China: cultural revoltion

             Mao's influence over Chinese politics declined severely after the Great Leap Forward, and the Sino-Soviet split (a term used to describe the split between Russian and China, which resulted in all Russian economic and military aid to cease) had produced a deep division within the Chinese leadership. A number of leaders, including the future chairman of China, Deng Xiaoping endorsed a more practical course. They argued that collectivization and industrialization had been pursued too quickly and that the mass campaigns were draining vital resources and energy. In fact most of these leaders had grown deeply suspicious of the mass movement character of 'Mao's China'.
             In the early 1960s, Mao was on the political sidelines and in semi-seclusion. By 1962, however, he began an offensive to purify the party, having grown increasingly uneasy about what he believed were the creeping capitalist and anti-socialist tendencies in the country. "As a hardened veteran revolutionary, Mao continued to believe that the material incentives that had been restored to the peasants and others were corrupting the masses." (2. View Bibliography for details)
             By mid 1965 Mao had gradually but systematically regained control of the party with the support of Lin Biao, Jiang Qing (Mao's fourth wife), and Chen Boda, a leading theoretician. In the next six months, under the guise of upholding ideological purity, Mao and his supporters purged or attacked a wide variety of public figures, including State Chairman Liu Shaoqi and other party and state leaders who allegedly were "'left' in form but 'right' in essence."(1). A year later in order to combat the counter revolutionary slide into bureaucracy and capitalism, Mao's campaign flared into what came to be known as the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," the first mass action which went against the Communist Party itself.
             The principle and openly-stated purpose of the Cultur...

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China: cultural revoltion. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 04:07, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/40722.html