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China-Cultural Revolution

 

            
            
             -Overlooking contrasting approaches to a historical personality, issue or event.
             -How has history been constructed and recorded over time?.
             -Why have the approaches to the construction of history changed over time?.
             This essay was originally to deal with debates regarding Soviet Russian history. This sphere of interest became more specific and eventually led to a study of inconsistencies regarding historical justifications of Khrushchev's dismissal of war hero Marshall Zhukov. However, while a variety of sources were available regarding his Western counterparts such as Montgomery and Eisenhower, copies of books written or translated into English regarding the matter were rare, to say the least. This seemed to be a trend for many aspects of Russian history. Consequently, this subject was dropped in favour of studying the history of the Chinese Communist Party, as it was an area which I was keen to learn about, overlapped in many places with Soviet history and had a relatively large amount of data published about it. It was also an event for which no definite argument had been published, so it was optimal for this task. The main problem with this subject was the difficulty in ascertaining the beliefs and schools of history of individual historians.
             The main attraction to this sphere of interest was the dramatic shift in popular Western opinion of Chairman Mao Zedong over the last few decades. While possessing the aura of a great leader during the 1970's, Mao's character has, to some extent, been reinterpreted that he is now depicted as a decadent mass murderer. A further study of this change revealed major inconsistencies on the causes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which is staggering, as it is considered as one of the greatest social and political upheavals in human history. It is also one of the major turning points of Mao's character, which, in the eyes of those who would vilify him, he begins to reveal himself as a monster.


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