Word: mao
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SEVENTEEN YEARS after his Communist Party came to power, Chairman Mao Tse-tung launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" to cleanse the Party of its bureaucratic tendencies. The resulting turmoil attracted the attention of many Americans who had already focused on Asia because of the Vietnam War escalation...
Karnow has anchored his discussion on the theory that Mao is a revolutionary who could not adjust to the transition from warfare to stable government. Frustrated by self-seeking Party-bureaucrats, Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution to bring a new era in which citizens would focus their efforts on strengthening the state and not on personal advancement...
...Guard youth groups, Mao's standard-bearers of the Cultural Revolution, were a grave disappointment. Instead of promoting a new civilization in China, the Red Guards pursued personal goals, and they split into a myriad of factions. Party bureaucrats throughout China took advantage of Red Guard disunion and indecisiveness to organize their own youth contingents which staged battles with the Mao-inspired radicals. Workers, who were jealous of Red Guard privileges, frequently took the opportunity to chastise Mao's "Little Red Generals." As the level of violence rose throughout the country in 1967, Mao called on the army to restore...
Historian Barbara Tuchman offered the appropriate judgment: "Could anyone, remembering past attitudes, look at that picture of President Nixon and Chairman Mao in twin armchairs, with slightly queasy smiles bravely worn to conceal their mutual discomfort, and not feel a stunned sense that truth is indeed weirder than fiction?" The title of her address: "Why Policymakers...
...effectively debunks much of the propaganda credited with China's progress. Fertilizer, after all, has done more to raise food production than ML&M, and Tuchman notes that not even Mao has thought of a Thought that has been able to stop spitting in the streets. Perhaps because the ideology is so pervasive, she enjoys poking fun at it and pointing out the inconsistencies. In short, she fails to take the revolution seriously...