Uncovering the Cultural Revolution's Awful Truths

[Yandex]

(I hope this is the right forum for this)

Rebel historians chronicle a past that the Chinese Communist Party grows ever more intent on erasing.

"To purge suspected traitors from the upper echelons, Mao bypassed the Communist Party bureaucracy. He deputized as his warriors students as young as 14 years old, the Red Guards, with caps and baggy uniforms cinched around their skinny waists. In the summer of 1966, they were unleashed to root out counterrevolutionaries and reactionaries (“Sweep away the monsters and demons,” the People’s Daily exhorted), a mandate that amounted to a green light to torment real and imagined enemies. The Red Guards persecuted their teachers. They smashed antiques, burned books, and ransacked private homes. (Pianos and nylon stockings, Yang notes, were among the bourgeois items targeted.) Trying to rein in the overzealous youth, Mao ended up sending some 16 million teenagers and young adults out into rural areas to do hard labor. He also dispatched military units to defuse the expanding violence, but the Cultural Revolution had taken on a life of its own."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/chinas-rebel-historians/617265/

[rampartc]

1. they make the cultural revolution sound like a bad thing

before the cultural revolution over 50% of chinese women had bound feet.

Foot binding, or footbinding, was the Chinese custom of breaking and tightly binding the feet of young girls in order to change their shape and size. Feet altered by footbinding were known as lotus feet, and the shoes made for these feet were known as lotus shoes. In late imperial China, bound feet were considered a status symbol and a mark of feminine beauty. However, footbinding was a painful practice that limited the mobility of women and resulted in lifelong disabilities.

china was low in industrialization and education.

mao was brutal, but in 50 years china became an actual superpower with an economy superior to most in the world.

sometimes i look at a reactionary crowd at a mega church or a trump rally and think, well, who knows ...................

[The Magistrate]

3. That Had Nothing To Do With The 'Cultural Revolution' Referenced, Sir

That began as a pure attempt by Mao to maintain power in the face of a restive Party bureaucracy, many of whom were attempting to repair harms done by the earlier 'Great Leap Forward'.

There was certainly a 'cultural revolution' occurred in China starting (for convenience) early in the twentieth century, but it had nothing whatever to do with the Party purge in the late sixties.

[Yandex]

5. Interesting takeaway by that poster n/t

[The Magistrate]

6. It Should Certainly Be Noted, Sir

That presentation of Mao's enormities needs to recognize the appalling state of the country prior to the Communist victory in the civil war, and the ruinous kleptocratic fascism KMT rule degenerated into under Chiang Kai-shek. Average life expectancy in the thirties in China ran about twenty-five years, and malnutrition was a leading cause of death. There were rural areas so stranded in time people thought the 'red banner' of the Communists heralded a restoration of the Ming dynasty, the last wholly Chinese one, whose founder chose red for its sacred color centuries ago.

[Yandex]

7. Always excesses in times of change n/t

[The Magistrate]

8. And They Remain Atrocious Excesses, Sir

My interest is not in excusing or justifying, merely in maintaining a sense of proportion. In things like this people often contrast the practice of one with the ideal case of the other.

[Yandex]

9. Yes, not at all n/t

[Yandex]

4. You advocate for this kind of cultural revolution n/t

[Hortensis]

10. Between 40 and 80 million Chinese died "unnatural deaths" during Mao's

reign, including probably well over a million during the cultural revolution (records were...poorly kept).

The shift from home production of goods to factory lead to abandonment of binding of the feet of the women who sat and did the work. A reflection of the enormous expansion of women's freedoms that occurred in all industrializing nations from industrialization itself, without need for genocide from both direct executions and policies that lead to death from famines, labor abuse, epidemic diseases, death from displacement of whole populations, etc.

[WhiteTara]

2. There is a book called Wild Swans

about a woman who grew up in and participated in the Revolution and chronicled the time. Very depressing.