You are correct in that we are also changing society, but how are you going to weed out 2,000 years of deeply entrenched sociocultural norms? Is it going to take another thousand years? This was a problem that Mao had to face when taking the country to a completely new direction.
Chinese practices are very ancient, so ancient that Mao could not see any other way but through a Cultural Revolution.
I’ll just give you an example: the Imperial Court Examination began to emerge during the Northern Wei Dynasty and became a fully matured institution by the Tang Dynasty (5th to 8th century AD). It was an important institution that allowed the Emperor to form his own cliques and power base against the feudal aristocratic class that controlled much of the imperial court at the time, shifting the balance of power towards the monarchy.
The Imperial Court Examination allowed people from the lower classes to gain social mobility and ascend to the higher class, and back in the days (as well as today’s), a young man from a poor family who passed the examination and became a local official would allow his entire family and those related to him to leap to a different social class. 一人得道，鸡犬升天: “one person gets promoted, even his chickens and dogs get to ascend to the heaven.”
His examiner (the person who decided to promote him) and his teacher would become his second fathers. His entire life would now be indebted to the examiner and the teacher. At the court, you are expected to be the “attack dog” of your examiner’s political stance, to help attack his opponents int he court, defend him at any cost, and in some cases, even with your life. This is because he was the one who made you who you are today, who chose to promote you and not anyone else. You will be his “boy” for the rest of your career. Can you see how corruption can so easily emerge in such an institution?
This was a very important cultural element in the Chinese society - the so-called filial piety - where betraying the will of one’s father(s) would cause one to be ostracized by society and become an outcast. Of course, exceptions exist but they became very controversial.
One thousand and five hundred years later, literally the same cultural practices still exist in Chinese academia, and occurs at the highest and most prestigious level. Your “lineage” is very important in Chinese academia today, far more important than Western academic institutions. You are very much indebted to the person who “gifted” you your prestigious career.
Again, once you understand this, you can see why corruption is almost impossible to weed out even under the present socialist system.
This is just one of thousands of “hidden” rules that everyone expects to accept. It is deeply entrenched into the societal norms. You are not expected to break the rules imposed upon by the society. The institutions may have changed to a more modern one, heck, we have a socialist system, but these essence of these practices remain. We’re not going to see radical changes any time soon.
At the end of the day you probably know much more about the Cultural revolution that I do, but as far as I understand Mao and the revolutionaries were pretty idealistic, to the point of being pretty ultraleftist in some beliefs.
Idealistic, to a degree, yes, but Mao was also extremely pragmatic (Chen Duxiu’s faction, the Trotskyists, were the idealist ones). Mao took land reform seriously and worked on that for years, and the end result was that he could unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses even when completely outnumbered and outgunned by the KMT. In fact, there were mass defections among the KMT’s own ranks. This shows you how Mao was able to identify the fundamental contradictions of the Chinese society, and used that knowledge to plan and devise a successful strategy that would take years to materialize.
The problem with the Cultural Revolution was that Mao tried to fight a 2,000-year old institution. The ancient institution fought back and won. The landlord class that were purged in the 1950s have now fully integrated into the governmental ranks.
I mean in practice, in an entire state with real people. Nobody has been able to do that over the 100 years of AES history. We have enough historical evidence for this.
70 years of socialist institutions under the USSR did not make the Russians and the Ukrainians and the likes more progressive. The moment the USSR was gone, material conditions took over and all forms of reactionary fascist elements came back in seconds. Heck, even the late stage USSR was already corrupt as fuck, let’s not pretend as though it was all Gorbachev’s fault.
China also faced the same problem. After the landlords were purged, Mao noticed that it’s not the people he had to purge, but an entire deeply entrenched sociocultural norms evolved over thousands of years. Mao’s mistake was to fight a 2000-year old institution. The ancient institution fought back and won. The landlords class that he purged in the 1950s was already back the moment the liberal reforms took place. Today, it is deeply integrated into the governmental ranks. The local governments have become the new landlords, with the same excesses as the feudal landlords once did. Once you understand this, the property crisis in China today - a socialist country, I remind you - isn’t so hard to grasp at all.
Yes, one could imagine we can slowly weed that out over the next 1000 years, but anyone who understands Chinese history knows that even the current CPC reign is merely a blip through its entire history. The Chinese civilization will still be here centuries after the CPC is gone. It’s a cyclical pattern of dynastic changes that is a fundamental characteristic of the Chinese civilization unless there is a decisive, radical change that breaks the cycle. Hence, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which failed and we go in circles here.