The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Podcast

With the end of the Red Guard & rebel movements and the deployment of the Mao Zedong Thought Workers Propaganda Teams, the class struggle across China seems to have calmed down. The last of the revolutionary committees are elected and founded. Things seem good- but a brutal new campaign initiated by the leadership of the provincial revolutionary committees sends many former rebels to prison or to their death. Young comrades are sent to the countryside to work among the peasants, and Liu Shaoqi is finally expelled permanently from the Party.

Mao and the Party Center try to bring the Cultural Revolution back to focus by establishing a series of new provincial revolutionary committees and order Red Guards to attend Marxist theory study sessions. But the Red Guards are still out for blood, and are quickly turning the all-around civil war into a war of total annihilation as the rebel movement becomes intent on destroying itself rather than the revisionist headquarters within the Party.

The "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung" or "The Little Red Book" is one of the best selling and most controversial books ever written. It is also one of the quintessential symbols of the Cultural Revolution, radical leftist ideology, and the general zeitgeist of the Global Sixties. This month's thematic episode will have us dive into the history, development, and spread of the Little Red Book that was called a "spiritual atom bomb" by the Chinese people.

[REUPLOADED] How did people have sex and fall in love during the Cultural Revolution? How did dating and marriage work in China in the 1960's and 1970's? What was queer culture like during this time? What was permitted and what was forbidden? The answers to this may surprise you- so join us today for a deep dive into sex during the GPCR!

How did the Cultural Revolution affect Chinese cuisine and how people cooked? What kinds of foods were popular at the time? Enjoy our holiday special and dig into how and what people ate during the Cultural Revolution!

Tibet and Xinjiang- China's westernmost regions and the source of considerable controversy and emotionally-charged discourse in West. Because of this, it's hard to have a clear picture of what the Cultural Revolution- a contentious topic within itself- was like in these regions. What do scholars, archival evidence, and eyewitness testimony tell us though? The answer will surprise you!

Ji Bing, a veteran of the People's Liberation Army, joins us to talk about growing up as a Little Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, joining the PLA during the twilight years of the GPCR, and experiencing the death of Chairman Mao, the Arrest of the Gang of Four, and his thoughts on how to view the Cultural Revolution as a historical event. Don't miss out!

"The messier, the better!" The Red Guard movement begins to break down nationwide into brutal factional armed struggle. The People's Liberation Army is forced to take sides. Chairman Mao and his comrades help establish the Beijing Revolutionary Committee. The mass movements grow nationally and the Cultural Revolution spills out of Chinese borders and into the popular imagination of the people of the world with riots breaking out in Hong Kong.

The Cultural Revolution takes a dramatic turn when rebels seize control of Shanghai and spark a prairie fire that engulfs China into a series of "power seizures" in what comes to be known as the "January Storm."

This month we're doing a minisode: a review of Zhang Yimou's 1994 epic masterpiece of Chinese cinema, "To Live," which sets its second act during the Cultural Revolution. Also Drew drops some announcements and updates!

For this year's Chinese National Day 2022, we're taking a break from the usual chronological format and doing something VERY special- an interview with my friend "Uncle Zhang," who was a Little Red Guard as a primary school student growing up in the Cultural Revolution. Listen to what he has to say about his experiences and what we can possibly learn from the Chinese revolutionary experience!

This month we're doing a minisode: a review of Carma Hinton's 2003 documentary about the Cultural Revolution, "Morning Sun."

We begin our journey through the Cultural Revolution with a bit of background: why did the Cultural Revolution happened and what led up to it?