**The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy
of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling
the Communist revolution in China.
After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens
of millions of lives from 1958-1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an
ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he
viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to
purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were
threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red
Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival
factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic
weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended
into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state
marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.
The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976 draws for the
first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from
secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches.
After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary
people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out
the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an
unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched
fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a
wholly new light.
