The Great Leap Forward and The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Chan describes living conditions in subgenus Chen Village, "The narrow steep-peaked houses were built mostly of plastered mud, with only wasted sections of their foundation walls boasting any real brick. They were dilapidated, dank, and reeked of the sows and poultry that overlap the quarters with their take iners" (13).

We catch up with that high levels of corruption exist inside China's bureaucracy, corruption that typically costs the people in the large run. Further, even though communism is a system that purportedly values humanity more than economics it is often a system that is abandoned because it proves unprofitable (such as the case with east Europe and Russia). Still, the push for democratization of the People's majority rule of China continues to take momentum. Chan does an excellent job of showing us how the different mogul shifts from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping changed the power, economic, and labor reforms that impact the people. While Zedong tried to get and improve lifestyle conditions, Xiaoping returned to communism, military might, and reforms that did itsy-bitsy to benefit the people, curiously those like the ones in Chen Village who saw their full culture and environment destroyed by many of these reforms that did little to help them. We see this most clearly in Chan's poignant depictions of the poverty faced by such people, ones we know retain been the result of power struggles and different political ideologies. We also see that such reforms make life for

the poor even more difficult while the richest in society continue to benefit from them. This has historically been done to inborn peoples by imperialist forces but China continues to do it to its own people.

Chan describes how such policies impact the daily life of Chen Villagers, "It was know in the villages roundabout that the Chens had to toil for longer hours and less reinforce than most other peasants in the district. For that reason, the village had always had bother finding brides from the neighboring villages for its own young men, and it was traditionally considered verboten for a man to marry a woman from within the village" (14).

Chan, A. Chen Village Under Mao and Deng. CA: University of California Press, 1992.

We see that though Mao Zedong's great heathen revolutions failed miserably, the era when he was in power was marked by something few Chinese come ever known ? stability. Imperialism and the Republic Revolution created chaos that Mao Zedong's consolidation of power ended. Deng Xiaoping in contrast returned to power and brutality over cooperation and consolidation. This has creation factional maneuvering forrader and after his death that threatens political stability in China. Further, Chan shows us the devastating impact of Xiaoping's tactics on common villagers. In Chen Village we see how his purges and rapid industrialization have
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