Imagine a near cult-like figure, that is the head of his political party, urging his most ardent supporters to revolt against his opponents. And they do! Not just a few hundred supporters, but more like a million plus supporters, with most of them being of high school or college age. The revolt ended up overthrowing several members of the country's government leaders, burning books, and killing thousands of innocent people. This all took place in China between 1966 and 1976 under the head of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, but why?
In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party was just getting started converting their country into a socialist system run by a centralized government. Their plans for first half of the 1950s went fairly well. Mao Zedong, who was both head of the CCP and the government, decided to mash the accelerator with a plan that came to be known as "The Great Leap Forward" whereby the country's agrarian society would produce not only more food, but also more steel. That's right, in the backyard of many everyday farmers, was a blast furnace for making steel. Unfortunately, the steel they made was pretty bad and unmarketable. It took famers away from what they do best, that is making food. This, along with major mismanagement by overzealous party leaders, caused widespread famine resulting in the deaths of around 30 to 50 million people.
Someone in the party had to be accountable for this, and surprisingly Mao took some of the blame and stepped down as head of the government (but kept his role as head of the CCP). Over the next few years he had time to think about things, and for whatever reason, he decided that the country was not taking hard enough steps towards socialism. It could be that he saw this stance as an opportunity to grab back some of the power he had lost earlier. Nevertheless, he began denouncing the country for this, and even more so, for having capitalistic tendencies. He blamed "elites" and "bourgeois" factions both inside and outside the party and government for this and he called for a revolt to purge such factions. Millions of young people in high school and college, who had been indoctrinated in Mao over the years saw him as a cult-like figure and they took on the challenge and unleashed their unlawful juvenile injustice system on people and institutes they deemed not following "Mao thoughts".
As part of my continuing research into Chinese and Taiwanese history, I have written a section on the Cultural Revolution that goes into more detail. You can read this by clicking on this link.
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