Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution brought a negative change that put China in a time of civil disagreement and instability. Mao Zedong, chairman of the communist party, led the Cultural Revolution against his own Communist party in order to secure Maoism in China. In August of 1966 Mao passed a bill that declared death for all intellectuals and imperialists. In this aspect the Cultural Revolution was bad because it discouraged intelligence. It did, however, create more workers and encouraged farming. In the village of Liu Ling before the Cultural Revolution there was extreme poverty, children would have to work in the fields instead of going to school, and peasants did not own their own land. After the revolution kids were sent to school, people had better jobs, and land was redistributed to everyone. Judging from these facts the revolution would seem positive. However, the Red Guards would go into people's houses and kill anyone who was against the revolution. There were no freedoms. There was censorship and the schools did not teach in a neutral way. Everything the children were taught was twisted in some way to support communism and the Cultural Revolution. Millions of people were killed because of the Cultural Revolution. There were riots, but there was no way of stopping it from happening. Mao instilled a sense of fear in his people, so even though there were improvements in education and health, the people were still being repressed. Mao killed many people to create the China that he wanted, and even after all of the killing the economy still dropped because the government took over private businesses and the quality of life in general went down.