The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Analysis

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Discuss the historiographical debate surrounding the causes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Historical Investigation on the Cultural Revolution

Handojo, Priscilla

7/31/2015

Essay Word Count: 1777

Discuss the historiographical debate surrounding the causes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
SYNOPSIS
In the early 1960s China, in response to the pragmatic and in some eyes revisionary policies pursued in the wake of the Great Leap forward, a radical group emerged which supported Mao Zedong in his ambition to restore the revolution. The Cultural Revolution was to revitalise the values of Communism and bring about a classless society. To Mao, this meant eliminating any remnants of past culture, customs, ideas, and …show more content…

The two-line struggle which broke between Mao Zedong’s promotion of socialism and his opponents’ lapsed into revisionism. The designation of Liu Shaoqi with the dominant authority was an assertion that consensus had diminished over a variety of issues, including the economy and ‘spontaneous developments towards capitalism’ in the countryside. The party was accused of having become ‘divorced from the masses’ and education thrived of ‘bourgeois individualism’. The struggle between the Soviet Union and China was escalating, in which a split seemed to be inevitable. Mao as a result attempted to spur China’s independent economic development through the Great Leap Forward. Hence the social violence of the Revolution was caused by the incoherence of pre-Cultural Revolution political system as explained by Richard Kraus, “Maoism itself was embodied in the paradox that Mao wanted people to act voluntarily exactly as he wanted them to, without quite trusting they would do so.” Shifting from this political argument, Lynn T. White III interpreted the Cultural Revolution as an unintended result of administrative policies, claiming the campaigning, controlling and labelling of such swayed students’ attitudes towards each other and their leaders, hence seen as merely the long term cost of these …show more content…

Roberts, J. and Roberts, J. (1998). Modern China. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Pub.
10. Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathon Unger, “Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou, “The China Quarterly, no. 83 (September, 1980)
11. Anita Chan. Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1985)
12. Communist Party of China, Resolution on CPC History, (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), 13 http://www.marxistarkiv.se/kina/engelska/on_cpc_history.pdf
13. Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathon Unger, Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao’s China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984)
14. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009)
15. Gerald Tannenbaum, ‘China’s Cultural Revolution: Why it had to happen’, and Richard Baum, ‘Ideology redivided’, in Baum and Bennet (eds)
16. William A. Joseph, Christine P.W. Wong, and David Zweing, eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

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