What the hell went wrong Veeky Forums?

>class

According to a Chinese chick I'm dating, the Cultural Revolution effectively eroded the entire moral background of Chinese culture. The destruction of this value system caused people to be less selfless and compassionate, losing faith in Maoism and preferring economic systems that allow for the pursuit of self interest at everybody else's expense.

:DDDDD

wtf i love the cultural revolution now

Wasn't Maoism what brought China economic prosperity though

why do people say it went wrong?

Mao was 70% good and 30% bad.

didn't like millions of chinese starve to death

Mao was 99% a perfect angel, but those 1% was a nasty scoundrel, and the women liked it.

>enact cultural revolution with no guidelines other than remove old culture

>form red guard out of teenagers who think old culture = anything you dont like

>no oversight or restrictions on red guard

>effectively made all Chinese youth into death squads that target education and authority

JUST FUCK MY COUNTRY UP SENPAI

*blood clots*

>all Chinese youth
just the evil ones

Is there another kind of Chinese?

If you weren't murdering people, you would be considered a "reactionary" and be murdered yourself.

It's not really evil to go along in such situations.

can someone tell me Maoism failed?

i thought it made China prosperous economically

what

it was deng xiaoping ''''''socialism'''''' with chinese characteristic

but this guy claims Mao was a force for good

gwydionwilliams.com/2015/03/14/mao-and-china/

Gooks aren't very smart. What did you expect?

>plant seeds six feet undergound and kill all the birds
>what could possibly go wrong

My parents live in China and my grandparents have lived there from before the revolution. The communist one, not the cultural one. I'm it basing this account on stories and anecdotes and descriptions of those days I have colected from these two generations, but obviously read it all with a grain of salt. It really depends on who you ask, as people from different strata of society had radically different experiences.

My dad was a farmer's son, youngest of six. His father was a dirt poor farmer, and his mother was a peasant who became a party member.
During the revolution, burning their (contracts?) to their landlords seemed like a surreal dream come true. I suppose for the landlord, who was likely publically humiliated (apparently he was not killed and his grandchildren went to school with me), it was a rough time.

For my mother, who's father was enlisted for the Japanese Invasion, meeting my grandmother, a nurse, and was commissioned just before joining the Volunteer Army for the Korean War, the revolution was a great time, despite the fact that they were a landowning family. They were stripped of some of their fields and lands, but a military billet in Qingdao made life very easy for them.

Life continued to be good during the Cultural Revolution, as my paternal grandparents were still peasanting away and my maternal grandparents were military personnel.

Many of my mothers friends and two of my aunts were Red Guardsmen. Although by that time, they had moved to the city and there wasn't much to do but patriotic exercises and propaganda dissemination. Stories from my father's side are a bit more tumultuous.

Cont.

Mao attempted to reform the economy by moving away from agriculture and transitioning China to an industry-based economy like the USSR's. He introduced five year plans that mimicked the Soviet five year plans and implemented radical, unscientific farming methods. This lead to a 10-15% lower crop yield, but administrators of the agricultural divisions lied to Mao out of fear of retribution. Large portions of small harvests went to the government, and the greatest famine in all of history took place. The Chinese gov made some more capitalistic reforms, such as giving peasants private land to farm on and importing grain from Australia and Canada to pacify the famine. The move to an industrial economy didn't work right away, but rulers after Zedong used this to further industrialize China into the economic powerhouse it is today.

Here's a protip user, whenever someone tells you that morality and values are the cause of anything you can safely discard most of what they're going to say

Cont.

Farming was a risky prospect, ironically, as some officials of the Party instructed to oversee specific farming village's production were already partaking in graft. I hear very few stories of Red Guard actions in the countryside, but corrupt officials (who, at village overseer levels, could reassign fields, animals and property) were an issue. If you had the unluck to get assigned one of these overseers and did not comply with their demands, they would reassign your property to a toady. Apparently, such a thing happened to some of my grandfather's friends. Ironically, it was the party that saved them after a man in the village took a train (which was prohibitably expensive apparently) to a (provincial? xian) capital and told the problem to an official there.
The corrupt overseer was removed in this case, but I'd wager that a happy ending was not reached in many other villages, especially not in villages where youth took a habit of aligning more with the Party representatives than with their families.

Farming was also an assigned task that workers were cycled in and out of. Apparently many of these were cityfolk, and led to a lot of mistakes and crop failures.

After the university system was re-established, things were very good for my parents (who caught on to the wave as some of the oldest applicants allowed into the tests), who both got into universities in big cities.

