What do the older people in China today who participated in the Cultural Revolution think of their actions back then?

>according to my teacher there were fears of the Red Guards hijacking army bases and stocks and thus the nuclear program
How could rowdy students get away with attacking the freaking army?

Jason is that you?

>Mao proposed that China return to the social state of communist zones during the anti-Japanese war in the 1940s, where soldiers, farmers, workers and students all lived in a barter economy. All people should learn to farm, produce industrial goods and prepare for war at the same time, he said, while also carrying out “class struggle”.

Is this what the founding fathers wanted?

He's a Third Worldist

I'm a ML with some sympathies for Mao. I certainly think a cultural revolution is a good way to rapidly change society.

Andrew Jackson probably

Those are Jesus's words man.

Alot of them were peasants, little mire than animals given human form. They probably dont have the requisite cognition to reflect on the enormity of the CR

A lot of them who do probably think those assholes deserved it.
>A BLOO BLOO YOU MADE ME DO THE WORK YOU DO EVERY DAY.

>Jefferson was Mao

Really makes u think

Jefferson would have told the workers to get out and everyone to stop producing industrial goods. Otherwise he'd be cool with it.

>Uh, these guys are with Mao, right?
>Uh-huh.
>The leader of our army.
>Right.
>The one who imprisons and kills his enemies right?
>Right.
>I figure we should do what these guys say.

It's difficult to go from a point where basically everyone has a gun to actually restricting them.

Chances are there were guns leftover from the civil war era, they gather enough of them to hit up a small army base, take the guns from there, and now you can hit other bases. Rinse and repeat until you lose.

>The Cultural Revolution was a good thing and quite necessary to destroy the remnants of capitalism in China

yeah, that sure worked. youre an ass

>Are they proud of torturing murdering their parents and teachers and destroying their cultural heritage because Mao told them the intellectuals were all counter-revolutionaries?

They are chinese and above all, they are asian. Of course they are proud.

It's the same with a lot of WW2 veterans in Europe. What they have witnessed and done themselves often shame them so much they refuse to talk about it, even to close family.

Fuck the part in the article were they deculturalize the village is painful to read.

The part in the article about the deculturalisation of the village made me feel that weird feel were it seems as if the blood would be sucked out of your face.

Fifty yuan has been deposited into your account.

To make this more direct: China doesn't have an independent military. It still doesn't. Technically, China doesn't have a military at all. The Communist Party of China has a military. It's theirs. It's structured to do what the party says, not do what the constution or whatever the fuck says.

The Red Guards existed to enact the parties will, and reform society. If a bunch of Red Guards show up and say your officers are counter-revolutionary and need to be punished, you, an semi-literate conscript, are not given a lot of clear guidelines what to do in that situation. After all, Peng Duhuai was supposed to be like the best General China had, as of last week, and he confessed to being a capitalist roader on public radio.

It was fun. School was canceled. Maybe forever. Instead you got uniforms and got to march and sing songs. You would be sent to a province and the job description was, well, revolution. Anyone could be assigned to any position. Much like in ancient Athens. No experience necessary. Neets today could use a little revolution.

>stays loyal to Mao and carries out his orders in the cultural revolution, avoiding his own political destruction
>at the same time uses his influence to mitigate the damage to chinese cultural heritage and keep everything from falling apart
>goes down as a villain to the west for carrying out Mao's orders, and a villain to hardcore commies for "sabotaging" the revolution

No modern nation has an independent military

The saddest part about Mao is that he lived for too long. I mean the dude was 82 when he died and all of the worst parts of his regime were towards the end of his life. Had he died before the mid 60's he would have been known as one of the greatest leaders in the world.

Yes, they do. If the head of most democratic regimes, and of some autocratic regimes, just ordered their military to kill their political rivals, for instance, they would possibly be ignored or face a coup.

Do you think every American soldier just up and decided to stop being Democrats last week?

>$7 for shitposting
How do I get this job desu.

Every modern military is controlled by political authorities. Of those, none are independent.

Kill yourself

China still has a massive fuck ton of cultural heritage though.

You seem to be having trouble with reading comprehension. To shorten y'alls discussion, you both have different defintions of independent.

No modern military is independent of the political authorities.
But you meant that China's military is much more controlled by the political authorities than America's.

That's most likely, but definitely exaggerated. Remember that multiple PLA commanders did not respond to 1989 orders. And that was a relatively minor protest of 200,000 people considering China had 1.1 billion people at the time.
If you had a revolution, much of the PLA wouldn't follow orders.

>Every modern military is controlled by political authorities. Of those, none are independent.
Actually no! Even under this arbritrary definition, in some countries, the Army acts independent of the political authorities and the politicians live in fear of them. So even when you tried to introduce a substitute meaning of "independent military" that nobody on earth uses, you still couldn't get it to work.

So, how about we hammer down the specifics of how you think this works. Given that every soldier that signed up in the last 8 years in the U.S. signed up specifically to implement Barack Obama's policies (after all, defending the Democratic Platform is the explicit purpose of the the U.S. Army), Donald Trump will probably have to liquidate the entire institution and build a new army, right?

Most people absolutely do not regret it. The only people who complain about the Cultural Revolution are those who got beat up over it because it was discovered their grandparents owned land or fought for the Nationalists. The people who just spent the whole period beating up people and travelling around the country for free actually miss it.

