Daily quote by Cultural Revolution

• Perhaps never before in human history had a political leader unleashed such forces against the very institutional system he had created. The resulting damage to that system was profound, and the goals Mao Zedong sought to achieve ultimately remained elusive. The agenda he left behind for his successors was extraordinarily challenging. This is the contradictory legacy of Mao: while he wrote the norms and rules of CCP leadership and represented its successes, he also became the voice of rebellion and the mirror of the party’s flaws and failures. The reverberations of this ambiguity, and the impact of Mao’s campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, were profoundly influential for the time after Mao. The most famous slogan of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, “it’s right to rebel” (zaofan youli), affected a whole generation. When former Red Guards and rusticated students returned to urban China from their stint in the countryside after two, three, and sometimes ten years, they had indeed learned from Mao, though not perhaps what Mao and the party wanted them to learn. They learned of the profound corruptibility of the party and the prevalence of archaic power struggles. They above all had absorbed that the biggest problem facing China was not the lack of revolution, but the lack of prosperity and progress.
  • Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (2019), Chap. 9: Overthrowing Everything: 1961–1976