing to their neighbor in which manipulating their minds that they’re now cool, but they were still rude to them afterwards. To repeat this, t...
Li, K., & Mengyan, F. (2013). A historical survey on modernization of Chinese culture. Asian Social Science, 9(4), 129-132. doi:10.5539/ass.v9n4p129
China has gone through many changes in its history. Changes include economic, political, and social. In the early 1500 and throughout history, mostly all social classes followed Confucianism. Confucianism is a type of religion based on an ideal society (Chang 2012, 22). China was molded though Confucianism but that slowly deteriorated as years went on. One main group that has been a main part in these changes is the Chinese literati. The Chinese literati include the higher-class people such as officials and scholars. The Chinese literati were the dominant social class during the 1500’s but their power slowly decreased throughout history. Throughout my paper, I will explain the Chinese literati involvement as centuries passed.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution was an attempt to create a new culture for China. Through education reforms and readjustments, Mao hoped to create a new generation of Chinese people - a generation of mindless Communists. By eliminating intellectuals via the Down to the Countryside movement, Mao hoped to eliminate elements of traditional Chinese culture and create a new form Chinese culture. He knew that dumbing down the masses would give him more power so his regime would be more stable. This dramatic reform affected youth especially as they were targeted by Mao’s propaganda and influence. Drawing from his experiences as an Educated Youth who was sent down to the countryside Down to the Countryside movement, Ah Cheng wrote The King of Children to show the effects of the Cultural Revolution on education, and how they affected the meaning people found in education. In The King of Children, it is shown that the Cultural Revolution destroyed the traditional incentives for pursuing an education, and instead people found moral and ethical meaning in pursuing an education.
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
There are many things that most people take for granted. Things people do regularly, daily and even expect to do in the future. These things include eating meals regularly, having a choice in schooling, reading, choice of job and a future, and many more things. But what if these were taken away and someone told you want to eat, where and when to work, what you can read, and dictated your future. Many of these things happened in some degree or another during the Chinese Culture Revolution under Mao Zedong that began near the end of the 1960’s. This paper examines the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie and a book by Michael Schoenhals titled China’s Culture Revolution, 1966-1969. It compares the way the Chinese Cultural Revolution is presented in both books by looking at the way that people were re-educated and moved to away, what people were able to learn, and the environment that people lived in during this period of time in China.
Hairong, Y., (2008) New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. (Duke University Press; Durham).
Clark, Paul. "The Chinese Cultural Revolution: a history." Google Books. Web. 03 Feb. 2011. .
Hsueh, Chun- tu, The Chinese Revolution of 1911: New Perspectives (Hong Kong: Joint _____Publishing Co., 1986), pp.1-15, 119-131, 139-171
The largest educational system is in china there is a law that makes it mandatory that all Chinese students have nine year of education experience this law was passed in 1986. The importance of having an education is the key to success to be comfortable and abl...