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May 16 Notice
The May 16 Notification () or Circular of May 16, officially Notification (), was the first major political declaration of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was issued at a May 1966 expanded session of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. The May 16 Notification ended a political dispute within the CCP stemming from the Beijing Opera play ''Hai Rui Dismissed from Office'' by dissolving the top level of the party's cultural apparatus and encouraging mass political movement to oppose rightists within the party. The result was a political victory for Mao Zedong. The Notification is often viewed as the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Background Beginning in 1965 and into spring 1966, a political dispute arose within the People's Republic of China regarding the Beijing Opera play ''Hai Rui Dismissed from Office''. The play depicts an honest official of the Ming Dynasty named Hai Rui, who reverses unjust land verdicts on behalf of peasants who are portrayed passively ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zhang Chunqiao
Zhang Chunqiao (; 1 February 1917 – 21 April 2005) was a prominent Chinese political theorist, writer, and politician. He came to the national spotlight during the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, and was a member of the ultra-Maoist group dubbed the "Gang of Four". Biography Born in Juye County, Shandong, Zhang worked as a writer in Shanghai in the 1930s and became closely associated with the city. After the Yan'an conference in 1938, he joined the Communist Party of China. With the creation of the People's Republic of China, he became a prominent journalist in Shanghai in charge of the ''Liberation Daily'' newspaper. He met Jiang Qing in Shanghai and helped to launch the Cultural Revolution. Zhang first came to prominence as the result of his October 1958 ''Jiefang'' ("Liberation") magazine entitled “Destroy the Ideology of Bourgeois Right.” Mao Zedong ordered the reproduction of the article in ''People’s Daily'', and personally wrote an accompanying “Editor� ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Revolution Group
The (Central) Cultural Revolution Group (CRG or CCRG; ) was formed in May 1966 as a replacement organisation to the Central Committee Secretariat and the "Five Man Group", and was initially directly responsible to the Standing Committee of the Politburo. It consisted mainly of radical supporters of Mao, including Chen Boda, the Chairman's wife Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi. The CRG played a central role in the Cultural Revolution's first few years, and for a period of time the group replaced the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) as the ''de facto'' top power organ of China. Its members were also involved in many of the major events of the Cultural Revolution. Background In January 1965, at a meeting of the Politburo, Mao Zedong called on the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to implement a "Cultural Revolution" in China. (The Oxford English Dictionary traces the English-language phrase "cultural revolution" (defined a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chen Boda
Chen Boda (; 29 July 1904 – 20 September 1989), was a Chinese Communist journalist, professor and political theorist who rose to power as the chief interpreter of Maoism (or "Mao Zedong Thought") in the first 20 years of the People's Republic of China.Chen Boda biography Britannica Concise Encyclopedia Chen became a close associate of in , during the late 1930s, drafting speeches and theoretical essays and directing propaganda.Guo Jian, Yongyi Song and Yuan Zhou, "Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution", pp. 33-35, The Scarecrow Press, 2006 [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lin Biao
) , serviceyears = 1925–1971 , branch = People's Liberation Army , rank = Marshal of the People's Republic of China Lieutenant general of the National Revolutionary Army, Republic of China , commands = 1st Corps 1st Red Army Corps, Chinese Red Army 115 Division, 8th Route Army People's Liberation Army Lin Biao (Chinese: 林彪; 5 December 1907 – 13 September 1971) was a Chinese politician and Marshal of the People's Republic of China who was pivotal in the Communist victory during the Chinese Civil War, especially in Northeast China from 1946 to 1949. Lin was the general who commanded the decisive Liaoshen and Pingjin Campaigns, in which he co-led the Manchurian Field Army to victory and led the People's Liberation Army into Beijing. He crossed the Yangtze River in 1949, decisively defeated the Kuomintang and took control of the coastal provinces in Southeast China. He ranked third among the Ten Marshals. Zhu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev stunned the communist world with his denunciation of his predecessor Joseph Stalin's crimes, and embarked on a policy of de-Stalinization with his key ally Anastas Mikoyan. He sponsored the early Soviet space program, and enactment of moderate reforms in domestic policy. After some false starts, and a narrowly avoided nuclear war over Cuba, he conducted successful negotiations with the United States to reduce Cold War tensions. In 1964, the Kremlin leadership stripped him of power, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Khrushchev was born in 1894 in a village in western Russia. He was employed as a metal worker during his youth, and he was a political commissar during the Russian Civil Wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Class Struggle
Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society because of socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor. The forms of class conflict include direct violence such as wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations or revolution; indirect violence such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness and unsafe working conditions; and economic coercion such as the threat of unemployment or the withdrawal of investment capital (capital flight); or ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political forms of class warfare include legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery of legislators. The social-class conflict can be direct, as in a dispute between labour and management such as an employer's industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect such as a workers' sl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Five Man Group
The Five Man Group (; also known as the Group of Five, bearing in mind the gendered English translation of 'Five Man' is ungendered in Chinese) was an informal committee established in the People's Republic of China in early 1965 to explore the potential for a "cultural revolution" in China. The group was led by Peng Zhen (the mayor of Beijing), the fifth most senior member of the Politburo. The Group was said to be tasked with studying popular trends in China's arts and cultural realms. In 1965 the Group commissioned a study of the play ''Hai Rui Dismissed from Office'', written by Vice-Mayor Wu Han, which came under suspicion for being an anti-Mao allegory. The Group then released the ''February Outline'', a document arguing that the play was not of a political nature. Mao became offended by the ''Outline'' and dissolved the group in May 1966, when it was replaced by the Cultural Revolution Group. Mao argued that Yao Wenyuan hadn't focused on the word 'dismissed' in the title of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai (; 5 March 1898 – 8 January 1976) was a Chinese statesman and military officer who served as the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, premier of the People's Republic of China from 1 October 1949 until his death on 8 January 1976. Zhou served under Chairman Mao Zedong and helped the Chinese Communist Party, Communist Party rise to power, later helping consolidate its control, form its Foreign policy of China, foreign policy, and develop the Economy of China, Chinese economy. As a diplomat, Zhou served as the Chinese Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of China, foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. Advocating peaceful coexistence with Western Bloc, the West after the Korean War, he participated in the Geneva Conference (1954), 1954 Geneva Conference and the 1955 Bandung Conference, and helped orchestrate 1972 Nixon visit to China, Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. He helped devise policies regarding disputes with the United States, Taiwan, the So ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peng Zhen
Peng Zhen (pronounced ; October 12, 1902 – April 26, 1997) was a leading member of the Chinese Communist Party. He led the party organization in Beijing following the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, but was purged during the Cultural Revolution for opposing Mao's views on the role of literature in relation to the state. He was rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping in 1982 along with other 'wrongly accused' officials, and became the inaugural head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. Biography Born in Houma, Shanxi province, Peng was originally named Fu Maogong (傅懋恭). He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1923 as a founding member of the Shanxi Province CCP. Arrested in 1929, he continued underground political activities while imprisoned. He was released from prison in 1935 and began organizing a resistance movement against the invading Japanese forces. Around the same time, he was appointed the Organization Depa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
People's Commune
The people's commune () was the highest of three administrative levels in rural areas of the People's Republic of China during the period from 1958 to 1983, until they were replaced by townships. Communes, the largest collective units, were divided in turn into production brigades and production teams. The communes had governmental, political, and economic functions during the Cultural Revolution. The people's commune was commonly known for collectivizing living and working practices, especially during the Great Leap Forward. The scale of the commune and its ability to extract income from the rural population enabled commune administrations to invest in large-scale mechanization, infrastructure, and industrial projects. The communes did not, however, meet many of their long-term goals, such as facilitating the construction of socialism in the rural areas, liberating women from housework, and creating sustainable agriculture practices in the countryside. They ranged in number fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They are sometimes divided into a petty (), middle (), large (), upper (), and ancient () bourgeoisie and collectively designated as "the bourgeoisie". The bourgeoisie in its original sense is intimately linked to the existence of cities, recognized as such by their urban charters (e.g., municipal charters, town privileges, German town law), so there was no bourgeoisie apart from the citizenry of the cities. Rural peasants came under a different legal system. In Marxist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production during modern industrialization and whose societal concerns are the value of property and the preservation of capital to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy in society. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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