Why I think some people compare the current woke movement to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (soldiers, health care)

[katharsis]

I have seen several posts lately comparing the woke movement to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The following non-biased article gives a brief summary -- it contains only about 2,300 words -- but for those who aren't familiar with that Revolution, it will be quite a revelation, I think. Although there are some major differences between what happened in China from 1966-1977 and what is happening now, there are enough similarities, I think, to justify some concern.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Cultural-Revolution

Here are some excerpts from the article (my italics):

Mao thus ultimately adopted four goals for the Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. He initially pursued these goals through a massive mobilization of the country’s urban youths. They were organized into groups called the Red Guards, and Mao ordered the party and the army not to suppress the movement.

[snip]

Mao did not formally launch the Cultural Revolution until August 1966, at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee. He shut down China’s schools, and during the following months he encouraged Red Guards to attack all traditional values and “bourgeois” things and to test party officials by publicly criticizing them. Mao believed that this measure would be beneficial both for the young people and for the party cadres that they attacked.

[snip]

In 1968, after the country had been subject to several cycles of radicalism alternating with relative moderation, Mao decided to rebuild the Communist Party to gain greater control. The military dispatched officers and soldiers to take over schools, factories, and government agencies. The army simultaneously forced millions of urban Red Guards to move to the rural hinterland to live, thus scattering their forces and bringing some order to the cities.

[snip]

From mid-1973 until Mao’s death in September 1976, Chinese politics shifted back and forth between Jiang Qing and those who supported her (notably Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, who with Jiang Qing were later dubbed the Gang of Four), and the Zhou-Deng group. The former favoured ideology, political mobilization, class struggle, anti-intellectualism, egalitarianism, and xenophobia, while the latter promoted economic growth, stability, educational progress, and a pragmatic foreign policy.