Attack's on Mao's opponents Flashcards
What happened to Liu Shaoqi?
His wife was subjected to struggle meetings in 1967, she was made to wear pearls made from Ping-Pong balls to humiliate her In front of a crowd of 300,000 RG. She was sentenced to solitary confinement in prison.
Liu was confined in his home in Beijing, Jiang Qing ordered him to be kept alive as a ‘living target’.
In October 1968 Jiang presented evidence to the central committee “evidencing” Liu’s treachery. He was accused of collaborating with the CIA but was still stripped of all his posts and labelled a “scab and a traitor”
Jiang and Kang Sheng used torture to extract feeble confessions from 28,000 people
Liu was no longer a threat to Mao, the torture meant he could no longer speak and was left to die in an unheated building. He died in November 1968 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
What happened to Deng Xiaoping?
Helped Liu and was accused of creating an ‘Independent Kingdom’
Like Liu, his family suffered. His Son jumped out of a window to escape torture and was then paralyzed from waste down
Deng disappeared from public view, he was sent to a rural factory in Jiangxi to work.
Why was Mao unhappy with Deng and Liu?
In Mao’s eyes, the pair had taken the ‘capitalist road’ as both had argued against Mao’s utopian ideology that relied on the masses and the belief it was better to be communist than practical.
Everyone’s fav dynamic duo advocated reliance on intellectuals and experts rather than ideological solutions.
What happened to the party during the CR?
70-80% of cadres purged
4/6 of regional party secretaries and 23/29 provincial party secretaries were removed.
Only 9 out of 23 Politburo members survived
Two Thirds of the Central committee were deposed.
3 million bureaucrats and cadres exiled to the countryside
500,000 killed
What happened to the ‘capitalist roaders’ and foreigners during the CR?
Diplomatic immunity was not respected, the French, Soviet and Yugoslav embassies were all attacked.
British embassy was set on fire
Soviet citizens were banned from public services, and posters were put up declaring “smash Brezhnev’s head”.
American Sidney Rittenburg was a communist who partook in many struggle meetings and propaganda campaigns, this didn’t make him safe and he was sent for re-education at May Seventh cadre school and was not realised until 1977.
In Conclusion, what happened to Mao’s political enemies?
By the end of 1968, the most violent stage of the Cultural Revolution was over, and Mao’s power was once again restored at the very top of the party. The majority of the older party cadres had been removed, with younger cadres who were completely obedient to Mao taking their place. In the 1969 party Congress, a new constitution placed Mao Zedong Thought as the official guiding ideology of the party. At the same Congress, Lin Biao was named Mao’s successor.
