That article compares people working on public works projects to Gulags..... seems legit. The revolution pretty much destroyed a generation of educated people, that is never good. The cultural revolution almost collapsed the Chinese economy calling it anything but a failure is wrong.[QUOTE="Person0"][QUOTE="iHarlequin"]
Extreme economic liberalism, that lead to the crash of 29 and the following great depression, is estimated to have caused over six million deaths in the U.S. (http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/19-05-2008/105255-famine-0/). For better and for worse things are not black and white, and you can't extirpate all the benefits the cultural revolution brought. China shifted from a country that had no technology development of its own, relying on the Soviet Union, to, after the Soviet Union left them post-Khrushchev's abandomnent, a country that was industrially self-sustainable. The shift from agrarian production to light and heavy industries in sizes ranging from domestic/small (dominant) to large was what led to the great famines, as agriculture production suffered with the partial rural exodus. Every country had severe issues when they shifted from an agrarian model to that of industrial production.
If you'd care to know more about the subject rather than deny it on unbased ideology, I recommend starting with 'The Chinese Road to Socialism', by Edward L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane. They're a pair of Australian economists who visited China multiple times in the sixties, as the Cultural Revolution ocurred, and compiled the data from census, China's position in the global economy, social factors and more in order to demonstrate what the changes brought on by Mao's policies did.
iHarlequin
It's called a REVOLUTION for a reason. This mindset that often proceeds would be the same of someone justifying the French revolution as something 'bad', because it indeed killed several thousand noblemen and counter-revolutionaries; or the 1917 revolution because of how many were also killed in order to quell any possible counter-revolutions.
As to your second 'appraisal', it comes to show how little you do know of China's economy. People love to ignore the rules there are for cause and effect and associate China's surging progress in the 70's to, solely, Deng's liberal (in contrast to Mao's) economic policies. The fact of the matter is that Deng Xiaoping built China's economic progress upon the foundations of an already consolidated industry, largely self-sufficient and with scientific discoveries (methods of producing steel, using domestic and industrial refuse for gas-production, etc.) powering their steady progress in the process of industrialization. Contrary to what we now see in China, with its economy centered around the SEZ's, the idea at the time of the Cultural Revolution was to have self-sufficient centers in both industry and agriculture peppered throughout the country. The very fact that there was a huge incentive toward the creation of domestic industry, rather than large-scale ones (which could easily operate at a loss due to the creation of solely management posts), showed how there was a great movement toward creating an egalitarian society, rather than one in line with the intriniscally unfair capitalist competition.
He sacrificed the social progress toward equality, then still unfinished, in order to accelerate growth with capitalist measures. It is as worse as saying that the Soviet revolution at the start of the twentieth century was a stain on Russia's history, disregarding how it brought a country that was poor and had one of the world's worst case of social disparity to industrialization, wealth and political power concentration because of the people who died during it. Preserving the status quo isn't inherently good, specially when said status quo promotes inequality.
Yep, just like the Germanic nationalist revolution of of the late 30s and 40s. There was no choice but to get rid of the Jewish, socialist and homosexual counter-revolutionaries...right? ...oh wait
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