China made its first computer in 1958 and its first 1 megaflop computer in 1973, so yes, their nascence of computer programming preceded the Cultural Revolution, about 10 years after the West.
It was also a Cold War. My father-in-law and mother-in-law were both gifted mathematicians and mainframe programmers. She also designed CPUs. She is a sweet sweet person and a major badass. She is my hero. She’s in her 80s and was more accomplished in her 20s than you and I put together will ever be.
A generation of gifted, and hard working graduates emerged out of the bitter ashes of the cultural revolution. Their delayed entry to tertiary education and the circumstances behind it gave added impetus to their desire to study and gain knowledge.
I've met several across different disciplines and two (at least) in computer science and networking. When the barriers for travel came down, many studied and worked abroad, I met some in Edinburgh at the end of the 70s who worked in advanced language areas (think the foundations of ML) formal methods, CSP, you-name-it. People like these in networking (I subsequently know and worked with in governance contexts) built and led the chinese academic internet. These people are now senior academics in the Chinese academy of science. They're serious, smart people.
There was also a late 1970s VLSI boom in China. It's why they were so successful in the 80s and 90s outsourcing chip commercialization space.
So to my own knowledge if not "in" the cultural revolution certainly very rapidly afterwards assuming you take its run up into the 70s.
The Great Cultural Revolution were the Golden Age of PRC. The economy grew rapidly. If you had the Little Red Book, you could take a free train to join the Great Rally held at Beijing.
Hundreds of thousands of micro-computers had been built during that period. For example, there were many used in the textile factories. Workers there were encouraged to learn programming. They wrote programs to control the weaving machines.
After Capitalist Roaders seize the power through a palace coup, they told everybody that, the Great Cultural Revolution wrecked the economy. So most were ditched.
As programmer shortage emeraged in the 1980s, Capitalist Roaders start promoting "grab toddlers to computers".
I could believe it, the timespan should be 1966-1976, so maybe in late 70s. I know a lot of automation software was being written in my Eastern European socialist country in assembly language around 1974. I think mostly for 6800-based chips like probably MOS 6502.
