What Chairman Mao initiated on May 16, 1966 as ‘Cultural Revolution’ or known as ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ came to an end only on his death in 1976, with over 1 million died, tens of millions were tortured and millions more were banished from cities to the villages.
Mao declared the Cultural Revolution through a secret circular with the primary objective in mind to declare war on ‘representatives of the bourgeoise who had sneaked into the Communist Party, the Government, the Army and various spheres of culture’. Also fearing a ‘revisionist’ trend in the Party like that of the Soviet Union, he wanted to inculcate or rather bring back the core credentials of Marxism through the Cultural Revolution.
Beyond this, as his position within the Party and the Government weakened, with the failure of the policy of the Great leap Forward’ (1958-60), and the economic crisis that followed, Mao along with his wife Jiang Qing, Defense Minister lin Biao and a group of radicals, decided to attack the party leaders who were fast deviating from the original tenets of Marxism.
The Group of ‘Red Guards’ or Maoist Youth Gangs created havoc across the country for nearly a decade, which, apart from the loss of life resulted into what The Economist recorded as: ‘Of the 6,843 officially designated places of cultural and historic interest in Beijing, Red Guards vandalized 4, 922’. Though the Party has called the Cultural Revolution a catastrophe, yet in 1978, two years after Mao’s death, it was officially declared as having been triumphant.
What an ironyIJ Karl Marx, the Father of Scientific Socialism, must now be lamenting in his graveyard, as the way his most trusted disciples are twisting and tweaking the core values of his globe-trotting ideology, including the current President Xi Jinping under the banner of the People’s Republic of China!