China's economic expansion after the Cultural Revolution was a result of new political reforms.
On May 16, 1966 the Communist Party of China announced the beginning of a process with profound and painful implications for the political, social and economic life of the country: the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", known simply as the Cultural Revolution.
Its stated objective was to clean Chinese society from capitalist influence and bourgeois thought. And that translated into political purges, exile, executions and forced labor for millions of people, who were sent to special farms for their "reeducation".
The Cultural Revolution, which had the youth as its main protagonist, also allowed the communist leader Mao Zedong to free himself from his enemies and stimulate a cult of his personality that still survives, although the process ended with his death a decade later.