At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Gao became a "barefoot teacher" at the village school but was removed from office and subjected to criticism and self-criticism sessions.
Gao is well known for his argument that the perception of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution are at times severely distorted by intellectuals and in the media of both China and the West.
He says that most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefitted from Mao's policies of a comprehensive welfare system and basic healthcare and education provisions.
[1] Gao writes that negative appraisals of the Mao era are often seriously misleading, he lists four ways: "First, it deprives a probable majority of the Chinese the right to speak up.
Moreover, this revolution instituted land reform, promoted equality of the sexes, realized widespread literacy, and finally transformed Chinese society.
Gao sets out to demonstrate that the known story of Mao who led a revolution that transformed human life on such a dramatic scale cannot be dismissed by misleading and purposefully sensational claims.
in early April 1959, Mao at a Shanghai Politburo meeting criticized "zealots" at the Central Planning Commission and praised Chen Yun for his rational and cautious approach.
According to evidence published on September 7, 2007, in the Luoyang Daily it was Mao who during the Zhengzhou conference in March 1959 decided to temper hype surrounding the Great Leap Forward.
Liu in at least one occasion in 1958 talked about forming a commune as big as a country and about revolutionizing families by having husbands and wives living in different dormitories.
In his memoirs, Wu Lengxi , then editor of the People's Daily remembered that Mao again and again urged him to be cautious in reporting economic figures so as not to mislead the party and the public.
[10] In turn, Gao is highly critical of the historical accounts of the Great Leap Forward written by Yang Jisheng and Frank Dikotter.
[14] The sudden change of organization from co-ops to big collective communes meant that no adequate supervision and monitoring system could be implemented to manage grain production.
[15] In Gao's interpretation, the Great Leap Forward represents a disastrously failed trial of a different development model which prioritized local enterprise and decentralized industry.
However, Bramall suggests that Late Maoism bequeathed a range of positive economic legacies to its successors, including improvements in basic education and infrastructure and the foundations of a "green revolution" in agriculture.
[21] There is a challenge to ask how these subaltern and majority groups remember the experience of the Cultural Revolution in contrast to the way the event's history is told from the perspective of urban intellectuals.
[22] Another episode reflecting the fraught nature of this historical experience and how intellectual bias is on display is recounted in the production of an exhibition about the Cultural Revolution organized by Steven Harrell and David Davies at the Burke Museum of Washington University in 2002.
In fact, Gao argues at length that Western derived concepts of race, ethnicity and nationality are insufficient in addressing who the Chinese are and especially when we approach complicated issues of class identity.
In today's reactionary and ultra-capitalist CCP, a resolution was adopted on the history of the Mao-era that explains the Cultural Revolution as an episode where Mao Zedong deviated from his own thought.
[27] This official party opinion on the matter opens a door in the historical discourse for perspectives and agendas that want to interpret the Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated disaster.
The post Mao government and its propaganda bodies have been depicting the Cultural Revolution to the world as a ten-year period of calamities and near disintegration of the country's economy.
The way Chinese authorities solved with problem was by making the tenuous argument that the Cultural Revolution period represents an aberration and was fundamentally misguided.
The zhongyao tonggao decree stated that no factory, mine, school administration or any other such unit could be allowed to set up a detention center or a court for the purposes of political persecution.
Historical records reveal that the motivation behind the Cultural Revolution by Mao was to rectify proper ideology in Chinese Communist Party officials.
New features introduced in China's domestic social scene were a cheap and effective healthcare system, education in rural precincts, promotion of gender equality and so on.
[36] The Cultural Revolution and late Mao years includes positive developments in China's military capacities, urban industry, and agriculture.
Gao presents documentary evidence and special studies of the period to show that in reality the picture was more complicated and suggests an opposite conclusion.
A report from the Joint Economic Committee of the US congress concluded that during Mao's rule the Chinese economy has a "record of positive growth in both agriculture and industry."
"[38] There is a strong suggestion in Gao's analysis that the negative economic impacts of the Cultural Revolution were not nearly as large as the current Chinese leadership contends.
As Amartya Sen observes: "India had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity, suffered an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 million a year during the same period... thus, in this one geographical area alone, more deaths resulted from this 'failed capitalist experiment' (more than 100 million by 1980) than can be attributed to the 'failed communist experiment' all over the world since 1917"[39] A huge controversy of the Cultural Revolution is the destruction Chinese traditional cultural artifacts.
[42] In Gao's recollection of rural life during the Cultural Revolution villagers often put on performances that meshed model Peking operas with local language and music.