The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Fanatical ideology, cut-throat intrigue and vast bloodshed roil China in this sweeping history of the Cultural Revolution. Journalist Yang (Tombstone) styles the 1966–1976 upheaval as a civil war declared by dictator Mao Zedong against the Communist Party bureaucracy in order to undermine Party rivals, deflect public discontent with his disastrous policies, and achieve a purer Marxist utopia. The conflict pitted radical Red Guard groups against the Party establishment’s more conservative Red Guards, and then against each other, in “large-scale armed conflicts.” Whenever the chaos grew too unruly, Yang contends, Mao switched sides and backed the bureaucracy and military in suppressing radicals. Yang’s sometimes disjointed narrative concentrates on leadership struggles as they played out in party conferences, backroom maneuvering, and factional propaganda couched in dreary jargon and hysterical invective. (“Thoroughly smash the bourgeois restorationist countercurrent,” exhorted one slogan.) He also explores the human cost with statistics, and some appalling specifics, on the millions of people imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and, in the case of the Guangxi massacre, even cannibalized. Though not the most elegantly written—or translated—study of the Cultural Revolution, this exhaustive and sometimes horrifying account demonstrates how deranged governments become when unconstrained by democracy and individual rights. (Jan.)