From Rocky Mountain News (link):
The images that come out of China in 2006 trumpet growth, from massive resettlement forced by the booming Chinese economy to construction projects that herald the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Forty years ago this year, though, China was not the giant flexing its economic muscles: It was the country in which leader Mao Zedong was clearing a political and ideological path that resulted in a 10-year experiment in terror known as the Cultural Revolution.
Artists were expected to hew the party line, intellectuals and young people were sent to “re-education” camps in the country designed to reacquaint them with “the masses” as “rusticated youth,” and political dissent was both quashed and fueled by Mao’s violent Red Guards. Newspapers were little more than party mouthpieces.
