8-6-4-2-5 Authorial argument, database judgment, institutional comparison, policy and law, and applications for public communication CHAPTER 9 The Cultural Revolution Mao Zedong's Personal Dictatorship, Mass Mutual Persecution, and the Catastrophe of Chinese Civilization (1966–1976) CORE ARGUMENT OF THIS CHAPTER. This chapter recovers the Cultural Revolution as a nationwide political catastrophe launched by personal dictatorship to seize and secure power—the culmination of Party dictatorship and imperial autocracy playing out through Mao Zedong's command of the military. Leader worship, mass rebellion, factional armed struggle, military control, house raids, torture, executions, and the destruction of knowledge and culture drove hundreds of millions of people, gripped by terror, to denounce, persecute, and protect themselves against one another. The Cultural Revolution was not an accidental “decade of turmoil” but the inevitable product of a totalitarian logic in which the Party's power is boundless, the leader is infallible, the law can be abolished, and the masses can be mobilized to prey upon one another; the subsequent “setting things right” dodged the gravest questions, and single-Party rule carried on as before. CONCRETE ENTRY POINT. Red armbands broke down front doors, students denounced their teachers, and children informed on their parents, while factions fought with guns and cannon over “loyalty”; what was destroyed was not only cultural relics and schools but the most basic trust between one person and another. SCOPE AND CLASSIFICATION BOUNDARY. This chapter includes only material directly related to “The Cultural Revolution: Mao Zedong's Personal Dictatorship, Mass Mutual Persecution, and the Catastrophe of Chinese Civilization (1966–1976)” — its ideas, institutions, events, implementation, victims, and lines of responsibility. Terms used in the catalog such as “evil, terror, plunder, enslavement, deception, and crime” are openly stated value judgments or characterizations of mechanism; they must be supported by verifiable fact, and every major figure must be recorded with its source, its basis of counting, and its range. Sharpness does not mean lowering the standard; it means refusing to use neutral language to conceal concrete harm　Folder · PG-E

ID CH-008.6.4.2.05

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