Revisiting China's Cultural Revolution: A Review Article

摘要

Amid much turbulence during the last century China experienced many and varied political campaigns and mass movements. Few of these have been as spontaneous as the May 4th Movement of 1919 (in protest at the terms affecting China of the Versailles Treaty) or the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1976 and 1989. Communist guerrillas in the areas controlled by them in the 1920s instigated campaigns against "local bullies, evil gentry and lawless landlords", while in the 1930s Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party launched the "New Life Movement" to promote good manners and improve public order. From the 1940s onwards political campaigns both within the party and involving "mobilisation of the masses" became a common feature of life under the communists. Mao Zedong even declared that a mass movement was necessary to accomplish any major undertaking. The "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" launched by Mao in 1966 combined all the features of a political campaign with those of a mass movement. Mao's overarching motive in launching it was, of course, to prevent the onset in China of "revisionism" of the kind which he discerned in the Soviet Union. It was his final and most spectacular effort to impose his will on his fellow-countrymen.