How crazy was China's Cultural Revolution?

Posted By Blake Hounshell Monday, January 25, 2010 - 11:07 PM Share

This New York Times article about the surprising release of records from the late Mao era raises the question: Just how crazy was the Cultural Revolution, anyway?

This crazy, according to the eminent historian Jonathan Spence, as told in his landmark biography of Mao Zedong:

An announcement from the "Beijing Number 26 Middle School Red Guards," dated August 1966, gave the kind of program that was to be followed by countless others. Every street was to have a quotation form Chairman Mao prominently displayed, and loudspeakers at every intersection and in all parks were to broadcast his thought. Every household as well as a trains and buses, bicycles and pedicabs, had to have a picture of Mao on its walls. Ticket takers on trains and buses should all declaim Mao's thought. Every bookstore had to stock Mao's quotations, and every hand in China had to hold one. No one could wear bluejeans, tight pants, "weird women's outfits," or have "slick hairdos or wear rocket shoes." No perfumes or beauty creams could be used. No one could keep pet fish, cats, or dogs, or raise fighting crickets. No shop could sell classical books. All those identified by the masses as landlords, hooligans, rightists, and capitalists had to wear a plaque identifying themselves as such every time they went out. The minimum amount of persons living in a room could be three -- all other space had to be given to the state housing bureaus. Children should criticize their elders, and students their teachers. No one under thirty-five might smoke or drink. Hospital service would be simplified, and "complicated treatment must be abolished"; doctors had to write their prescriptions legibly, and not use English words. All schools and colleges were to combine study with productive labor and farmwork. As a proof of its own transformation, the "Number 26 Middle School" would change its name, effective immediately, to "The Maoism School."

And you thought your middle-school experience was rough.

EXPLORE:CHINA, HISTORY

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GRANT

10:48 AM ET

January 26, 2010

Read Wild Swans? It got much,

Read Wild Swans? It got much, much worse than this would suggest. It'll probably take China at least another fifty years before they really look at the the Cultural Revolution.

LAURAROBERT23

2:05 AM ET

January 27, 2010

Great

The Maoism School is really a nice name and all the changes are also good.
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