Tell me about the Cultural Revolution. Is this the most history destroying event ever to occur...

Tell me about the Cultural Revolution. Is this the most history destroying event ever to occur? Could China one day fully recover from this event?

>Great
>Proletarian
>Cultural
>Revolution

Mao did nothing wrong.

Recover what? How?

Does anyone even to talk about history on this board anymore? I mean for fucks sake, you've got 9gag, reddit, facebook and hundreds of sites to have a 2 second giggle on but the slightest notion of serious discussion is just too hard for you, isn't it? But what can I expect, this prime American hours where none of you even have an education.

And this Veeky Forums so nothing good's going to happen anyway.

>this prime American hours
It's late night in most of the U.S. bruv

Go to reddit if you can't take a little bit of memery.

>Tell me about the Cultural Revolution.
Mao wanted to take back the power he used to hold over the PRC. One of the ways he did this was to whip the 20 something year olds, who had never lived in the years before the revolution and essentially worshiped him, into a frenzy over what he perceived as "reactionary forces" which meant anything that existed prior to the revolution. The destruction of Chinese culture around this time was carried out by what we're basically mobs of hooligans, using Maos teachings as an excuse to do literally whatever they wanted. A lot of their ire was towards old people and even their parents were not safe from skepticism. The only thing that prevented it from causing a complete civil collapse was the party finally recognizing the problem and cracking down on the revolutionaries, often via a bullet to the skull.
>Is this the most history destroying event ever to occur?
There have actually been several events just like this in China where the main authority would excite citizens to exterminate all traces of the previous government, the cultural revolution was taking that idea and putting in into practice in a modern day environment. We still have no clear idea how much damage it has actually done to Chinese cultural heritage.

wat?

Most of the US is the Eastern seaboard.

#thingsyoudon'tlearninschool

Have any of you guys read Born Red? It's a fantastic book. It shows how everyone was obliterating everything, and people were fucking each other over for not being a true revolutionist. I'd argue it was far more destructive as far as cultural relics go, but for information I'd still wager the Library of Alexandria was more devastating.

>living in the east
how does it feel to be on the worst half of the usa user?

KC-tier post.

No

Yes, and it is getting there

9:30 is not "late night"

Maoism is single most shit tier form of socialism ever. Juch is arguably worse but Juche is also arguably not socialism.

Every board has a shitty meme or two that goes everywhere, just quit whining about it.

The first few sentences of this post are basically correct. I can't talk about the level of violence involved in putting it down later, however.

t. spent a decent amount of time studying modern China in college and interviewed a professor who had to go through that as a daughter of "bougie" parents, got her version, she was very gracious to provide it and she didn't have to do that. Signs around necks, the young are young enough to know everything.

Around this time there was a "court" of about 20 top individuals, many Long March survivors, including Mao, Deng, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Mao's wife - from somewhere in this coterie eventually comes the Gang of Four on later intrigues (incl Mao's wife), around the time of Mao's death. Anyway the name of the game in the sixties is to re-educate reactionaries, and this is /partly/ a distraction from the failures of the Great Leap Forward, since Mao is King Dick atm. Both Deng and Liu Shaoxi are in the doghouse, and Deng just bears it patiently, but Liu is the one killed. Deng pretty brilliantly hangs on, to his credit, and gets the thaw going during China's own Post-Stalinism. Lived as late as 1997, buried all them fuckers, opened up Guangdong. Also not that anyone cares but I did a chapter summary of the Little Red Book on wiki years ago that is still about 99% intact, as I wrote it.

Per wiki, North Korea quietly augmented its constitution about 8 years ago to disclaim status as a "technically" communist country. It's full on Juche-idea dynasty, now, so in one sense they don't even make the commie pretense anymore.

I like the part where people began worshipping mangoes that Mao received as a present.

The most scary thing about the Cultural Revolution is how widespread support for it was. People usually talk about Nazism when they talk about the "banality of evil", but the Holocaust and most other Nazi atrocities were perpretated by a tiny cadre of fanatics, with the complicity of the German people who did nothing. During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people as a whole, and specially it's young people, took part enthusiasticly in the destruction. To this day you can read people like Mobo Gao speaking with nostalgia about it, and it's understandable. Imagine being a Red Guard, traveling around the country, condemning people you don't like to death, what's not to like?

Except every Chinese person I know disagrees with Mobo Gao.

The Cultural Revolution was supposed to be a way for Maoist China to stamp out bourgeois (capitalist) influence. While it sounds like a good idea, (it really was a good idea.) it wasn't executed correctly. Instead of it being organized like other movements, it was very loosely knit. Some people weren't even sure what Mao meant by "bourgeois influence" and they just started destroying things. The real problem wasn't the reason why it started, but the way it was executed. If it was very controlled and rigid it could have turned out amazingly. However, it was taken from a uncontrollable, or anarchistic, approach. I wouldn't say that this is the most history destroying event ever to occur by any means. Much worse things have happened. Could China recover? I believe they have already recovered to an extent.
>TL;DR
The Cultural Revolution was a movement to recreate the Chinese Culture into a more proletariat (worker) oriented one. Mao wanted bourgeois (capitalist) influence to be removed from the country, so he told people to start removing said influence. Since the movement wasn't well organized, people starting destroying things all willy-nilly and messed up some old things which were priceless.
>Is this the most history destroying event ever to occur?
Not really, many worse things have happened.
>Could China one day fully recover from this event?
To an extent, they already have.

that meme doesn't belong to Veeky Forums though

That's because most Chinese are taught that the cultural revolution was a mistake, which it was in many respects.

Saying otherwise will basically discount your chances of ever joining the party and all but a few hardcore Maoists have condemned the actions of those who participated (despite many of them participating themselves in some respect) because of how badly it damaged Chinese society in hindsight.

>The Cultural Revolution was supposed to be a way for Maoist China to stamp out bourgeois (capitalist) influence.
Maybe in a very broad sense. In reality, it was Maos way of asserting his influence on the party after being marginalized by Zhou Enlai who supported economic reforms along with Deng Xiaoping (the so called "revisionists"). It was a way for him to attempt to purge the leadership because, basically, "my brand of Communism is the only brand that should exist".

Really? Ive never seen it anywhere else.

>If it was very controlled and rigid it could have turned out amazingly
As a student of history, you absolutely disgust me.

Your meme game is small time, friend.

It's as history as it gets.
>The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was neither a revolution, nor great, nor cultural, and, in particular, not in the least proletarian.

People need to calm the fuck down about the "Cultural Revolution destroyed Chinese culture" meme. Hellooo, retards, every single transition to a new dynasty resulted in mass destruction of the previous culture, some more than others. However, that didn't stop Chinese culture from coming back.

It's the fact that it was done in a modern context that shocks people, particularly Westerners, who thought the world had moved beyond that after the 19th century.

>Alexandria meme