China

Consequences of the Cultural Revolution

Although the Cultural Revolution largely bypassed the vast majority of the people, who lived in rural areas, it had highly serious consequences for the Chinese system as a whole. In the short run, of course, the political instability and the zigzags in economic policy produced slower economic growth and a decline in the capacity of the government to deliver goods and services. Officials at all levels of the political system had learned that future shifts in policy would jeopardize those who had aggressively implemented previous policy. The result was bureaucratic timidity. In addition, with the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, nearly three million CCP members and other citizens awaited reinstatement after having been wrongfully purged.

Bold actions in the late 1970s went far toward coping with those immediate problems, but the Cultural Revolution also left more-serious, longer-term legacies. First, a severe generation gap had been created in which young adults had been denied an education and had been taught to redress grievances by taking to the streets. Second, corruption grew within the CCP and the government, as the terror and accompanying scarcities of goods during the Cultural Revolution had forced people to fall back on traditional personal relationships and on extortion in order to get things done. Third, the CCP leadership and the system itself suffered a loss of legitimacy when millions of urban Chinese became disillusioned by the obvious power plays that took place in the name of political principle in the early and mid-1970s. And fourth, bitter factionalism was rampant, as members of rival Cultural Revolution factions shared the same work unit, each still looking for ways to undermine the power of the other. Kenneth G. Lieberthal