Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, but here

The GREAT LEAP FORWARD and the CULTURAL REVOLUTION have been sucked into a historic black hole. Gone.

The GREAT LEAP FORWARD

began as Mao’s attempt to transform the rural population of China into a revolutionary force, determined to out-Communist Russia. The country became massive collectives called “people’s communes”.

Everything was converted to the State property and then assigned as a collective property. The farmer’s time, like the tools they needed, was rationed for them by a feudal overlord system. It was a bad gift that kept on giving. Without the incentive to capture the land’s yield its substitute became the last resort, ultra violence.

Famine happened, man made and not due to natural events. Chinese Communist Party members had to use the highest level of coercive force to compel marginally paid villagers to work, some of this was to implement the most absurd Communist Agricultural “science” such as Lysenkoism

By ’62 tens of millions of people had starved to death. A small amount of economic freedom was restored by granting private plots, needed by the farmers to survive, the famine ended. The GREAT LEAP FORWARD was over.

+/-50 million deaths.

In 1964, the LITTLE RED BOOK, properly titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong is published, it is Mao’s 267 aphorisms.

The FOUR OLDS, proposed in 1966 by Mao’s heir apparent Marshal Lin Biao, referred to the “old ideas, culture, customs and habit of the exploiting classes” that need to be destroyed.

In 1966 Mao’s retirement ended with a rally to 1m youth in Tiananmen Square. He asked the participants to ‘Bombard the headquarters’ – overwhelming the government with criticism. Turning the masses against its governance allowed Mao to reduce his political competition, new power centers could not be established.

In 1966 the CULTURAL REVOLUTION began with the “May 16 Notification”, a warning that the party had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary “REVISIONISTS” who were plotting to create a

dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.

In June, the party’s newspaper commanded to “clear away the evil habits of the old society” by commencing an all-out assault on “monsters and demons”.china

The RED GUARDS were empowered as a mechanism of permanent post Great Leap Forward revolution and as a means of assuring a loyal support base for Mao. They wore uniforms and red armbands to display their soldierdom. Recent history was reconstructed and those, such as academics were revised out violently.

RED GUARDS

were erasing the “old world”. They destroyed all the local industry such as shops, they renamed streets so as to wipe out traces of a feudal culture. Churches, temples, tombstones, books went into massive bonfires. Religious practices, superstitions, festivals, traditional weddings, funerals, ways of dress, everything that symbolized or practiced tradition had been purged. Gone’d.

Remnants are also people. Their homes raided so as to destroy the occupants and whatever sympathies lingered with them, the cues were pianos, bourgeois literature. Thoughts went last.

Cities harbored large, dense, clusters of people opposed to this new form of Communism, “the bourgeois headquarters”, tens of thousands are purified out of Shanghai and Beijing.

The LITTLE RED BOOK

became a way of surviving. The paramilitary RED GUARDS that had been mobilized by Mao would check whether those suspected of bourgeois tendencies were carrying it and whether they could quote from it.

The demand for THE LITTLE RED BOOK was incredible, there was little to buy, society had turned over. Mao badges become a substitute for money. People are able to put a certain value on very different types of badges. So even within the attempt to eliminate all forms of capitalism, a black market thrived And, the Mao badge was it.

Different and competing factions sprouted, all assured they speak for Mao and where the proper interpreters of Mao philosophy. By 1967, they had acquired heavy weaponry such as machine guns and anti-aircraft artillery.

The RED GUARD were dispersed into villages in accord with Mao’s “Up To the Mountain, Down To the Village”. From 1967 to 1978, +/- 17m youth were migrated to the rural countryside to be reeducated and labor amongst their rural compatriots.

The revolution disassembled in pieces.

Mao slowed it in 1969, his heir apparent was accused of plotting an overthrow and died in a plane crash escaping China. Mao died in 1976. It was over.

The Cultural Revolution resulted in close to 2 million deaths, but its damage cannot be measured so forensically. It was societal.

The End?