Tomorrow the Whole World Will Be Red

1. The Cultural Revolution and the Distortions of May Fourth Tomorrow the Whole World Will Be Red

2. Considering the Cultural Revolution • Cultural Revolution 1966-1976 • Manic phase 1966-1969 • The actions of Mao Zedong and Cult of Personality • Linguistic disorientation and violence • Moral Nullity of the Cultural Revolution and its emphasis on power • Isolation of the Cold War Period facilitated the events of the Cultural Revolution

3. What Was the Cultural Revolution? • Smash the four olds – old thinking, old customs, old habits, and old culture • Violence and destruction of cultural artifacts • Mao attempted to hold on to power and preserve revolutionary fervor • Lashing out at the corrupt elites in cities • The loss of the possibility of an education for the youth caught up in the spirit of the revolution and its disruption of cultural activities

4. The Cold War and the Cultural Revolution • Division of the world into a Manichaean world facilitated the Cultural Revolution • Confucian division of the world between moral and immoral • Soviet division of the world between capitalists and proletariats China failed to break out of this binary world order

5. Life and Death During the Red Guard Period • Attacks against those wearing western styles encouraged a Maoist Puritanism • Powerful state and dynamic ideology proved ruinous • Experiments in egalitarianism • Liberation of China’s Youth • Political elites attacked and purged; revolutionaries also open to the same treatment • Cannibalism?

6. Changing the Guard • Why did people in the wider society respond to the Cultural Revolution? • Opportunities were closed off to many • Black classes backed Mao’s program to regain status

7. May Fourth or Not • The improbability of the Cultural Revolution as an offspring of May Fourth nationalism, science, democracy, and openness • Mao’s mindset was informed by many of the values of the New Culture movement • Stress on youth • Stress on iconoclasm • Root out external influences and pre-communist influences • Mao as the greatest romanticists

8. The Cold War and the Romance of Technology • Technological fetishism and hero worship • Xenophobia and lack of foreign input stalled this development • Being red (ideological purity) trumped technical expertise with the expected results • The Four Modernizations required breaking the bonds of high technology, peasant agrarianism, utter rejection of the outside world, and ideological hero worship

9. Divisions: Red, Black, Men, Women • Social Darwinistic strains drown out the differences between men and women as all are called to advance China’s heroic revolution – Heroic literature trumps decadent literature – Sexual repression is a dominant theme of this time as work group leaders play the role of patriarchs

10. Conclusion: A Strange May Fourth • Xenophobia • Problems with a culture of pluralism • Mao’s joy in shaking the mountains with one’s cries limited his ability to perceive the benefits of moderation and more humane values • Reckoning with the Cultural Revolution is on the horizon