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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/world/asia/china-cultural-revolution-explainer.html?_r=0

https://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/graph/9wenge.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/exeas/resources/china-cultural-revolution.html

http://chineseposters.net/themes/cultural-revolution-campaigns.php

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-20/edition-12/psychology-china

The Cultural Revolution and Psychology of the Youth Involved

The Cultural Revolution came to bear largely because Mao Ze Dong was reaching at any opportunity to gain power back after his failed Great Leap forward. After leaving "45 million dead " from extreme famine, other Chinese leaders greatly curbed his ability to make political decisions. More specifically, Liu Shaoqi stepped in after the Great Leap forward and helped to pull China out of its despair. Mao, however, was not ready to step down from leadership which is why he started the Cultural Revolution. Mao was motivated to push communism and socialism forward, and he targeted the youth of the country to get them mobilized. It is known that many times youths are at a stage of life in which they are trying to find their purpose. Mao was able to give them something to work toward in which he presented as being a worthy and noble task. Psychologically, youths are malleable and often passionate, so they were one of the best demographics available to Mao. Though, there were psychological and ethical struggles within the youths because of the content of what Mao was calling them to, (questioning everyone and their motives, especially their teachers and others of authority which would have not been acceptable in the past) Mao was still able to gather them because of the near deity he had built himself to be in Chinese culture. Not only did they have motive to follow Mao because of who Mao was, but also because it was a way to get back at a school system in which underprivileged students were often not as attended to as those who had elite parents. When youth joined the red guards they were given freedom and power by their association with Mao that they would not have otherwise had. Overall, the youth in China at the time were primed to be the best set of people for Mao to mobilize a movement which would seek to redeem his reign.