tears posted:

i am reading kim newmans Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s

oh that sounds good i thjink i will also read that, and pretend i thought of reading it all by myself

The Cultural Revolution moved into high gear in January 1967 with a seizure of power from below in Shanghai. In the plants, neighborhoods and at the city-wide level in Shanghai and many other cities, rebel workers criticized and replaced revisionist party officials with their own representatives. Through revolutionary committees, made up of representatives of the mass organizations of workers, revolutionary party cadre and political cadre of the People’s Liberation Army, millions of people began to play a more direct role in economic and state affairs. Likewise, revolutionary committees were established in many areas of the countryside based on self-organized mass associations of peasants and workers in local factories and shops.

Mao and the revolutionary forces in the party advanced other methods for overcoming the power inequalities between full-time government officials and party cadre and the masses of workers and peasants. While increasing numbers of peasants attended universities and agricultural colleges, May 7 Cadre Schools were set up in the countryside. All government officials and full-time party cadre were to be rotated through these schools, where they would do manual labor, live simply, and engage in intensive political study. Cadre returned to their work units after completing courses lasting six months to one year. According to one estimate, more than three million cadre attended these schools in their first year of existence. Despite the wide availability of cadre schools, there were often more applicants than accommodations.

In contrast, the educational policies of the Cultural Revolution had the goal of producing graduates who were both “red and expert.” Students were expected to gain knowledge and skills that could be used to solve society’s pressing problems. A second goal was to make more educational opportunities available to working class and peasant children. Third, a system of mass education was developed so that primary or middle school graduates would continue their educations throughout their adult lives. The last and perhaps most important objective was to provide political education. During the Cultural Revolution, the understanding was that a student must first have the idea of serving the Chinese people. Then she or he would work hard to develop the ability to do so.

During the years of the Cultural Revolution there was a vast expansion of education in the countryside, where 80% of the people lived. Since primary education was already universal in the cities, the goal was to introduce at least five years of primary schooling in the rural areas. State education funds were redirected to the countryside, so that primary school enrollment in rural areas increased from 116 million to 150 million from 1966 to 1976. Educated local villagers were recruited as “barefoot teachers” to teach in new schools built by the villagers themselves. Middle school enrollment rose from 15 million to 58 million as new middle schools were built or added to primary schools. In many of these schools, representatives of peasants’ and workers’ associations entered the schools to provide educational leadership and practical advice to students and teachers.

Particularly in the lower grades, many lessons consisted of stories of heroines and heroes of majority and minority nationalities, children and adults, workers, peasants and soldiers doing noble and realizable deeds. At a combined primary and middle school, the CCAS delegation reported that:

We were surprised to find a sixth-grade reading class using as a text Rent Collection Courtyard, a series of articles about life in the old society. It was a new text, published during the Cultural Revolution. In a fourth-grade politics class, we heard the teacher discussing imperialism with her students. The lesson for the day was that United States imperialism was the leading enemy of Asian peoples and all peoples of the world. She gave an account of the Korean War and of two decades of American aggression in Southeast Asia.

Education was not limited to the schools, but was viewed as an ongoing process of raising one’s cultural level, technical competence and political consciousness throughout adult life. One Canadian observer wrote about the varied arrangements for mass education during the Cultural Revolution:

There are study groups at workplaces and in neighborhoods that focus on the immediate problems of the group and on political issues. There are spare-time courses, part-work, part-study courses, correspondence and radio courses, and full–time workers’ colleges and peasants’ colleges offering programs in general “cultural knowledge” and technical skills.

A number of factories and communes she visited had their own libraries, and some advanced workers in Shanghai were engaged in studying Marxist philosophy and determining how to apply it to practical problems they faced in their plants, as well as to political issues in their work units.

According to an educated qingnian who left Shanghai to work on a state farm on Chongming Island:

Young women like me sensed few gender constraints in our devotion to the revolution. Numerous young female leaders emerged on this island with eight farms. This cohort never believed in female inferiority and was free from social expectations of the roles of wife and mother…. We never worried about being seen as unfeminine for surpassing men in our job performance. When young female and male leaders got together at meetings or training sessions, we talked about our work and discussed Marxist theories on equal terms.

As the Cultural Revolution spread to the working class in 1967, women workers in Shanghai, where they comprised one-third of the workforce, organized against oppressive policies in their factories and participated in power seizures from rightist managers and party officials. Thirty-two year old Wang Xiuzhen, a 32 year old technician in a textile mill, was the Vice-Chair of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee.

“Iron Girls Brigades,” teams of young women who took on the most demanding and difficult tasks, were formed in many enterprises. National publicity was given to these women as they broke into all-male jobs such as oil drilling, repairing high-voltage lines, and building bridges. Increasing numbers of women worked in heavy industry, joined the militia and the PLA, and became technicians and assumed positions of leadership in the textile factories. Half of all doctors and “barefoot doctors” in the countryside were women.

Girls as well as boys in middle school received military training, and joined the People’s Militia in large numbers after they graduated. According to one observer, “These men and women were organized for training, for brigade infrastructure projects, and for cultural and sports activities…. The training was practical and organizational, and cultivated a team spirit, a sense of purpose and discipline.”

New advances, particularly in the cities, were made in providing childcare. In some factories there were nursing rooms for infants, and 24 hour nurseries for children from two months to four years old. In one nursery, an American visitor was told that children learned to “care for each other, love and help each other” through stories, pictures and play. Factories usually ran canteens and dining halls. It was understood that socializing childcare and other household tasks not only freed up women to work outside the home, but allowed them to develop as political activists and leaders.

