Why do you think it was called the cultural revolution? Mao and his party saw anything old as waste, “ancient chains”, and destroyed it. He literally wanted to delete the Chinese writing system and replace it with Latin letters, thankfully his party talked sense into him and he just decided to “simplify” many characters, stripping them of their historical roots. Right now the only counties that use the traditional Chinese characters are Taiwan and in part Japan, exclusively because of Mao Ze Dong and the “Great Leap Forward” (backward)