The problem is, you're blurring the line of 'politicians' into one big category. The PLA is an instrument of the Chinese Communist Party, not the People's Republic of China. They take orders from the Party Chairman, not the head of State. Their explicit purpose isn't to defend the Chinese State, but to defend and complete the work of the Chinese Communist Party.

So to be completely accurate in this analogy, the loyalty of the U.S. Army doesn't drastically switch from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. It would switch from Debbie Schultz to Reince Priebus. If the Pentagon says to stand down, and Reince Priebus tells them to go invade Cube, to lawfully obey their orders, they should ignore their general and obey Reince Preibus. Because the purpose of the U.S. Army is not to defend American Interests, but to defend the Republican Parties interests. Similarly, all their officers have to go through republican ideological training, and swear their oath of allegiance directly to the Republican Party.

Does the CPC also control the various law enforcement agencies, or could one potentially see a civil conflict over attempts by the Premier to increase police powers?

I have had two professors for Mandarin before I quit that shit and just focused on Japanese.

The first was born shortly before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. She does not remember the actual political events of course, but she was very bitter about what happened. She particularly was disgusted by the huge amount of forced abortions and murders.

The second was born in the late 80's, and she has no problem with the Cultural Revolution. To her, it seemed like a very unique time in Chinese history. She thinks it was the best time to be a kid, because the kids grew up alone and free in the cities since their parents were busy working in the countryside or government agencies.

It's not exactly relevant to OP's question, but I thought I'd share two perspectives from two Chinese professors I have met.

Depends on the law enforcement agencies. The People's Armed Police report to the Central Military Commision (Party) and the State Council of the PRC (Not-Party). How these interact and where the juristiction applies is not super clear. But the Ministry of Public Security, which oversees and organizes China's police force is Subordinate to the State Council. Hong Kong and Macau have their own separate Ministry for Security.

>or could one potentially see a civil conflict over attempts by the Premier to increase police powers?
Possibly yeah. "Increase Police Powers" is a standard sort of thing for infighting in the Chinese Government, of the sort you get in the Cultural Revolution. It's basically impossible to understand what was happening without this distinction, because it was basically the opposite case.

Mao gets Marginalized in the State Council after what a big shitheap the Korean War and the Great Leap Forward was. Other guys like Liu Shaoqi come forward who was actually president of China at the time. Mao is marginalized to the party administration. So what does he do? He creates/empowers a new thing, the Red Guards to carry out "Ideological Struggle." These don't report to the State Council even theoretically. They are a party apparatus, like the party. Theoretically, members of the state Council could have used the police to move quickly against Mao, and arrested and broken up the Red Guards movement. In practice, they were slow to do that, disorganized, and Mao was still too popular in the party to try ousting him. And of course, theoretically, he could have called the Army in to counter the police, if it didn't work.

This is also a thing still ongoing in Chinese Politics. Xi Xingping has brought back 'struggle sessions' and 'self-criticism' which haven't been used since the Maoist era. But his predecessor as power behind the throne, his Jiang Zemin, stacked the state bureaucracy with his loyalists and made it very hard to deal with corruption.

Obviously you can't order the police to arrest themselves. So what do you do? Well, to ensure their loyalty, most of the police chiefs etc. are party members. As party members, they're subject to the party rules and discipline. So you, extrajudiciously, call them into a 'struggle session' to convince them to confess to their crimes. This is, again, a thing that happened ALL OVER the place during the cultural revolution, and you can't understand why Mao did it without it. It wasn't just a bunch of people smashing statues because Mao commanded it, it was part of an internal power struggle in the CCP, where one of the party insiders armed party radicals to undermine the state.

Kek like China would waste money on defending the cultural revolution

It's nothing like how many in the West (and here) portray it. i.e. The oriental dictator Mao arbitrarily demanding mass slaughter to the subservient slavish masses.

Rather it was like a /pol/ or tumblr witchhunt with large chunks of the populace radicalized looking for those who may be a threat to the revolution. Combined with people taking advantage of the chaos to settle their own personal disputes and others simply relishing in the chaos.

The party had little control over the whole affair.

>The party had little control over the whole affair.
Wasn't that rather the point, since it was Mao's attempt to take power back from the party for himself personally.

It wasn't carried out to completion.

>Actually no! Even under this arbritrary definition, in some countries, the Army acts independent of the political authorities and the politicians live in fear of them.
Pre Erdogan Turkey and where else?

A gorillian African states, notably Egypt.

Were the Red Guards even ideologically coherent or did they just label everything they didn't like as "reactionary"?

You're both retards who should fuck off back to skeletonchan where you belong.

Thank everything nobody on Veeky Forums will ever be granted an ounce of power.

I mean, yes and no. Understand that everything caught up in the Cultural Revolution is some brand of Marxist Leninist, so a lot of the ideological disputes could be seen as 'inside baseball' things.

There was the general position that the Revolution was going too slow/was actually being reversed, and needed to be revitalized.

But on the otherhand, it was a movement that was a generally spontaneous youth movement, so you know, mileage will vary across the membership.

>I mean, yes and no

That means the latter.

>some brand of Marxist Leninist

It belongs in the garbage.

China looks like it's gonna overtake the US real soon.

with capitalism on steroid

Really informative user
Thanks!

Does it?