d with the Communist thought promoted by Mao and his followers.
The late 1960s in China was known as the period of the Cultural Revolution, an attempt on the part of certain central Party members to weed out dissent and to exert a tighter control. The leadership had goals in terms of altering first the political purposes of literature and the performing arts. What began as a push for the socialist purification of art would become pressure for the socialist purification of all aspects of society and life as well as a drawing of lines between competing groups and an effort to weed out all dissent and all enemies, real or perceived. The leaders of the Cultural Revolution led a comprehensive attack on the four old elements in Chinese society--old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. They left it to the Red Guard to carry out the "reforms."
The Tysons trace the current fervor for reform to the post-Cultural revolution era, noting that the Chinese then started listening to "their inner voices" because they were deeply disillusioned by their own worship of Mao: "They were fed up with Mao's promise of a workers' utopia, exhausted by malicious political campaigns, and bitter over years of sacrifice for the collective" (1). The reformers of the time, led by Deng Xiaoping, took a radically different strategy to recover the support of the people and to rebuild the country:
Beginning in the early 1980s, Deng offered the people hard incentives: cash bonuses instead of equal wages for workers, family farming instead of communal toil for peasants, and promotions for professionals based on skill instead of Communist fervor (1).
In the newest wave of reform, say the Tysons, the impetus for changes comes from the grassroots so that 1.2 billion Chinese are seeking to push to extremes the market-oriented reforms instituted tentatively by the Communist party, and the tysons find the change considerable:
Craving eve...