As you know, I'm associated with the sort of leftists who think that there were positive as well as negative aspects of the Cultural Revolution in China: e.g., Dave Pugh, "William Hinton on the Cultural Revolution," Monthly Review 56.10, March 2005, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0305pugh.htm>. While Pugh's is not the only kind of view on the matter that has appeared in the magazine in recent years, nor is it identical to mine, it is certainly rooted in a school of thought well represented among MR writers and readers here in the USA and the rest of the world.
At the heart of China's Cultural Revolution was the choice of politico-economic programs: less inequality at the expense of slower economic growth and less integration into global capitalist economy, or faster economic growth and more integration into global capitalist economy, especially the US market, at the expense of more inequality? As it happened, the faction of the party elite who emerged victorious at the end of the Cultural Revolution steered the nation into the latter direction, which ended socialism in China just as surely as, albeit more gradually than, capitalism was restored in Russia.
But the choice wasn't posed during and after the Cultural Revolution in such a way as to make what was at stake clear to everyone, inside or outside China, for the choice was filtered and obscured through "culture" (as in "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius").
The question is why the Chinese people couldn't have a clarifying debate, even a sharp conflict, that was focused _only on politico-economic alternatives_ -- why the conflict took the form of "cultural" revolution instead.
And it is not just regarding China that questions like that can and should be raised.
Why do modern revolutionary and post-revolutionary politico-economic struggles, whether revolutions in question are bourgeois or socialist or Islamist or whatever, inevitably make culture a battleground, the first instance of which was the Puritan Revolution? Why do such cultural struggles tend to become especially dramatic in post-colonial nations that emerged from Jacobin revolutions like China and Iran? What do such Jacobin cultural struggles have in common with, and how do they differ from, the kind of cultural transformation -- radical in its own way and in fact more violent* than Jacobin varieties -- that anti-Jacobin Jacobinism like Kemalism and the Meiji Restoration initiated?
* Violence in the case of Japan's cultural as well as politico-economic transformation eventually escalated into imperialism and then fascism. -- Yoshie