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Violence During The Cultural Revolution
Violence During The Cultural Revolution
Those engaged in violence were victims of it Widespread and endless generational and transgeneratioal revenges made the Communist state a vengeance state
Causes of Revolution
Three levels of analysis:
Permissive: sanctioned by CCP leaders Proximate: Maos charismatic authority and political ideology
Maos ideology supported and legitimized violence Maos distinction between friends and enemies, good classes and bad classes provoked social conflicts in society
Participants:
Accusers: whoever believed Mao and his ideology; whoever wanted be recognized as good people Spectators: whoever wanted to be entertained by such spectacle (renao, excitement)
Process of struggle:
The accused was forced to endured verbal attack by colleagues, students, friends, relatives Subordinates were pitted against superiors, students against teachers, friends against friends, colleagues against colleagues, spouse against spouse
Red guards: school students, most of them teenagers, 13 to 19 Engaged in sacking, looting, beating, killing and warring with one another Destructed public and personal properties, and anything regarded as representing the Four Olds, or feudal Whoever classified as: landlords, reactionaries, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, bad elements, traitors, spies, capitalist-roaders, all of them ox ghosts and snake spirits
due to depression and despair Suicide due to fear Suicide in order to protest against an unjust government
intervened to end factional fighting between rival Red Guard groups Some 12 million young people were rounded up and sent to the countryside to study (xuexi)
Maos ideology: Recompense injury with injury Represented the value of xia (knight-errant, roving
swordsman), which was viewed as heroic
As someone who has been fascinated with Mao's story since high school in the 1970s, when the country was first opening up again after the Cultural Revolution, Zhang, and her husband,
have reduced him [Mao] to a bloodthirsty, power-obsessed egotist, someone who never believed in communism, nor in anything else, and this from the very first pages of the book.