u/FreeRangePork - originally from r/GenZhou
The cultural revolution was definitely complicated, and I agree with the CPC’s opinion that it was a mistake, and lots of people were targeted who didn’t deserve it, and it was chaotic and very poorly carried out. However it was not all negative, Dongping Han, who is a professor in the US who grew up in China during that period wrote a book called the Unknown Cultural revolution, and he sees many positive aspects of the period, like an increase in rural education and the chance for people to challenge corrupt party officials, among other things. I’d highly recommend the book if you’re looking for another view on the era.

u/FeiGweilo - originally from r/GenZhou
From a Communist and pro-China perspective, Mao was good because he fought the revolution and established the DotP in mainland China, however China had not yet industrialised by the time the CPC came to power. As I’m sure you’ve already read, Mao initially tried to follow the Soviets in industrialising China which produced some good results before the Sino-Soviet split. However, without the Soviets and no bourgeois capitalists of their own, it was difficult for China to continue its industrialisation alone whilst it was still crawling out of the husk of feudalism. This is why Deng introduced his reforms, because he understood dialectical and historical materialism well enough to know that one cannot bypass that phase of bourgeois capitalist industrialisation on the road to Communism. One of the biggest mistakes westerners make in their analysis of Deng is that they presume he was a capitalist at heart who gave up on the pursuit of Communism in China, merely keeping Communist aesthetic around as a cynical way to retain legitimacy but this is absolutely not true.

u/cbaltmackie - originally from r/GenZhou
The official position of the Communist Party of China regarding the Cultural Revolution:

Regrettably, the correct line adopted at the Party’s Eighth National Congress was not fully upheld. Mistakes were made such as the Great Leap Forward and the people’s commune movement, and the scope of the struggle against Rightists was also made far too broad. Confronted with a grave and complex external environment at the time, the Party was extremely concerned about consolidating China’s socialist state power, and made a wide range of efforts in this regard. However, Comrade Mao Zedong’s theoretical and practical errors concerning class struggle in a socialist society became increasingly serious, and the Central Committee failed to rectify these mistakes in good time. Under a completely erroneous appraisal of the prevailing class relations and the political situation in the Party and the country, Comrade Mao Zedong launched and led the Cultural Revolution. The counter-revolutionary cliques of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing took advantage of Comrade Mao Zedong’s mistakes, and committed many crimes that brought disaster to the country and the people, resulting in ten years of domestic turmoil which caused the Party, the country, and the people to suffer the most serious losses and setbacks since the founding of the People’s Republic. This was an extremely bitter lesson. Acting on the will of the Party and the people, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee resolutely smashed the Gang of Four in October 1976, putting an end to the catastrophic Cultural Revolution.

https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202111/16/content_WS6193a935c6d0df57f98e50b0.html

u/spliff_placebo - originally from r/GenZhou
Mobo, Gao. The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Pluto Press, 2008.

Zhong, Xueping. Zheng, Wang. Di Bai. Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. Rutgers University Press, 2001.

u/traficantedemel - originally from r/GenZhou
check - https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rqr6pp/in_the_chinese_scifi_novel_the_three_body_problem/