The Cultural Revolution
In Our Time17 Dec 2020

The Cultural Revolution

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students formed Red Guard factions to attack the 'four olds' - old ideas, culture, habits and customs - and they also turned on each other, with mass violence on the streets and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution came to an end.

The image above is of Red Guards, holding The Little Red Book, cheering Mao during a meeting to celebrate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, August 1966

With

Rana Mitter Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford

Sun Peidong Visiting Professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris

And

Julia Lovell Professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London

Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson

Avsnitt(1086)

Medical Ethics

Medical Ethics

Melvyn Bragg examines the technological advances and ethics of modern medicine. On an average working day about three quarters of a million of us go to the doctor’s. About a hundred thousand are visit...

16 Dec 199927min

Childhood

Childhood

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss childhood. The 20th Century was proclaimed the Century of the Child. It has been much else but in the western world the position, the possibilities, the meaning and the...

9 Dec 199928min

Tragedy

Tragedy

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the ancient genre of tragedy and examines whether we have a psychological need for it, either as catharsis or Schadenfreude. You could be forgiven for th...

2 Dec 199928min

Consciousness

Consciousness

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the problems of consciousness, one of the greatest mysteries facing science and philosophy today. The frustrations, the stubborn facts and the curiosities of today’s th...

25 Nov 199927min

Progress

Progress

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss progress. As man has grown in years and knowledge, has he also progressed in terms of happiness and a true understanding of the human condition? It was the Enlightenmen...

18 Nov 199928min

The Novel

The Novel

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the development and the future of the novel. D.H. Lawrence was proud of his job, he said: “I am a man, and alive…for this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, ...

11 Nov 199928min

Education

Education

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and the modern purpose of education. Nobody - would argue with the fact that education is of central importance to the people we are. And there seems to be ...

4 Nov 199928min

Atrocity in the 20th Century

Atrocity in the 20th Century

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the widespread and chilling atrocities of the 20th century. Just over a hundred years ago, in the ‘Genealogy of Morals’, Nietzsche wrote “there can be no doubt that mor...

23 Okt 199928min

Populärt inom Historia

kod-katastrof
massmordarpodden
historiska-brott
p3-historia
motiv
olosta-mord
historiepodden-se
rss-historien-om
rss-seriemordarpodden
rss-historiska-brottslingar
historianu-med-urban-lindstedt
rss-massmordarpodden
krigshistoriepodden
mannen-utan-spar
obskyr-historia
nu-blir-det-historia
militarhistoriepodden
harrisons-dramatiska-historia
bedragare
rss-folkets-historia