My parents had Copaganda The Show on in the room, and a Chinese character talked about how her parents were doctors during the cultural revolution, but were accused of using bourgeois science and were sentenced to reeducation. I don’t know enough about the cultural revolution to know anything about that, so I googled. Naturally I found myself on Wikipedia (blech) where they talked about a variety of “bourgeois pseudoscience” ranging from phrenology and eugenics to psychology and sociology. These latter two were specific to the PRC. Of course I know better than to automatically believe NATOpedia, especially on topics like these, but I don’t know any better places to look for accurate information, particularly in English. So I have a few questions.
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Where can I go to find these answers? I am aware of ProleWiki, but a lot of the pages I’ve seen have been more summary and less in-depth talks about these things.
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Is psychology and potentially psychiatry still considered bourgeois science? I have a variety of psychiatric disorders, and I would be upset if my communist utopia did not see fit to help me deal with them. I have heard of anti-psychiatry, and some random dude claiming it is popular on the left? Not jumping to believe them, but instead asking people who have a better chance of actually knowing.
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Is there any truth that the PRC did take these actions? Do they still? If I were to move to China, would I be unable to get psychiatric meds?
There were problems in the implementation of the cultural revolution. A major cause of the problems was the bottom up methods of justice but this was also a major part of its success. The goal was to preempt counter revolution by rooting out liberalism and in this regard it was a great success.
On the down side some people were wrongly accused and there were many cases of mob justice. Some people used it to settle scores. Some legitimate crimes against the revolution were punished far more harshly than deserved. Some times mobs lashed out in ignorance at things they didn’t understand.
They broke 10 eggs to make a 3 egg omelet.
The people who escaped to tell stories however… There were many people who thought because they were well educated they deserved money and power. They were well educated because their parents had the wealth to get them educated before the revolution. Those people had the money on hand to flee. Those are the people who told the world about what happened. Those people claimed they were persecuted because of their education not because they had a bourgeoise mentality of class superiority.