China: The Asian Civilization - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 249

demonstrate his grip on leadership, to assure his place in history, to restore the purity of the
Party's Communist ideology, and to crush urban resentment (especially among the literate)
of the Party's and the state's heavy-handed control over what had once been private lives.
Mao shut down the schools and mobilized the urban young as Red Guards, encour-
aging them to roam the country and root out Party backsliders and all traces of bourgeois
life and thought. Teachers were beaten, and many were killed. Books were burned. Arti-
facts of middle-class life, such as musical instruments and family keepsakes, were smashed
and burned. Traditional monuments and temples, such as Confucian temples, were razed
and burned. And children were encouraged to challenge authority and toss aside traditional
respect for parents and elders. In the chaos, Red Guard units battled each other for suprem-
acy, killing those deemed unworthy of Mao's leadership. To bring order out of anarchy, the
army fought and disarmed the Red Guard.
Figure 16.8. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
The costs of the Cultural Revolution are too numerous to tally, but perhaps the greatest
is an entire generation deprived of education and the stability of family life. A deeply mov-
ing account of one woman's imprisonment and suffering during the Cultural Revolution
is Nen Cheng's 1988 book Life and Death in Shanghai . The memoir of a twelve-year-old
Red Guard and his subsequent life is Son of the Revolution , by Lang Hen and his American
wife, Judith Shapiro. [224]
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
Mao died in 1976, and in the hidden struggle for Party leadership, Deng Xioping, with
well-honed survivor's skills, took the role of Great Helmsman, as Mao liked to be called.