Blood Red Sunset: 2a Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

``We were dupes of class struggle'' the author says of the 1966-76 national aberration known as the Cultural Revolution, ``made to howl at the moon like a pack of dogs.'' When the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party launched the One-Smash-and-Three-Oppose Campaign in 1970, the author was a fervent Red Guard. But his best friend betrayed him and Ma Bo was denounced as an ``active counterrevolutionary,'' charged with slandering Chairman Mao and sentenced to labor reform in the quarries of Inner Mongolia. An irrepressible, pugnacious young man, Ma Bo launched a campaign to convince the authorities to reopen his case. The upshot was a period of official ostracism and personal isolation; how he managed to cope with this while suffering the tortures of unrequited love forms a major portion of this compelling memoir. In 1976 the Party unexpectedly changed the verdict on him to ``serious political errors'' and ordered his conditional release. A huge bestseller in China, this richly detailed record is told with raw narrative power. Ma Bo is writer-in-residence at Brown University. (Mar.)