Chinese Modern History: Cultural Revolution in China

Chinese Modern History
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Chinese Modern History
Question 1
Contrary to popular belief, the Cultural Revolution in China is not a phenomenon that had nothing to do with the rest of China’s modern history. The Cultural Revolution was actually something that was planned by the ruling Communist party and especially by its chairman Man Zedong. There are various events or linkages that culminated in the Cultural Revolution.
One of the earliest events that contributed to the Cultural Revolution is the Hundred Flowers Campaign that Mao launched as a way of seeking different views on how China should be governed (Schoppa, 2016, p. 551). This campaign gave freedom of expression and so liberals and Chinese intellectuals started to criticize and oppose the Communist Party and questioning its leadership. The party tolerated and even engaged with these intellectuals for a few months, but after this Mao’s administration reversed this policy. Mao and his Communist Party did not want people to criticize any of their policies and soon enough many people were persecuted for criticizing the government. In this way, the Hundred Flowers Campaign was stopped when the Communist party felt it was losing a grip on its power.
After this Mao created the concept of the Great Leap Forward (Schoppa, 2016, p.556). The Great Leap Forward was a plan that Mao came up that he hoped would help China become industrialized and stop being wholly dependent on agriculture. In this program, he called upon people from the rural areas to work together in the production of iron. Ultimately, the people involved in this program were uneducated rural farmers who did not have any first-hand skills on how to produce iron. These people had to improvise on with what they had to make the iron. These people had to build their own iron furnaces to produce the tools or items they were designing such as window panes, spoons, and farm tools (Schoppa, 2016, p. 557). In this way, a lot of deforestation occurred to run these furnaces and as people rushed to produce a lot of iron tools. In the end, the iron items that these people produced were low quality because they were not done with qualified techniques or the environment. Even though they produced a lot of items, they were low quality because the method of production was faulty. In this way, Mao’s Great Leap Forward became a failure.
Another event that is connected to the Cultural Revolution is the decline in agricultural harvest. While many people collectively worked to produce iron, the agricultural sector was somewhat neglected. According to Schoppa (2016, p. 565) the agricultural crisis was worsened by natural disasters that plagued China during this period. Many natural disasters such as flooding that occurred in the 1960s caused the harvest to decline further. With the declining harvest, the country faced the worst famine in history where millions of people died because of lack of food. The famine again, caused a lot of dissatisfaction among the general public and in so doing, the Communist Party was losing is popularity. The party did not have immediate solutions for the famine and it went on for a long time. There are even allegations that Mao allowed the famine to worse...