Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #616873 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 752 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Given the hostile biographies and debunking histories that have recently appeared, it's safe to say that Mao's long honeymoon is over. In this exhaustive critique, MacFarquhar (director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard) and Schoenhals (lecturer on modern Chinese society at Sweden's Lund University) cover the terrifying Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, when Mao unleashed the Red Guards on his people. As the unceasing, pointless intrigues between Mao and his chief henchmen unfolded, the violence and denunciations, the staged humiliations and mass executions raged remorselessly out of control, and the country lurched into turmoil. Even today, no one knows the final death count of the Mao cult. In rural China alone, according to a conservative estimate, 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were murdered, with roughly the same number permanently injured. In the end, the authors, ironically, take comfort from one of the chairman's favorite sayings: "Out of bad things can come good things." For out of that dreadful decade, the authors conclude, "has emerged a saner, more prosperous, and perhaps one day a democratic China." 57 b&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
MacFarquhar and Schoenhals successfully synthesize the many plotlines of the Cultural Revolution in a narrative that shuttles from the endless micro-maneuvers of the Party elite to the marauding teens of the Red Guard; and from the Revolution's macro-economic fallout to such bizarre manifestations as the cannibalizing of counter-revolutionaries in Guangxi. Carefully orchestrating the pandemonium and fuelling it with his "deliberate opaqueness" is the figure of Mao Zedong. Utterly unfazed by violence—"China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people," he remarked—he hoped the Revolution would perpetuate his legacy. But the arbitrary brutality of the regime insured the opposite. One weary subject recalled that when Mao died, in 1976, "the news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb."
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From The Washington Post
It has been enthralling to read Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals's exhaustively researched new book on China's Cultural Revolution -- a sensation akin to returning to a Chinese painting in which a mist-shrouded landscape has miraculously cleared to reveal what was obscured beyond. While it was not difficult to feel the tension, even the fear, aloft in the land when I reported from Mao Zedong's China for the New Yorker during the mid-1970s, being there gave few intimations of the dark complexity of the political struggle playing out beneath the surface. By making sense out of this opaque decade, MacFarquhar (who teaches at Harvard University) and Schoenhals (who teaches at Lund University in Sweden) have provided the most definitive roadmap to date of China's odyssey through those tumultuous times.

But what happened is still not easy to explain completely. For complex reasons that involved Mao's political beliefs as well as his own psychological pathologies, the communist leader felt compelled to goad China into an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness that ran from 1966 to 1976. Both to protect his own political supremacy and to wrench China out of its "feudal" past, he made politics and "class struggle" the currency of his revolutionary realm. In his own words, he created "great disorder under heaven." Proclaiming that "to rebel is justified," he called on students to "bombard the headquarters" of the Communist Party and thus set in motion one of the most unprecedented upheavals of the 20th century.

"You ask us how to do it," President Liu Shaoqi, who later died as a political enemy in one of Mao's prisons, told students as the leftist surge gathered momentum. "I tell you honestly, I don't know either. We're mainly going to be relying on you to make this revolution."

In the name of wiping out "capitalist roaders" (a euphemism for anyone seemingly opposed to Mao's revolutionary line) and "bourgeois revisionism," tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed. "Beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong Thought -- no matter who they are, what banner they fly, or how exalted their positions may be," proclaimed one Red Guard poster.

"Whereas party violence had normally been carefully controlled and calibrated, now the rules had been suspended," note the authors. "Freed from parental and societal constraints, youths, both girls and boys, had been unleashed to perpetrate assault, battery, and murder upon their fellow citizens to the extent their barely formed consciences permitted. The result was the juvenile state of nature, nationwide, foreshadowed in microcosm by Nobel Prize-winner William Golding in Lord of the Flies."

A few of China's more pragmatic leaders did shrink from Mao's cataclysmic vision of revolutionary extremism. But Mao's Last Revolution suggests how easy it can be for a mercurial "Big Leader," operating within a totalitarian system, to throw doubters so far off balance that none was able to organize resistance. And if there is one thing that Marxist-Leninist states do well, it is defoliating the political landscape of checks and balances, as well as watchdog institutions like the press. This is especially true when the media fall into the hands of one faction so that any sense of the actual variety of contending viewpoints is eclipsed, making it impossible for an outsider to discern how different factions were actually struggling against each other behind the scenes.

Mao was a master of keeping all comers in a state of paralyzing uncertainty. He garnered enormous power from his imperial opaqueness: While almost everyone wished "to work toward" Mao and his policies in order to please him, they could never be quite sure whether they were measuring up. Mao was the embodiment par excellence of the advice implicitly given by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov when he chastises Jesus for failing to compel belief by ruling by "miracle, mystery and authority."

By frequently absenting himself from the everyday sordidness of Beijing politics, Mao conjured up an almost otherworldly authority. And by making conflicting pronouncements that were impossible to factor together, he maintained both deniability and an ambiguity that kept his subordinates "transfixed like rabbits in front of a cobra," as the authors put it.

In the end, after years of chaos, even Mao seemed to realize that the party's ability to continue leading China hung in the balance. He then called back cashiered veteran army leaders such as Deng Xiaoping. Curiously, although most of them had been persecuted by Mao, when it came to evaluating his life after his death, they still gave Mao a pass, finding only 30 percent of his policies erroneous and 70 percent correct. But as Deng pragmatically observed, discrediting Mao "would mean discrediting our Party and state." And so, in the end, Mao's legacy as grand progenitor of the Chinese Communist Revolution was left largely intact, despite the horrors of this last revolutionary paroxysm.

