Prologue
The Cultural Revolution began quietly. On November 11, 1965, a Shanghai daily newspaper published a review of a four-year old play, Hai Jui Dismissed From Office. The review stated that the play's author, Peking Deputy Mayor Wu Han, had written an anti-socialist document calling for the destruction of socialism in China. That same day, Red Flag published an attack on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and revisionism within the CCP. The article charged that some leading CCP members had given in to pressure for a capitalist restoration and had begun preparing a counter-revolution. Within six months, senior leaders who had joined the Party in the 1920s and 1930s had fallen into disgrace. Within a year, student radicals had paralyzed the CCP. By the summer of 1967, China was on the verge of a civil war. This study grew out of the need to explain the short-term causes of the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, most analyses of the Cultural Revolution focused on the......
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Approximate Word Count: 2507
Approximate Pages: 10 (260 words per double-spaced page) |