In 1966, 72 year old Mao Tse-tung staged a revolutionary drama, stimulating a cataclysmic upheaval that he termed "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution". Decades after the fact and controversies over the nature and results of the Cultural Revolution continue to rage today. According to Meisner, it will be many years because the full history of the event can be written with any reasonable degree of degree of accuracy and understanding. Inevitably, any attempt to write even a brief preliminary account of the revolution is a formidable task as there exists a host of political passion and historical dilemmas in light of the event. Notwithstanding, what is evident to academics and other scholars alike is that the Cultural Revolution had a number of goals in mind at its onset.
[...] In this regard, the Great Leap may have started as a reactionary agenda to pressing social and economic issues, but it morphed into a coherent social narrative that proved to be a way forward for China into the mid twentieth century and beyond. Gordon White, Dan Lynch and Feng Chen are all pessimistic about the possibility of the CCP successfully rebuilding its normative authority around a re-invented ideology, but they differ in their analysis of which factors are most important. [...]
[...] A number of China observers suggest that ‘consumerism' is subversive of political authority in China. Based on Rosen's (The Victory of Materialism) analysis, do you agree? Support your answer as concretely as possible. While I would be inclined to say that most things are subversive to political authority in the state of China, I would not go as far as to say that the global cultural idea of consumerism is one of them. Indeed, even in the strict political system of the communist state we are beginning to see the emergence of a trend that is both individually centered and capitalist in nature. [...]
[...] the Cultural Revolution was undertaken with the intention of resolving a host of social and political problems that had merged in the years following 1949. As history reveals, the events were not to unfold as Mao had hoped. What is obvious to scholars is that the revolution was a last desperate attempt to revive a paradigm shift that Mao believed was dying. Unfortunately, it was an attempt that failed, and it was a failure on a grand scale, dominating and distorting the social and political life of the People's Republic for more than a decade and tarnishing the historical image of Mao in the process. [...]
[...] It would seem that the collapse of the old communist belief system has increasingly resulted in widespread moral decay. For Chen, seeking a balance between society's material and spiritual development is necessary in order to rebuild the communist party's normative authority. Thus far, she believes national attention has been called to a moral crisis. It is argued that increased patriotism benefits the regime, which needs some shared values to hold the nation together at a time of momentous change. In this light, the party's reliance on proven techniques reflects its deep seated belief that establishing normative authority can only be steered from the top. [...]
[...] According to Lynch, there is no turning back in this regard there will always be a price to pa for wealth and strength. In a similar context, Gordon White argues that the overriding political rationale for economic reform was the desire to rebuild the power and authority of the Communist regime. For White, the CCP leadership faces two major tasks in reestablishing their political hegemony. First, they must redefine the official political ideology in such a way that it becomes an effective force for legitimating the CCP regime in the context of the socialist commodity economy. [...]
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