CHIN 50 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Backyard Furnace, The Fifth Modernization, Wei Jingsheng
Document Summary
Small backyard steel furnaces were set up to increase national steel production. They were largely a failure, and couldn"t produce even low-quality iron, let alone steel. Mao envisioned a total mobilization of china"s labor power with the goal of greatly increasing industrial and agricultural production in a short amount of time. The result was an economic disaster with massive human costs - including a famine that caused as many as 30 million deaths. Differing ideas and leadership in marxist ideologies (between mao and khrushchev) Attacks on teachers and others during the cultural revolution. Struggle sessions in which those deemed counterrevolutionaries were publicly denounced and physically attacked, sometimes causing death. Jiang qing, mao"s widow, blamed for instigating the cultural revolution, along with 3 other members of the so-called gang of four. After her televised trial in 1980, she was sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison. The reform era under deng xiaoping, reform and opening up 1978-
