Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Simplified Chinese: 无产阶级文化大革命, Traditional Chinese: 無產階級文化大革命, Pinyin: Wúchǎn Jiējí Wénhuà Dà Gémìng, literally: Proletarian Cultural Great Revolution); shortened in Chinese as 文化大革命 or 文革, also known simply as the Cultural Revolution, was a time of large cultural change in China.
Mao Zedong (Chairman of the Communist Party of China) started the Cultural Revolution in 1966, after the Great Leap Forward failed.[1] It began to slow down in 1967, and ended in 1969.[1] At a meeting called the Ninth National Party Congress, the end of the Cultural Revolution was announced.[1]
The Communist Party
[change | change source]In the Cultural Revolution, Mao tried to remove capitalists from the Communist Party of China: the political party that was in power at the time.
To get rid of the capitalists, Mao started the Socialist Education Movement in 1962. (It ended three years later.) At the same time, Mao's government changed the school system to make sure that students could work in factories and communes. Mao slowly started to regain power in 1965, supported by Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and Chen Boda.[1]
The Communist Party was split between Mao's partners and Deng Xiaoping's. Deng Xiaoping, a rival of Mao's, was the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of China. Hoping to get support from young people in China, Mao wrote a collection of his sayings called Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (also known as the Little Red Book).[1]
The Red Guard was also made popular. They were a group of young people in China that went around teaching Mao's sayings. They also beat people who disagreed with Mao and destroyed homes and museums.[2] There were many fights breaking out, and China faced anarchy.[1]
During the Revolution, several important people in China were forced to leave. These people included Liu Shaoqi, President of China, and Deng Xiaoping, the secretary-general of the Communist Party of China.[3]
Effects and problems
[change | change source]The Cultural Revolution caused many problems in China. Because of these problems, China's industrial output decreased by 14 percent during the years of the Revolution.[4]
Factories produced less because of the workers' political activities - and because the people put in charge of the factories did not know how to run them.
Transportation worsened because there were not enough trains. Many of them were being used to take Red Guards around the country.
Many scientists and engineers were put in jail or sent to work on the farms, which meant that their knowledge was lost.
Many Chinese people had their education cut short. This was worse in the cities than in the countryside. Universities and many schools were closed.
A program called the "sent-down youth" program also disrupted education. In that program, children were sent from the cities to the countryside.[5]
Related pages
[change | change source]References
[change | change source]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 People's Republic of China: III. Retrieved on 2009-09-12.
- ↑ Red Guards.ThinkQuest. Retrieved on 2009-09-12. Archived 2009-04-16 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ Butterfield, Fox (1976-09-10), "Mao Tse-Tung: Father of Chinese Revolution", The New York Times, retrieved 2009-09-12
- ↑ /r-2713.html China: Events During the Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-76. Retrieved on 2009-09-12.
- ↑ Giles, John; Park, Albert; Wang, Meiyan (April 2007), The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Disruptions to Education, and Returns to Schooling in Urban China (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-06-09, retrieved 2006-09-12