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals have drawn from a truly impressive array of materials, including documents, wall posters, autobiographies, journalistic reports, interviews, speeches, academic studies and personal reminiscences. But here a cautionary word is in order. The field is awash with "wild" (rather than "official") histories and sources, which include autobiographies, memoirs, reminiscences and reflections filled with recovered memories and reconstructed dialogue of questionable provenance and accuracy. But the sources for this impressive book are more solid and varied than for any previous effort. One can only lament that Mao's Last Revolution will not be available in China, where the party's aversion to probing into such sensitive topics makes it unlikely that a similar historical research project will be forthcoming anytime soon.

China has come a long way since Mao. But neither he nor his revolution has been completely interred; his body still lies on public view in Tiananmen Square, his image remains on China's money, and his portrait still hangs on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. With China's political system still lacking the kinds of checks and balances that can bring a society back from the brink of extremism, optimism about its political future should be tempered by realism.

Indeed, this September, on the 30th anniversary of both Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the party still chose to spend a week celebrating his legacy, culminating with an official concert in the Great Hall of the People entitled "The Sun is the reddest and Chairman Mao is the most beloved." No mention was made of the incalculable damage his Cultural Revolution inflicted on his country. In the future, one important index of China's passage toward political maturity will be the degree to which it feels able to repudiate both Mao and his Cultural Revolution legacy.

Reviewed by Orville Schell
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Hows & Whys of a Historical Tragedy
A lot of experts say that there are four periods in modern times that helped shape present-day China: World War II, the Civil War & rise of the Chinese Communist Party, the Great Leap Forward & resulting famine, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I'm not an expert, merely someone who's interested in History, but I tend to agree. This theory explains many things, including why true republicanism is coming so slowly to the People's Republic. But there is one further question everyone asks - How can something like the Cultural Revolution happen?

This book attempts to answer that broad question, as well as shows us how the Cultural Revolution is with China even today. The authors are experts in Chinese history and point out how the vision of one man - Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung as romanized in the older British system still used in Taiwan), founder and chairman of the CCP - almost destroyed his own creation through dithering, ruthless crackdowns, and borderline insanity.

This isn't an easy read by a longshot, but those who want to find out more about one of the most pivotal events in human history are well-served in reading it. The book dispells a lot of commonly-held views (such as Zhou Enlai (Chou En-Lai) being a moderating force on Mao) and gets the reader into the thick of it. Clearly demonstrated as well is, far from the clear-headed leader of Party propaganda, how indicisive Mao himself was in the direction of his Revolution (one example being the rise, fall, rise, fall, rise and ultimate redemption of Deng Xiaopeng (Teng Hsiao-Ping)). We see how politics apart from, but very connected to, Mao's vision of "continual revolution to route the rightist capitalist roaders" kept feeding the Revolution victims until it consumed those who created the CCP. And that includes the ones who most benefited from the Cultural Revolution's chaos.

For those who want to know more about China and the Chinese of today, this is an invaluable resource. Just be prepared for the density of the work.

An encyclopedia of the Cultural Revolution
This book is an exhaustive and remarkably well-written narrative of the Cultural Revolution. It offers a kind of a panoramic view - from detailed discussion of power struggles in Mao's court to close-up glimpses at the lives of ordinary people in the revolutionary chaos. The book is excellently researched, bringing just about every possible scrap of evidence from the Chinese side, much of it hitherto unknown in the West.

On the downside, the authors are ambivalent in their conclusions. Indeed, there is no real conclusion, and no real analysis of what the Cultural Revolution really was. MacFarquhar's long-time thesis is resurrected here in the form of "if it was only a power struggle, it would be over by 1967", and the authors try to make sense of Mao's revolutionary visions, but to no avail, because in the final count all their evidence does point to a brutal power struggle. So the well-known argument about Mao's revolutionary concerns floats over the narrative but fails to make contact with it; there is some uneasy coexistence between what the authors evidently wanted to say and what they actually say.

Even so, who can blame them, the Cultural Revolution was a hell of a mess. It is a great book anyhow, and for all the unanswered questions, I would not hesitate to use it in my upper-level Chinese history classes.

Wondrous scholarship of an unfathomable time
Although Mao's portrait still hangs above the Tiananmen Gate, modern Chinese will acknowledge that the Cultural Revolution was a "mistake."

But what was the Cultural Revolution? With detailed scholarship from original sources MacFarquar and Schoenhals document that for much of the time none of the participants really knew what the Cultural Revolution was all about. The thesis here is that, seeing the fall of Krushchev in Moscow, the aging Mao found it very convenient to support leftist radicals who removed (and humiliated and abused) the ossified and aging Chines Communist Party (CCP)leadership. With the old guard turned out, Mao was less likely to be shot from behind. A secondary motivation was that Mao's sense of self was bound up in being a revolutionary and revolutionaries struggle! The end results were that the CCP lost credibility and the country willingly embraced Deng Xiao Ping's de facto move to capitalism as anything was going to be better than the last 10 years.

For a jointly-authored book, Mao's Last Revolution speaks with a coherent voice making it a most enjoyable read. And the mechanics of the book are excellent: There's a list of acronyms in the front and a glossary of people in the back plus nearly 200 pages of notes which are conveniently indexed back to the text page numbers. These features make an exhaustive piece of scholarship not entirely exhausting to read.

This book belongs in every university library and will be appreciated by non-academics who have a personal interest in China.