The Cultural Revolution

Mao’s War on the Nation and a Generation

De: Gordon J. MacKenzie

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

HE CULTURAL REVOLUTION is a gripping account of Mao Zedong’s last great campaign, the decade of ideological terror that turned China against its own people, institutions, memory, culture, and families.

Launched in 1966, the Cultural Revolution was presented as a struggle to save socialism from corruption, revisionism, bourgeois influence, and enemies hidden inside the Communist Party. In reality, it unleashed fear, denunciation, public humiliation, factional violence, broken education, damaged families, ruined careers, and political obedience performed before the image of one man.

Mao’s China had already survived revolution, civil war, land reform, campaigns against enemies, and the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward. After that disaster, Mao feared the party was becoming bureaucratic, cautious, and revisionist. To restore his authority and revive revolutionary struggle, he called on the young to rebel.

The Red Guards attacked teachers, officials, intellectuals, writers, parents, temples, books, customs, and anything branded as part of the old world. Struggle sessions turned crowds into weapons. Children denounced parents. Neighbours denounced neighbours. Party leaders such as Liu Shaoqi were destroyed. Millions of young people were later sent down to the countryside, their education and futures disrupted by the movement that had first told them they were history’s chosen rebels.

Part of the Blood and Power Series, this book examines how political purity, personality cult, fear, and ideology wounded a nation, and how a revolution that claimed to defend the people taught people to fear one another.