The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976
FRANK DIKÖTTER

Launched 50 years ago this month, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the third of the disasters visited on China by Mao Zedong. First came land reform, rammed through by the Communists after their seizure of power in 1949. Then followed the wholesale slaughter through famine of the Great Leap Forward, the attempt to trump the boast by Khrushchev, condemned as a revisionist for denouncing Stalin, that the Soviet economy would overtake that of the United States by 1980. Finally, again with an eye on the ideological backsliding of his giant neighbour, Mao set out to destroy all remnants of the old society, with the Red Guards as his shock troops.

Frank Dikötter, a Dutch historian who is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, has now completed a trilogy on these momentous upheavals, making use of material which shows how they affected the population at large; thus the subtitle of his latest volume. In it, he draws on published works, such as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, on municipal and provincial archives, and on self-published autobiographies called ziyinshu. The result is a detailed and relentlessly black picture of the chaos which a murderous old despot inflicted on his country.