In a visit to Liu Ling village in 1969, two Swedish journalists wrote about the transformation that a 39 year old woman experienced as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Now a member of the revolutionary committee, she explained why she had not previously been active in the brigade management board to which she belonged:

I was selfish. I had my household and my children to look after. I thought of my own private interests and was not an active member of the board.,,, But from studying Chairman Mao I realized what a mistake I’d been making, to sit silent at the meetings of the management board, thinking of my own household instead of the affairs of state. Before the Cultural Revolution women were too tied to their own homes. Now we read newspapers and discuss things. Formerly it was only the men who discussed things when resting from their work in the fields…. For the older of us, who never went to school, it’s hard. The younger women study with us, though, and teach us from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung. The young women say we women must be capable of making up our minds and arriving at decisions.

The mass uprising of hundreds of thousands of workers in Shanghai in January 1967 was a signal to workers elsewhere, particularly workers in large state-owned enterprises who had participated in the Great Leap Forward, to organize and seize power from managers and party cadre who were running their factories like capitalist enterprises. These power seizures were led by varying combinations of rank and file workers, work group leaders, technicians, middle-level managers, and revolutionary cadre at various levels. Where these in-plant uprisings took place, elected revolutionary committees--composed of workers, technicians and party cadre--took over directing the daily activities of the factories. This new form of factory management was promoted as a model and spread nationwide during 1967 and early 1968.

This political mobilization and surge of China’s industrial workers enabled them to make many of the transformations within the factories that had first been attempted with varying degrees of success during the Great Leap Forward. Piece wage systems were abolished; by 1971, individual and group bonuses had been eliminated in most plants. Production teams took over managerial responsibilities for their units. They took attendance, planned daily tasks, recorded use of materials, scheduled maintenance, performed quality control and coordinated production with other units. In some factories, yearly production quotas were determined after a lengthy process of consultation with all units in the plant, and production teams determined their own pay within the basic wage scale, based on length of experience, level of skill, and their attitude towards work and fellow workers.

During the Cultural Revolution, there was a big push to mechanize agriculture. In the farming area around Shanghai, the amount of land that was machine-tilled grew from 17% in 1965 to 76% in 1972. The rural industrialization program begun during the Great Leap Forward was accelerated. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, there were nearly 800,000 rural industrial enterprises, plus 90,000 small hydroelectric stations, producing 15% of China’s industrial output. These advances could not have been achieved without the rapid expansion of the rural educational system during the Cultural Revolution, which produced agricultural experts, and technicians and skilled workers for commune factories and workshops.

Prior to the Cultural Revolution, health care resources—doctors, hospital facilities and money—were concentrated in the cities. This system left hundreds of millions of peasants with rudimentary medical care, and it impeded the flow of advanced medical knowledge back to the villages. One of the most dynamic innovations of the Cultural Revolution was the system of "barefoot doctors" that helped narrow the gap in health services between rural and urban areas. By the mid-1970s, more than a million of these paramedics, four times as many as in 1965, were working in the countryside. Many of them were educated urban youth who were part of the movement “down to the villages.”

there's also a lot of discussion about factionalism, especially in terms of right-wingers like Deng Xiaoping whom ended up reversing almost everything accomplished:

The significance of these socialist educational policies was underscored by the restoration of pre-Cultural Revolution practices after Mao’s death. In 1977, the National College and University Entrance Exam was reinstated. According to one scholar, the extreme emphasis on standardized tests and curricula in the middle schools that did not fit the needs of rural people produced a drop-out rate of over 80% in some provinces during the early 1980s. During these years, large numbers of junior and senior middle schools were closed in the name of “raising standards.”

In the 1980s, in a manner familiar to women everywhere, Iron Girls were derided in the Chinese press as unwomanly, unmarriageable, unattractive “false boys.”

In December 1976, even after the military coup that brought an end to the Maoist era, an Italian teacher visited a power station in Shanghai where the workers still shared in management at all levels, and young workers were sent to universities to return to the plant as technicians.

As the Deng Xiaoping regime consolidated power in the late 1970s, these transformations were wiped out. Under the new “manager responsibility” system, all authority was placed in the hands of factory managers. They decided how production was organized, whether to hire or fire employees, how much to pay workers, and how much they, the new bosses, would get paid.

The end of the Cultural Revolution led to a rapid and drastic decline in the health care system in the countryside. The barefoot doctor system was abandoned by Deng’s regime in 1981. Doctors set up their own private practices, making medical treatment well beyond the means of most villagers. After the collectives were dissolved in 1983, health care insurance disappeared in the countryside.

in hope of some positive change i decided to take a brief glance at the current president

Wikipedia on Xi Jinping

A new National Security Commission was formed with Xi Jinping at its helm. The Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms – another ad-hoc policy coordination body led by Xi – was also formed to oversee the implementation of the reform agenda. The reforms, termed "comprehensive deepening reforms" were said to be the most significant since Deng Xiaoping's 1992 "Southern Tour". In the economic realm, the Plenum announced that "market forces" would begin to play a "decisive" role in allocating resources. This meant that the state would gradually reduce its involvement in the distribution of capital, and restructure state-owned enterprises to allow further competition, potentially by attracting foreign and private sector players in industries that were highly regulated previously. This policy aimed to address the bloated state sector that had unduly profited from an earlier round of re-structuring by purchasing assets at below-market prices, assets which were no longer being used productively.

not good. i wouldn't be surprised if we see a party merger under the "Democratic Party of China" or something similar in a couple of decades

cars posted:

I'm still not exactly sure that ... is exactly parallel to literally

catchphrase

swampman posted:

You're right

catchphrase