Analysis Of Mao Zedong And The Proletarian Cultural Revolution

When Japan withdrew their forces from China, the Communists no longer had to work alongside the nationalists in protection of China’s sovereignty. They were soon able to force Jiang and the GMD into exile, partially because of the promises of improvement that they made to China’s impoverished masses. As Mao Zedong stepped into power, he put forward a five year plan to improve the lives of impoverished city-dwellers. In the cities, Mao initially planned to develop “powerful bureaucracies to control industrialization through comprehensive central planning,” and much like the Soviet Union he called “for concentration of investment in heavy industry, such as steel production, rather than in the agricultural sector or consumer goods” (DeFronzo 102).

DeFronzo defines the initial objective of the program as “to redistribute power to the people” (DeFronzo 104). In practice, this meant targeting any individuals with wealth and status and sending them away for re-education. Ping Fu witnessed these events from the perspective of a young girl torn from her parents and forced to care for her even younger relative as Mao’s Red Guard, partially made up of the teenage children of peasants, attempted to re-educate them (Fu 37). Ping remembers that “unlike us, the Red Guards were descended from generations of workers, peasants, and soldiers, and so their blood was good,” adding that “we black elements had led privileged lives, while they had had nothing, the Red Guards ranted” (Fu 37). There are many such stories of horrific abuse on the part of the Red Guard, and many survivors (most of whom now live abroad) have come forward with their stories. More rare, however, are the perspectives of the former Red Guard members who perpetrated such violence and disorder. In a recent New York Times article, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore suggests that admitting such a past is “a rare admission in a country that has largely brushed aside its traumatic history” (Sebag-Montefiore). Sebag-Montefiore mentions that some few former Red Guards have come forward to apologize and urged others to do the

According to DeFronzo, the movement embodied by the Cultural Revolution “had widespread influence until the mid-1970s” (DeFronzo 104). The leaders of the country have since experimented with various economic reforms, essentially searching for the synthesis of communism and capitalism that Dr King described. Carla Freeman of SAIS points out that “As growth in China 's cities took off, rapid urbanization became the epic drama in the narrative of the country 's post-Mao development, ushering in not just dramatic social change, but also glaring social inequalities” (Freeman). Indeed, the cities have only grown, including an urban population increase of “a staggering 370 million people in the two and a half decades between 1980 and 2005” (Freeman). Anthony Thomas’s film The Tank Man delves into some of these staggering inequalities, highlighting the plight of migrant workers in today’s China. Such workers are subject to Residency Laws that are reminiscent of the Great Leap, where workers are only permitted to live in cities if they are separated from their families, living in single sex dormitories and agree to return to their rural area upon completion of whatever project they are working on. Often, however, the compensation for such work will be long delayed or never arrive at all (The Tank Man). This experience alone includes many of the factors that initially pushed the urban poor to revolution, from lack of recognition and