The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a ten-year political campaign with objectives to revolutionize china with the cultural and political ideologies of Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward in 1959, which was a complete disaster. To help bring China out of the economic depression caused by the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong began the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, China and it lasted from 1966 to 1976. (The Cultural Revolution) The goal of the Cultural Revolution was to steer China away from the lines of the Soviet model and into its own form of government (The Cultural Revolution). Mao thus ultimately adopted four goals for the Cultural Revolution. They were to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; To rectify the Chinese Communist Party; To provide China's youths with a revolutionary experience and lastly, to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist (The Cultural Revolution). During this time, thousands were killed and millions of people were imprisoned or exiled. In our presentation, we will discuss how the Cultural Revolution began, the advantages, disadvantages, and the effects it had on China during this time.
             Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution for three reasons. One was to make China distinct from the Soviet Union, the second was to renew the spirit of China and the third was to re-establish his ideologies (Chinese Cultural Revolution). His role had been diminished due to the failure of the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward was aimed at China making a "Leap Forward" into modernization. (BBC News). Mao began to promote technology and overnight all the rice and crop fields were turned into factories. Around 23,000 communes were created each controlling its own means of production. Farmers did not know what to do with all the new technology that was built on...