To what extent do you agree that the Cultural Revolution was a struggle for control over the future of the Chinese revolution?

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Elizabeth Hadjia

To what extent do you agree that the Cultural Revolution was “a struggle for control over the future of the Chinese revolution”?

During Mao Zedong’s last decade of rule in China a domestic struggle convulsed that nation between 1966 and 1976 that achieved appalling destruction. This period was known as The Cultural Revolution, which followed the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Mao worried about his leadership in China, accepted that repairing the damage of the Great Leap Forward was necessary to prevent China from slipping into revisionism. The movement eradicated once and for all the remnant of bourgeois ideology, which Mao claimed were largely permeating the party and society. Mao was willing to undergo further revolution only just after China had emerged from civil war and famine, as it was a means by which Mao could reassert his authority over China and the Chinese Communist Party. To do this Mao removed all possible source of opposition, broke the power of the urban bureaucrats to restore the peasant character of China, as well as ensuring that the concept of permanent revolution continued after his death. These actions conducted by Mao underline the notion that the Cultural Revolution was indeed “a struggle for control over the future of the Chinese revolution”.

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This idea of a power struggle was emphasized by Mao’s attempts to consolidate the notion of continual revolution. Subsequent to The Great Leap Forward Mao judged that he was losing power in the CCP and that a power struggle was looming. He believed to maintain his authority a permanent revolution was necessary. He was convinced that revolution was not a single event, but a continuing and developing process, that once stopped would allow China to become a self-justifying bureaucracy – destroying all the achievements made by the PRC since 1949. The main safeguard against this was to instil in ...

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