Hu Qiaomu - Post Cultural Revolution Hardliner

Post Cultural Revolution Hardliner

After the death of Mao, Economic Reform began under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Hu Qiaomu was one its most prominent opponents. Hu and Deng Liqun, another hard-line leader in the propaganda department, made every effort to fight against reform, with efforts such as the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1983 mainly targeted against critics of the Cultural Revolution and the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign in 1987 which essentially targeted reformers. Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun were instrumental in the ousters of the liberal general secretaries Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang, by winning Deng Xiaoping to their side. Hu Qiaomu applauded the use of force against the students in 1989, and called for stricter political indoctrination.

Efforts of the hardliners like Hu Qiaomu, were finally put to an end, at least in economics, by Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in the spring of 1992. Hu Qiaomu died later that year, in September, at the age of 81.

Read more about this topic:  Hu Qiaomu

Famous quotes containing the words post, cultural and/or revolution:

    I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.
    Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after the forms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.
    Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)

    In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.
    Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)