"Perhaps never before in human history had a political leader unleashed such forces against the very institutional system he had created. The resulting damage to that system was profound, and the goals Mao Zedong sought to achieve ultimately remained elusive. The agenda he left behind for his successors was extraordinarily challenging. This is the contradictory legacy of Mao: while he wrote the norms and rules of CCP leadership and represented its successes, he also became the voice of rebellion and the mirror of the party’s flaws and failures. The reverberations of this ambiguity, and the impact of Mao’s campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, were profoundly influential for the time after Mao. The most famous slogan of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, “it’s right to rebel” (zaofan youli), affected a whole generation. When former Red Guards and rusticated students returned to urban China from their stint in the countryside after two, three, and sometimes ten years, they had indeed learned from Mao, though not perhaps what Mao and the party wanted them to learn. They learned of the profound corruptibility of the party and the prevalence of archaic power struggles. They above all had absorbed that the biggest problem facing China was not the lack of revolution, but the lack of prosperity and progress."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (2019), Chap. 9: Overthrowing Everything: 1961–1976
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Cultural Revolution
40 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Cultural Revolution →
Related Quotes
"Yet unity was to prove an elusive goal, and the nature of the victory was difficult to define. The Cultural Revolutio…"
"The violent phase of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1969, deeply marked Chinese society. In addition to the es…"
"But the past, however much we may rebel against and seek to repudiate it, is not easily exorcised. The history of thi…"
"Obviously, the Cultural Revolution was a failure in achieving its goals. In fact, it had negative consequences. As I …"
"I should remind you that Chairman Mao dedicated most of his life to China, that he saved the party and the revolution…"
"Mao set about ensnaring his enemies with the precision of a trapper. But once the stage was set and the Cultural Revo…"
"Mao's last decade was as full of confusion and surprises as the 1790s in France. In size and complexity the Cultural …"
"The most obvious result of the Cultural Revolution, and perforce the starting point for any evaluation of the upheava…"
"Mao finally struck in 1966 when he unleashed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution against the 'Four Olds': cultu…"
"China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of t…"