10 YEARS OF CHAOS IN CHINA

Agence France Presse | The Philippine Daily Inquirer
May 15, 2006 (05:56 am Manila time)

Tragedy of Cultural Revolution recalled

BEIJING -- Forty years ago on Tuesday, Chairman Mao Zedong unleashed China’s infamous Cultural Revolution -- a decade of terror and violence that continues to haunt both the country and its people.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, now officially referred to as “10 years of catastrophe,” was to unravel in a disaster that claimed millions of lives and pushed China to the brink of economic and social collapse.

The movement officially began on May 16, 1966, with a directive from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief Mao charging that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” had infiltrated all levels of the party and intended to establish a “dictatorship.”

The motives for the Cultural Revolution’s launch are complex, although Mao’s intention to eliminate people who threatened him politically is now seen as a stronger reason than his apparent desire to create social equality through eradication of a new class of exploitative bureaucratic rulers.

“Mao told people that he wanted to realize a fair and equal society. He deceived people by saying that (inequality) was due to his enemies,” Xu Youyu, a philosophy professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Agence France-Presse recently.

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