Research on China and Chinese Cultural Revolution

I knew a little bit of general information about China before I began my research, such as its location and population size, but I was excited to learn some new things about it that I hadn't already known. I began my research with some general information about China to fill in the gaps of things that I had a rough understanding of. Out of my research I discovered that China, or the People’s Republic of China, is the world’s second largest country by land area. Russia has obviously got to be number one on that list, but it’s still pretty impressive that China is next in line behind Russia.

China is also the most populous country in the world with a population of over 1.35 billion. I already knew that it was the most populated country, just because it’s a widely known fact, but I had no idea how large the population was in terms of numbers. I wanted to compare this to the US so I looked it up and the US population is approximately 313.9 million. That means China’s population is approximately 4.25 times larger than America’s. I just found that astounding considering how many people I come into contact with when I go out in public. Even though I knew China had a large population, in comparison to America’s, it’s much larger than I thought it was.

Another thing I already knew about China was its geographic location. However, I didn't know much about its border size and how many countries it shares borders with. China is located in East Asia and has the world’s longest combined land border. It also shares borders with 14 nations, which is the same as Russia but larger than any other country in the world. Some of the countries it shares borders with are Nepal, North Korea, and India.

After getting a better grasp on some general information about China, I decided to do some research on something that I know near nothing about, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, more commonly known as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, was a social-political movement and the goal was to enforce communism in China. Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China at the time, wanted to remove capitalist tradition and cultural elements from Chinese society. To get rid of the “revisionists,” whose aim was to restore capitalism, Mao acted through violent class struggle. China’s youth took to Mao’s appeal and formed groups around the country called Red Guard groups. These groups enforced Mao’s communist view and the children in these groups pressured their parents to conform as well. Mao disliked intellectuals and creative people, because he saw them as a threat, so art and literature were removed from the schools and basically banned except for the use to promote communism in propaganda.

As I read more and more about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, my mind kept wondering to Germany’s Third Reich in WWII. There are a lot of similarities between the two. Both wanted conformity, both got the youth involved to pressure adults into assimilating as well, both banned literature and the arts from schools and instead taught collectivism. Because I had no idea what The Chinese Cultural Revolution was, I had no idea how similar it was to Nazi Germany. Although it may be slightly less severe than Germany’s Third Reich, It’s frightening to know that this type of movement has happened more than once in the history of the world. Even though this is an uncomfortable subject to think about, it’s important that we do research it, and teach it, and learn the patterns so that if something like this were to happen again we may realize what’s happening and stop it before it’s too late.