Cultural Revolution
Article
Cultural Revolution is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 12, 2021 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare, the Cultural Revolution”; “during the Cultural Revolution, about half of Chinese people who got degrees at all got engineering degrees”; “As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, he was deported to the interior province of Shaanxi”. It most often appears alongside Beijing, China, Shanghai.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: May 12, 2021
- Last seen: August 19, 2022
Appears In
- Theses On The Current Moment
- Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
- Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
Related Pages
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- Beijing (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Shanghai (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 1587 (1 shared issues)
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- 1587 (1 shared issues)
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- 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s American consensus (1 shared issues)
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- 1990s (1 shared issues)
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- A Universal History of Infamy (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
We usually stick to the same stock examples of repression and retaliation against nonconformists - the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare, the Cultural Revolution. These are rightly remembered as awful, and reminders of them make good rallying cries.
But also: during the Cultural Revolution, about half of Chinese people who got degrees at all got engineering degrees. The Cultural Revolutionaries were really not big on education (according to one article, “Xi's secondary education [was cut short] when all secondary classes were halted for students to criticise and fight their teachers.") But engineering was useful for building factories, and so was grudgingly tolerated. That meant that of the people smart and ambitious enough to get into college at all, half did engineering.
Inline links: about half
But he was a Shanghaier who could appeal to the CYL. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, he was deported to the interior province of Shaanxi to work as a farmer and ditch-digger. His years of hard labor in Chinese flyover country made him more palatable to the hicks of the CYL than the average East Coast elite would be.
As for the Wan-li Emperor, after complaining of various vague ailments for many years he died peacefully enough - although rumor has it that he had become addicted to opium, which might explain some things. His last journey out of the imperial city was to rest forever in his monumental tomb. (Or maybe not forever - the Emperor’s tomb was looted and desecrated by Chairman Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.)
Inline links: Emperor’s tomb