Chinese Modern History: Cultural Revolution in China

Chinese Modern History
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Chinese Modern History
Question 1
Contrary to popular belief, the Cultural Revolution in China is not a phenomenon that had nothing to do with the rest of China’s modern history. The Cultural Revolution was actually something that was planned by the ruling Communist party and especially by its chairman Man Zedong. There are various events or linkages that culminated in the Cultural Revolution.
One of the earliest events that contributed to the Cultural Revolution is the Hundred Flowers Campaign that Mao launched as a way of seeking different views on how China should be governed (Schoppa, 2016, p. 551). This campaign gave freedom of expression and so liberals and Chinese intellectuals started to criticize and oppose the Communist Party and questioning its leadership. The party tolerated and even engaged with these intellectuals for a few months, but after this Mao’s administration reversed this policy. Mao and his Communist Party did not want people to criticize any of their policies and soon enough many people were persecuted for criticizing the government. In this way, the Hundred Flowers Campaign was stopped when the Communist party felt it was losing a grip on its power.
After this Mao created the concept of the Great Leap Forward (Schoppa, 2016, p.556). The Great Leap Forward was a plan that Mao came up that he hoped would help China become industrialized and stop being wholly dependent on agriculture. In this program, he called upon people from the rural areas to work together in the production of iron. Ultimately, the people involved in this program were uneducated rural farmers who did not have any first-hand skills on how to produce iron. These people had to improvise on with what they had to make the iron. These people had to build their own iron furnaces to produce the tools or items they were designing such as window panes, spoons, and farm tools (Schoppa, 2016, p. 557). In this way, a lot of deforestation occurred to run these furnaces and as people rushed to produce a lot of iron tools. In the end, the iron items that these people produced were low quality because they were not done with qualified techniques or the environment. Even though they produced a lot of items, they were low quality because the method of production was faulty. In this way, Mao’s Great Leap Forward became a failure.
Another event that is connected to the Cultural Revolution is the decline in agricultural harvest. While many people collectively worked to produce iron, the agricultural sector was somewhat neglected. According to Schoppa (2016, p. 565) the agricultural crisis was worsened by natural disasters that plagued China during this period. Many natural disasters such as flooding that occurred in the 1960s caused the harvest to decline further. With the declining harvest, the country faced the worst famine in history where millions of people died because of lack of food. The famine again, caused a lot of dissatisfaction among the general public and in so doing, the Communist Party was losing is popularity. The party did not have immediate solutions for the famine and it went on for a long time. There are even allegations that Mao allowed the famine to worsen without providing solutions because he did not care if some people died for the benefit of the larger population. In fact, people were not allowed to relocate to other places in search of food. These problems continued making Mao unpopular both in the Communist Party and in the general public.
Finally, the Sino-Soviet split is another event that is linked to the Cultural Revolution (Schoppa, 2016, p. 568). Ideally, while the Soviet Union and China relationship was not completely perfect, it worsened after the death of Joseph Stalin. During Stalin’s reign China and the Soviet Union strongly supported the communist ideals, but after his death, his successor Nikita Khrushchev did not uphold most of Stalin’s policies. Khrushchev believed that communism and capitalism could coexist peacefully, but Mao did not hold similar sentiments. In a public declaration in 1960, China publicly denounced the Soviet Union as a state that could no longer be trusted because it was allowing capitalism to gain ground (Schoppa, 2016, p. 577). With the failure described above, Mao popularity and public image was damaged. He needed a comeback strategy and the Cultural Revolution was the perfect strategy where he used his powers to get rid of those who got in his way.
Question 2
One period that truly depicts the duality of what people publicly sat and what they actually believe is the reign of Mao Zedong chairman of the ruling Communist party. For example, while examining the plight of the peasants in 1927, he declared that soon hundreds of millions of peasants would revolt against the injustices that faced (Schoppa, 2016, p. 386). Mao argued that the peasants would help eliminate all imperialist, corrupt officials and bad leadership when they revolt. In reality, Mao felt that poor leadership through corruption and imperialism should not be tolerated. However, when it was time for him to be the leader of the largest party in China (Communist Party) he did not abide to these ideologies. What he said in public was not what he practiced when he gained power because he was a leader who practiced intimidation, corruption, restriction of freedom, and many other atrocities (Schoppa, 2016). Further, Mao publicly did not support the killing or beheading of people who opposed a certain ideology. While trying to gain support for his party in the 1930s, Mao said that beheading people was wrong because people...