"Only when the Cultural Revolution was waning in the cities in 1966-69 was the movement extended to the countryside. There were political and social conflicts in the villages, but they were relatively benign in comparison to the struggles that had racked the cities. The situation varied enormously from region to region and from village to village. Some villages split into political factions, mimicking those in the cities or in nearby middle schools, but the divisions of ten were based more on old clan and neighborhood differences than on political ones. In many areas there was an intensification of class antagonisms, but this usually involved "poor and lower-middle peasant associations" reenacting old hatreds against former landlords and rich peasants, based on the memory of class divisions that had long ago ceased to exist. One result was of ten the persecution of individuals stigmatized with "bad" class labels, but it was hardly the "life and death" class struggle depicted in the official press. In the countryside, as Richard Kraus has pointed out, there was a particularly strong tendency to translate old class designations into new caste categories."
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Maurice Meisner, Mao's China and after: a history of the People's Republic (3rd ed., 1999), Chap. 19 : Social Results of the Cultural Revolution
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
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Cultural Revolution
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