"Mao's 1949 revolution had been termed the “Liberation” by the party, but it fitted the Chinese people into a procrustean bed of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, popular liberation finally did begin to flourish. The humiliation of party cadres high and low destroyed the authority of the CCP in the eyes of the Chinese people, who took to heart the Maoist message of daring to think, speak, and act. Today, all over China, people protest what they consider to be unjust treatment by corrupt officials. The Cultural Revolution was truly the watershed in the history of the People’s Republic of China. But the Cultural Revolution was also a watershed in Chinese modern history. For well over a century, since the Opium War of 1839–1842, the Chinese had struggled with how to modernize while preserving their integrity as a people and a culture. The slogan that gained currency in the mid-nineteenth century was “Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning for practical use.” But early in the twentieth century, Chinese learning crumbled. Confucianism was abandoned as state ideology; the 2,000-year-old imperial Confucian state gave way to a republic; Confucianism as a social philosophy came under attack from intellectuals as inegalitarian and paternalistic. The nature of the Chinese “essence” became unclear. In its place, the CCP offered Marxism-Leninism, a foreign “essence” as totalist in its reach as Confucianism, which promised and, under Mao, delivered success. But by the late 1950s, Mao had tired of aping foreigners. The GLF was his first attempt to find a distinctive Chinese road. By the mid-1960s, he could justify his distaste for the Soviet model with the specter of revisionism. The Cultural Revolution was declaredly Mao’s attempt to vaccinate his people against the Soviet disease. But more importantly, it was his last best effort to define and perpetuate a distinct Chinese essence in the modern world. His was truly the last stand of Chinese conservatism. The chaos, killing, and, at the end, the stagnation of the Cultural Revolution—which together had cost China well over a year’s worth of national income—led Deng to abandon this vain search for a Chinese version of modernity that had preoccupied the nation’s politicians and intellectuals for well over a century. China had to jump on the bandwagon of successful Western-style modernization that had proved so effective on Taiwan and elsewhere in East Asia. The Cultural Revolution became the economic and social watershed of modern Chinese history."