For a university graduate, especially those of economics streams, life was very good. Cushy government jobs aplenty, with alotted apartments and good wages. Despite this, farming work cycles were still a thing. My parents complained about how hard the work was, especially being sent with no experience. I think they lokely caused problems for the farmers looking after the fields.

Oh and to add, rationing for the entirety from the 40s to the 70s was never much of a problem, except for one administrative issue where my paternal grandparents were regularly forced to cross provincial borders and wheelbarrow back supplies overnight due to a zoning error in the ration tickets they were sent.

Overall, the experience my family has described has been one of relative comfort.

I am sure this is not the case for many families during the history of the PRC, perhaps not even the case for most.
However, I would just like to note that comfortable lives, despite low stations (farmer and military noncombat officer of low ranking) were possible.

Life even improved highly for us due to my parents' academic successes, which may explain the Chinese Generation (X?)'s obsession with studying well.

Even then, I know many Chinese people living where I am now who were dirt poor in the PRC yet still managed to scrape together comfortable lives and even successful businesses back there.

I understand that much of Veeky Forums is American, and even that many chinese back then (as they still are) are absolute cockroaches, but please remember that most were just honest peasants used to nothing more than a life of hard work to earn money for their parents and their children.

No. Simplified generalization here, but: Maoism is similar to Soviet communism, except China didn't have much of a developed industrial working class at the time. Instead, it put more emphasis on rural peasants, which it did have a lot of.

Mao was already worm shit when the capita-- errr, 'Chinese characteristic socialism' was put into action.

>into the economic powerhouse it is today.
not for much longer, though.

Socialism and communism will never ever work.

Good post. Thanks for sharing

That faggot spams his revisionist bullshit blog everywhere

This. Never bet on the intelligence and prudence of teenagers. The cultural revolution was like a more extreme and violent version Social Justice Warriorism.

What was supposed to be an upsurge of radical criticism of power structures and systematic corruption quickly turned into a purity dick measuring contest among dumb teenagers and college students. The one with the most oppressed background, i.e. the poorest, or the most hysterical accusers were kings. Everyone that had a "problematic" background was a target for those higher in the oppression olympics hierarchy.

The big difference is that with the cultural revolution the rightious cliques sometimes got their hands on guns and were actively told and encouraged to target government figures.

Capitalism

>Mao: I could have you peasants make food to eat but wouldn't it be cool if you slaved away making steal instead??!

>economic decentralization and empowerment of localized individuals is bad
>central planning is pure-super-mega evil

Haven't modern SJW college groups done the equivalent of struggle sessions as well?

depends on the circumstance.

Why do people ignore death tolls to forgive such things? Can't they see they are falling for pure ideology?

lmao no, you can thank Deng Xiaoping for that. Maoism brought about the
>Great
>Leap
>Forward
and the Cultural Revolution

>image
toppest of keks. only thing to make me laugh out loud all night. thanks for that.

Baron von Ungern-Sternberg went mad and invaded the USSR instead of continuing south pursuing the routed Chinese army and establishing a glorious eternal dynasty in central Asia.

We should have gotten to see footage of an aging Baron executing Mao on live TV in the 1950s.

I enjoyed reading that

so why do people still idolize Mao at my university?

A country has to manufacture heros, amerifats her worship Washington and Lincoln.

Mao was a revolutionary and had some interesting ideas. He was not so good at running a country. Generals don't always make good politicians and politicians don't make good generals.

Commies didndu nothin wrong

Well you should keep dating her, because she's dumb as fuck.

He was a unique and interesting individual, he managed to inspire a lot of people to create major change, some of his ideas were good. Now that there's been a few generations since his time it's possible to focus on his successes and ignore or shift blame for his failures.

It was never tried.

...

Because he helped unify China and removed the imperial powers.

...

...

Exactly.

So, the destruction of Chinese culture created a Capitalist attitude that didn't match a capitalist economy, putting the whole socio-economic balance out of whack?

Stop user, my dick can only get so hard.

Despite the large death toll and inefficiencies of central planning economies, Mao was actually the best thing to happen to China in 100 years.

He successfully unified a fractured and weak state, doubled life expectancy, doubled literacy rates, maintained reasonable levels of economic growth for a country with laughable industrial capabilities before he came to power and rectified the "Century of Humiliation".

I think the general sentiment amongst the CCP is that the problem with Mao is that he lived too damn long and marred his very successful legacy with the GLF, CR and poor planning.

Without his foundations though, Deng's later reforms would have simply not been possible and a testament to Mao's legacy is shown in the fact that despite all the idiocy, the man was untouchable; no one could remove him without facing the wrath of a populace who adored the man.