Can anyone tell me everything about china's cultural revolution and mao ze-dong? sources please.?

Question

doing a report on mao and his beliefs. also, help on red scarf girl by jiang jili. good book or no? why?

Answer 1

The Cultural Revolution happened because Mao Zedong wanted complete control. He wanted all of the old traditions of China to be demolished. He did this because, as you probably know, religion is a huge impact on peoples lives. Once he had religion(and other traditions that people held dear) out of the picture, he was in complete and total control.

  Also, I've read the book Red Scarf Girl. It is a little boring at first, but it gets better as it goes along.

Answer 2

This link give you the Chinese version of "it wasn't us." Or perhaps the young people who set up the site really have been taught, as they write here, "The CR was threatening China for ten years. Although the CR involved a lot of the people, noone knows the definite cause of the CR. There are a lot of background behind the CR. That was concerned with not only China but also the world. And they were involving each other complexly. Here, you can know a part of background of the CR."

http://library.thinkquest.org/26469/cult...

Every word of that site is so general as to be of no help what so ever. You don't know if they are being evasive--or if they really believe their own worthless propaganda.

But they have definitely either forgotten their own history or they are doing a "we are ignorant" coverup. They write it as if it happened of its own accord, like weather gone haywire and no one had any idea why.

This site seems more objective, but no where do I see any that people were mass murdered.

"Opposition came mainly from the moderates represented by Liu Shaoqi ()and Deng Xiaoping (), who were unsympathetic to Mao's policies. The Socialist Education Movement was soon paired with another Mao campaign, the theme of which was "to learn from the People's Liberation Army."

But the history itself seems ok.

http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/prc3.ht...

This one seems good too.

"In the second phase of the Cultural Revolution, the atomised and terrorised population was mobilised against the Party. In December 1966, Mao declared that the ‘bourgeois headquarters’ was in the top leadership of the Party itself, and called on the population itself to overthrow the Party administration in their area. By-passing the Party apparatus in this way (something Stalin never dared do), Mao had no mechanism for controlling or directing the “revolution”. As a result, in all areas of the country, rival groups claimed the mantle, and launched holy war, not only against the “capitalist-roaders” – generally the best elements of the Party – but against each other. China degenerated into the chaos of factional fighting which the Revolution had only just succeeded in overcoming.

The means of Mao’s war against the Party was quite different from Stalin’s. Mao mobilised the general population rather than the secret police as the weapon of terror. Torture and murder were carried out quite publicly, by the public, and were supplemented by very effective social control through the eyes and ears of a thousand million neighbours, friends and family members. "

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/events/...

This link states deaths this way.

"People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong's regime (1949-1975): 40 000 000 [make link]

Agence France Press (25 Sept. 1999) citing at length from Courtois, Stephane, Le Livre Noir du Communism:

Rural purges, 1946-49: 2-5M deaths

Urban purges, 1950-57: 1M

Great Leap Forward: 20-43M

Cultural Revolution: 2-7M

Labor Camps: 20M

Tibet: 0.6-1.2M

TOTAL: 44.5 to 72M

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1...

So between 2 and 7 million people lost their lives during the CR. That is a big discrepancy in the numbers, which means no one knows for sure.