#Struggle session theme song series#

“Whether or not to acknowledge violent revolution as a universal law of proletarian revolution.

#Struggle session theme song series#

Beijing lashed out against Moscow in a series of nine commentaries in its mouthpiece People’s Daily as the row gradually developed into a three-decade-long feud that came to be known as the Sino-Soviet split. The move affronted Mao, a staunch believer of the Marxist class struggle. In 1963, Russia’s Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Nikita Khrushchev, declared its Marxist class struggle completed, allowing the regime to relax its previously repressive policies and further soften its stance towards the West. Former Red Guards and rebels share their personal accounts of the difficult decade that the country and its people are still struggling to come to terms with half a century on.īirth pangs of the emerging revolution began in the early 1960s, when China’s supreme leader Mao Zedong – increasingly insecure from being sidelined as chairman of the Communist Party – started trying to reassert his authority.Īggressively attacking the state of society in which he saw a growing chasm between those in power and the people they served, Mao argued that a revolution of culture would better serve the interests of the masses.

We detail the birth of the movement – Mao Zedong’s brainchild – and how the hardline political campaign shook the nation even as its effects rippled across the globe. The official death toll numbered more than 1.7 million. On this day 50 years ago, China issued a top directive calling on its people to rid society of “members of the bourgeoisie threatening to seize political power from the proletariat” – marking the start of a decade-long violent class struggle.įor 10 tumultuous years from 1966, the country underwent massive sociopolitical upheaval that saw countless politicians and intellectuals driven to their deaths, civilians killed in armed conflicts, and cultural relics and artefacts destroyed.

May 16, 2016, marks the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.