The Cultural Revolution lasted for a decade and saw the fragmentation of China only ending after yielding seemingly little benefit to anyone involved. Mao Zedong was foremostly, and most successfully, a revolutionary and much of his life had been spent seeking to fundamentally transform China. Mao’s goal, to form a new strong and prospering China, required the creation of a new national sense of being through the Cultural Revolution. To forge a new society and culture, rid of entrenched feudal ways was considered absolutely necessary with the omnipresent shadow of the New Culture Movement, which had been frustrated by the size of the task. Only a mass movement by the entire nation to reform themselves could succeed. Mao found his answer in the political philosophy of Marx and Lenin whose work he synthesised and altered, eventually focusing on the potentially revolutionary aspects of widespread revolution. Mao made a significant contribution to Marxist philosophy by concluding that in order to keep the results of a revolution in place, the revolution too had to be permanent. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, motivated by this genuine desire to preserve and protect the revolution by making it impossible for China’s leaders to become comfortable and lead the nation to regress to capitalism.
The Communist victory in 1949 and subsequent decade of control saw some slow improvements in the life of the ordinary Chinese, and few leaders of the CCP were adamant that a revolution was a necessary process for the nation to progress. Revolution was held to be a way for the masses to seize power in the classical Leninist way, with the formation of a Communist economy and culture coming by later, more conservative means. Yet the formation of the PRC would deviate significantly from the track of the Soviet Union, with continuous successions of revolutionary fervour in mass