What actually happened as a result of these movements? People usually use them as evidence that Mao killed however many millions of people. I’m aware that they aren’t fondly remembered periods in Chinese history, but I’m not sure how accurate the wikipedia entry on the subjects are. Does anyone have further reading?
Mao presided over the greatest life expectancy increase in Chinese history. But the modern CPC regards the great leap forward as essentially a series of misguided solutions to the problem of rapid industrialization, and the cultural revolution as (overall) an ultraleftist deviation of Marxism which attempted to insert internal ideological struggle as primary, and ignore underdevelopment, rather than a scientific analysis of material conditions and development of the productive forces to solve the primary world contradiction: inequality between rich and poor countries. These mistakes were fully identified and corrected in the Deng Xiaoping era.
A good intro article on the cultural revolution, and SWCC:
Here is one statement by the CPC on the cultural revolution, cited in the article above: