History Final Examination Take-Home Component

History Final Exam Take-Home Component Name Institution History Final Exam Take-Home Component Question 1 The Cultural Revolution describes a sociopolitical movement that occurred in China from 1966 to 1976. Many people believed that the Cultural Revolution is a complete anomaly and so it had nothing to do with the rest of China’s modern history. However, the Cultural Revolution did not come out of anywhere, it was a planned and organized sociopolitical movement. In this way, it has a lot of linkages with earlier events that occurred in China. The Cultural Revolution traces its roots to the Great Leap Forward (Schoppa, 2016, p. 330). In 1958, Mao Zedong, who was the Chairman of the Communist Party of China launched the Great Leap Forward as a way of modernizing China. In this endeavor, he called for socialism from the grassroots where people from the rural areas were required to collectively work in industries to produce iron or steel. Many of the people involved in the production of this steel were uneducated farmers and so they did not have the skills or equipment for such work. In the end, the Great Leap became a total failure from what Mao had imagined (Schoppa, 2016, p. 335). This is because the steel products produced were often low quality and mainly useless. People would be required to build their own steel furnaces and so, in general, it was not possible to produce quality steel. To maintain these furnaces, extensive deforestation occurred (Schoppa, 2016, p. 330). People were able to make many types of iron tools like window panes, utensils, and farming tools but they did not last long because the method of production was faulty. Further, with people collectively forced to work in rural areas to produce steel, the agricultural sector took a serious hit. The harvest sizes decreased significantly because people had their attention focused elsewhere. Additionally, the crisis of the declining harvests was worsened by the natural disasters that occurred in the 1960s (Schoppa, 2016, p. 336). With over 60% of the farmland affected, the country could not reach it’s per capital food production before 1957 and this decline continued up the early 1970s. The decline in harvest resulted in the worst famine in China’s history often referred to as the Great Chinese Famine (Schoppa, 2016, p. 336). The famine resulted in the death of millions of people. The Communist Party did not have solutions for the famine or did not seem to care that people were dying. For example, people were prevented from relocating or move to other locations searching for food. With such polices, the Communist Party and especially its Chairman Mao started to lose favor in the public eye. Another factor that is directly linked to the Cultural Revolution is the Sino-Soviet split (Schoppa, 2016, p. 339). In the 1950s, China and the Soviet Union were the largest Communist states across the world. During the reign of Joseph Stalin, China had close collaboration with the Soviet Union but after his death, Nikita Khrushchev came to power but he did not embrace the policies of Stalin. Tension developed between China and the Soviet Union because Mao saw Khrushchev as a leader who was departing from Marxism. Mao felt that Khrushchev was more a revisionist and he feared that he could influence the country to adapt to capitalism. In 1960, China publicly denounced the Soviet Union as the Communist leader and definitely led to their split (Schoppa, 2016, p. 343). With these failures, Mao realized that he was losing faith with the Communist Party and in deed, the Chinese public. Mao initiated the Cultural Movement in a bid to eliminate those who were opposing him and also to secure his position as a leader in the Communist Party of China. Question 2 One period where people what people said publicly were not what they believed occurred in the 1960s China. This is the period where the Communist Party of China was the ruling regime. In most cases, people would publicly say things that they did not believe as a way of protecting themselves from retaliation. The book Red Azalea by Anchee Min has many examples of when people often said what they did not believe in their inner perceptions of things. For example, Min is a leader in the Little Red Guards during the period of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. During this period, people who adhered to the Mao’s Marxist ideology had to behave and talk a certain way otherwise they’d run the risk of being called traitors and suffer the repercussions. As a leader of a group that abides by Mao’s ideologies, Min was expected to adhere to these rules and requirements. However, what she publicly declared was not what she often believed. For example, when her grandmother brought the family a hen named Big Beard, the family grew fond of the he...