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Mao Zedong launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" 30
years ago. This documentary history of the event presents a
selection of key primary documents dealing with the Cultural
Revolution's massive and bloody assault on China's political and
social systems.
Mao Zedong launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" 30
years ago. This documentary history of the event presents a
selection of key primary documents dealing with the Cultural
Revolution's massive and bloody assault on China's political and
social systems.
The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the
People's Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century
of communist rule. Before 1966, China was a typical communist
state, with a command economy and a powerful party able to keep the
population under control. But during the Cultural Revolution, in a
move unprecedented in any communist country, Mao unleashed the Red
Guards against the party. Tens of thousands of officials were
humiliated, tortured, and even killed. Order had to be restored by
the military, whose methods were often equally brutal. In a
masterly book, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals explain
why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and show his
Machiavellian role in masterminding it (which Chinese publications
conceal). In often horrifying detail, they document the Hobbesian
state that ensued. The movement veered out of control and terror
paralyzed the country. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou
Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing-Mao's wife and leader of the
Gang of Four-while Mao often played one against the other. After
Mao's death, in reaction to the killing and the chaos, Deng
Xiaoping led China into a reform era in which capitalism flourishes
and the party has lost its former authority. In its invaluable
critical analysis of Chairman Mao and its brilliant portrait of a
culture in turmoil, Mao's Last Revolution offers the most
authoritative and compelling account to date of this seminal event
in the history of China.
The Maoist state's dominance over Chinese society, achieved through
such watersheds as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution, is well known. Maoism at the Grassroots reexamines this
period of transformation and upheaval from a new perspective, one
that challenges the standard state-centered view. Bringing together
scholars from China, Europe, North America, and Taiwan, this volume
marshals new research to reveal a stunning diversity of individual
viewpoints and local experiences during China's years of high
socialism. Focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to 1980, the
authors provide insights into the everyday lives of citizens across
social strata, ethnicities, and regions. They explore how ordinary
men and women risked persecution and imprisonment in order to
assert personal beliefs and identities. Many displayed a shrewd
knack for negotiating the maze-like power structures of everyday
Maoism, appropriating regime ideology in their daily lives while
finding ways to express discontent and challenge the state's
pervasive control. Heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tensions
between official and popular culture were persistent features of
Maoism at the grassroots. Men had gay relationships in factory
dormitories, teenagers penned searing complaints in diaries,
mentally ill individuals cursed Mao, farmers formed secret
societies and worshipped forbidden spirits. These diverse
undercurrents were as representative of ordinary people's lives as
the ideals promulgated in state propaganda.
Since the end of the Cold War, the operations of secret police
informers have come under the media spotlight and it is now common
knowledge that vast internal networks of spies in the Soviet Union
and East Germany were directed by the Communist Party. By contrast,
very little historical information has been available on the covert
operations of the security services in Mao Zedong's China. However,
as Michael Schoenhals reveals in this intriguing and sometimes
sinister account, public security was a top priority for the
founders of the People's Republic and agents were recruited from
all levels of society to ferret out 'counter-revolutionaries'. On
the basis of hitherto classified archival records, the book tells
the story of a vast surveillance and control apparatus through a
detailed examination of the cultivation and recruitment of agents,
their training and their operational activities across a
twenty-year period from 1949 to 1967.
Since the end of the Cold War, the operations of secret police
informers have come under the media spotlight and it is now common
knowledge that vast internal networks of spies in the Soviet Union
and East Germany were directed by the Communist Party. By contrast,
very little historical information has been available on the covert
operations of the security services in Mao Zedong's China. However,
as Michael Schoenhals reveals in this intriguing and sometimes
sinister account, public security was a top priority for the
founders of the People's Republic and agents were recruited from
all levels of society to ferret out 'counter-revolutionaries'. On
the basis of hitherto classified archival records, the book tells
the story of a vast surveillance and control apparatus through a
detailed examination of the cultivation and recruitment of agents,
their training and their operational activities across a
twenty-year period from 1949 to 1967.
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