Topic 3 - The Cultural Revolution and its Aftermath - Attacks on Mao's Political and Class Enemies Flashcards
(35 cards)
Liu Shaoqi - What role did Liu play post GLF and what was Mao’s reaction to this?
- As Head of State, Liu’s pragmatic policies had helped rebuild China after the GLF
- He was popular amongst the people and Mao may have been jealous
Liu Shaoqi - What did Liu do when Mao first encouraged the students to rise up and what was this used as evidence of?
- When Mao first encouraged the students to rise up, Liu had supported the sending of Party ‘work teams’ onto the campuses of schools to control the violence
- This was used as evidence of his traitorous ‘rightist’ sentiments
Liu Shaoqi - What was Liu and his family subject to as a result?
- Liu was subject to constant struggle meetings – he was abused and beaten and his family were also targeted
- His wife was publicly denounced and his children sent to the countryside to live as peasants
- Liu wrote to Mao begging to be allowed to resign, but Mao did not reply
Liu Shaoqi - What happened at the 9th Party Congress?
- At the Ninth Party Congress, Jiang Qing denounced him as a traitor who was working for the CIA
- The evidence for this had been gathered by Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, who had tortured prisoners to get it
Liu Shaoqi - What happened to Liu after the 9th Party Congress and when did he die?
- Denounced as a ‘renegade, scab, and traitor’, Liu was stripped of all his posts and replaced by Lin Biao
- Liu was exiled from Beijing and, in time, torture and neglect meant he could no longer speak
- He died in Nov 1968 and was buried in an unmarked grave
Deng Xiaoping - How did Mao feel about Deng and what was Deng’s dictum?
- Mao was angered by Deng Xiaoping
- His famous dictum about the irrelevance of the ‘colour’ of a policy was a direct affront to Mao’s belief that it was better to be Communist than practical
Deng Xiaoping - What were Mao’s complaints about Deng?
- Deng had helped Liu introduce economic reforms without Mao’s advice
- Mao complained that ‘Deng Xiaoping never came to consult me… from 1959 to the present he has never consulted by over anything at all’
Deng Xiaoping - What was Deng damned as and accused of?
Damned as ‘the number two person in authority taking the capitalist road’, Deng was accused of trying to establish his own ‘independent kingdom’
Deng Xiaoping - What happened to Deng and his family?
- Deng disappeared from public sight, having been sent to a tractor factory in rural Jiangxi
- Deng’s family also suffered – his son attempted to escape torture by jumping out of a window and was paralysed from the waist down
Deng Xiaoping - What happened to Deng later on?
Deng was later returned to power by Mao, who needed him to help end the chaos of the CR
Deng Xiaoping - Who was Deng a target of and what did they accuse him of?
- He was a target of radicals and so was blamed for the protests that followed the death of Zhou Enlai
- The Gang of Four radicals blamed Deng for the violent clashes with police during the 1976 Qingming festival
Deng Xiaoping - What did the Gang of Four convince Mao to do and what happened after Mao’s death?
- The Gang of Four convinced Mao to take away Deng’s positions of gov leadership
- However, after the death of Mao, Deng eventually became the most important leader in the PRC
Lin Biao - Who was Lin Biao and what did he help create?
- Lin Biao was Mao’s most subservient follower whose loyalty had impressed Mao so much that he was chosen to replace the disgraced Peng Dehuai after the Lushan Conference
- He also helped create the Little Red Book that helped spread Mao’s cult of personality
Lin Biao - What did Lin’s foreword in the Little Red Book do, what was it made, and what did it demand?
- Lin wrote a foreword to that book that lauded Mao as practically a deity
- It was made compulsory reading for PLA soldiers
- It demanded self-sacrifice in the service of the Chairman and was distributed to millions of soldiers
Lin Biao - What did the PLA newspaper begin to publish and what were soldiers ordered to do?
- The PLA newspaper began to publish a quotation from Mao every day
- Soldiers were ordered to cut them out and compile their own collections of Mao’s quotes to be studied and recited
Lin Biao - What did the cult of Lei Feng do and what happened at the outbreak of the CR?
- The cult of Lei Feng encouraged obedience to Mao Zedong Thought
- When the violence of the CR spiralled out of control, Mao was able to rely on the complete loyalty of the PLA to control it
The purging of the CCP membership - What did Mao encourage and what campaign was launched as a result of this?
- When Mao told young people to ‘Bombard the Headquarters’, he was encouraging them to attack the CCP
- The launched a so-called ‘rectification campaign’ against the CCP to remove any members who had been bourgeois and elitist
and replace them with young, fervently revolutionary people – led to a devastating impact
The purging of the CCP membership - How many regional and provisional party cadres were purged?
70-80%
The purging of the CCP membership - How many party cadres in the organ of central gov were purged?
60-70%
The purging of the CCP membership - How many party cadres were executed in Yunnan?
As many as 14,000 party cadres were executed in Yunnan as ‘traitors’
The purging of the CCP membership - How many regional party first secretaries and provincial party first secretaries were removed?
- Four out of six of the regional party first secretaries removed
- 23 out of 29 provincial party secretaries were removed
The purging of the CCP membership - How many members of the Poliburo survived the purge?
Only 9 out of 23 Politburo members survived the purge
The purging of the CCP membership - How much of the Central Committee were removed?
Two-thirds of the Central Committee were deposed
The purging of the CCP membership - What were the purged officials sent to do?
Many were sent to undertake ‘productive labour and political study’ which in reality translated to a life of back-breaking hard labour and indoctrination in the May Seventh Cadres Schools
