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Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius
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==Theoretical focus== A main theoretical focus of the campaign was to advance the principle articulated by Mao that the masses are the motive force of history.<ref name=":2" /> Although the campaign was used as a political tool by the Gang of Four, it did produce a genuine attempt to interpret historical Chinese society within the context of Mao's political theories. Maoist theorists attempted to use what they knew about the stone-age [[Dawenkou culture]] to produce evidence that a slave society had existed in Chinese history, just as Mao had described. These Maoist theorists used the recurrent patterns of peasant revolts, which have occurred throughout Chinese history, as evidence that the common people had consistently rejected both feudalism and the Confucian ideology that supported it. After their vitriolic denunciations of Confucianism, radical theorists attempted to interpret all of Chinese history as a long episode of conflict between the forces of Confucianism and Legalism, and attempted to identify themselves as modern Legalists.<ref name="Hsiung638" /> During the campaign, critique groups formed at [[Tsinghua University]] and [[Peking University]]; they produced commentaries under the name "Liang Xiao," a pseudonym that sounds like a person's name but which is a [[homophone]] for "two schools."<ref name=":22">{{Cite book |last1=Xu |first1=Youwei |title=Everyday Lives in China's Cold War Military Industrial Complex: Voices from the Shanghai Small Third Front, 1964-1988 |last2=Wang |first2=Y. Yvon |publisher=[[Palgrave MacMillan]] |year=2022 |isbn=9783030996871 |pages=238}}</ref> The campaign was an intense moment in 20th Century Chinese intellectual history,<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Russo |first=Alessandro |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1156439609 |title=Cultural Revolution and revolutionary culture |date=2020 |publisher=[[Duke University Press]] |isbn=978-1-4780-1218-4 |location=Durham |pages=245 |oclc=1156439609}}</ref> combining both specialist scholarship and with an openness to mass study.<ref name=":0" /> There was a spike in new political economy texts produced for a lay audience (as opposed to party members or university students),<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Coderre |first=Laurence |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1250021710 |title=Newborn socialist things : materiality in Maoist China |date=2021 |publisher=[[Duke University Press]] |isbn=978-1-4780-2161-2 |location=Durham |pages=125 |oclc=1250021710}}</ref> and mass dissemination of information made thousands of documents and articles available to ordinary Chinese, including worker-formed study "groups for theory" in factories.<ref name=":0" /> Workers writing groups also collaborated with specialists on drafting texts, such as the 1976 ''Political Economy in Front of the Smelting Furnace'' (''Lianganglu qian de zhengzhi jingjixue'') by the theory group of Shanghai Number 5 Steel Factory and the Fudan University philosophy and economics departments.<ref name=":1" /> The campaign resulted in reprints and new editions of classic Legalist writings as well as historical reconstructions of their debates with the Confucians.<ref name=":0" /> It also provided the impetus for archeological excavations.<ref name=":0" />
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