Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution

Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, had great ideologies and plans for China. He was ambitious in wanting the People’s Republic to become a world super power and was eager to make create a nation with pride. He was a socialist and that creating a socialist country that was different from the former Nationalist regime was crucial. However, Mao had many inner struggles. Many of Mao’s thoughts were contradicting, and he had many struggles between which ideologies he should emphasis on. After Stalin’s fall, people in China started to realize that the utopian neighbor Soviet Union is not as perfect as they always thought it had been. This was a complete shock to the Chinese, and that the myth that the all-socialist countries

He believed that there was a need for non-stopping revolutionaries and that that class struggle was necessary. Mao wanted a country lead by the proletariat and that the bourgeois, the rightist, and the anti-revolutionist were enemies. After the failure of the Cultural Revolution, Mao successor Deng Xiaoping was facing the decision of what road to the People’s Republic should be led to. The Cultural Revolution leaves Deng the decision to seek a new path for China. New voices of seeing Mao in a negative light became inevitable if Deng chooses a different path. Of course, Deng would still want to respect Mao’s thought, as both leaders wanted the People’s Republic to become a stronger nation. Deng really opposed Mao’s idea of focusing on the proletariat and believed that this was the cause of failure. Mao chose to strengthen the party. Deng knew he still had to give some credit to Mao, because he did not want a completely opposing population from the public to weaken the party’s position. However, Deng knew Mao’s idealistic Chinese Socialism was not the path to go on. Deng still believed in centralization of the party but believed that development of the country was more realistic. Unlike Mao, Deng no longer focuses on class struggles and farmers’ revolution. Although Deng brought China to the international stage by normalizing relations with other countries and provide more options for the Chinese economy, Deng was still very firm on Mao’s thoughts. Deng acknowledged that China would not become a capitalist country. Like Kenneth Lieberathal mentioned in his book Governing China, “To develop efficiency, it was necessary, therefore, to decentralize power within the state and to permit at least part of the Chinese economy to develop outside the noncompetitive state sector of the economy