My wife and I visited the museum commemorating the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party when we went to Shanghai in 2012. I found the place interesting for two reasons. First, you would have thought that there would be lots of negative comments about the Qing dynasty, but there weren’t; all of the anger about the state of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was directed at foreigners. Second, the Party openly admits that the Cultural Revolution was a mistake. There is no such admission about the Great Leap Forward, however, even though it resulted in the deaths of far more people.
The difference revolves around the identity of the victims. In the Great Leap Forward, they were millions of faceless peasants, but in the Cultural Revolution, they were primarily the urban intelligentsia and members of the Party leadership. The Cultural Revolution is best understood as a populist movement led by Mao that was intended to regain control of the Party from an establishment that he felt was controlled by corrupt bureaucrats. The current leadership is understandably determined to see that this kind of Trumpian-style populism is kept firmly under control. That’s why Bo had to go, and why the public is repeatedly told that the Cultural Revolution never should have happened.