The 20th century was pretty big for China because it saw not one but two revolutions. China's 1911 revolution might be a bigger deal from a world historical perspective than the more famous communist revolution of 1949, but you wouldn't know it because: 1. China's communism became a really big deal during the Cold War, and 2. Mao Zedong, the father of Communist China, was really good at self-promotion.

After the first elections, Sun Yat Sen's party, the Guomindang were the largest, but they weren't the majority. So Sun Yat Sen deferred to Yuan, which turned out to be a huge mistake because he then outlawed the Guomindang party and ruled as dictator.

Once in power, Mao and the CCP set out to turn China into an industrial powerhouse by following the Soviet model. The Chinese adopted the model of Five Year Plans beginning in 1953 and the first one worked, at least as far as industrialization was concerned.

By the middle of the sixties, Mao was afraid that China's revolution was running out of steam, and he didn't want China to end up just a bureaucratized police state like, you know, most of the Soviet bloc. And the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to capture the glory days of the revolution and fire up the masses, and what better way to do that than to empower the kids.