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Mao's Last Revolution

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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.

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.

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.

First of all, this book is a very valuable source of information relating to the Cultural Revolution - its why's, how's and who's. Knowing next to nothing about this important part of Chinese history, I felt that I was getting a great education, at least regarding the government level of what happened.
Having said that, I would offer two caveats. The first is that if you're not familiar with the who's who of Chinese Communist leaders in the 1960s or 70s, or the history of the Great Leap Forward, I would suggest you keep your Wikipedia handy (I read this right after consuming "Mao's Great Famine," and I still occasionally had problems keeping up with who was who). A little bit of background knowledge will carry you a long way when reading this book, especially in the first few chapters of what is otherwise a fascinating read.
The second problem is with the Kindle version, which I purchased. In plain language, you're getting gypped. Typos are common (formatting problems?) and in one or two cases almost make the text incomprehensible. Worse, there isn't even an attempt to include historic photographs. It's laughable - you pay near the price for the new paperback, but when it comes to dozens of photos you have to make due with a caption of the non-included photo and the phrase "To view this image, refer to the print version of this title." What a joke. If I would have known of these deficiencies, I would have bought a used version of the book.

I tore through this book like it was a detective novel, no small recommendation considering that it's a hefty tome with hundreds of pages of notes, sources, glossaries and indices. The Cultural Revolution, as grandiose and awful a spectacle as any produced in the 20th century, abounds with mind-blowing anecdotes and statistics that seem as though they must be sensationalized. MacFarquhar and Shoenhals were actually present for many of the events they write about, and seem to have personally interviewed (or read the diaries of) about half of the GPCR's participants. The end is a magnificent book where every paragraph rings true.

The prose is a pleasure. Take this as an example, from a chapter on the Tiananmen incident of 1976:

"Arriving in the square, groups held a short ceremony, dedicating themselves to the ideals they attributed to Zhou. Then they joined the throngs reading the individual tributes. By April 1, the tributes crowded the square: Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane. Their ranks were not serried, but in their peaceful and massive profusion they demonstrated solidarity more impressively than the terracotta soldiers of Xi'an."

For anyone interested in China, this is a worthy purchase; for students of modern Chinese politics and social development, it is essential.

This book, by two distinguished scholars of modern Chinese politics, is a comprehensive history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, an event initiated by the 'Great Helmsman', Chairman Mao Zedong. It ran for about a decade, spanning the years 1966-1976, a period roughly paralleling the major social changes occurring in the West (France, the USA) and Latin America (Guatemala, Cuba, Chile).

The book features an introductory chapter which very succinctly outlines the motive for the upheaval, but the remainder of the book is an exhaustive catalogue of the defining events. Each and every political figure of even the most tangential importance to the Cultural Revolution is given abundant ink. While this is of great importance to serious students of modern China, the wealth of detail is daunting for the general reader searching for an explanatory but non-superficial history. The arcana of Chinese Communist Party internecine warfare are catalogued in excruciating detail, replete with all the bloated slogans and cant typical of that era in modern Marxism. The vast damage to the Chinese economy, the armed forces, the educational system and the Chinese social structure is highlighted. The dubious role played by Zho Enlai (portrayed in many sources as a moderating force) is also discussed in detail, as is the tumultuous career in CCP politics of Deng Xiaoping. The unplanned ascendency of the Peoples Liberation Army as a result of GCR policies eventually required the removal of Mao's planned successor, Lin Biao and his supporters in the PLA general's ranks.

The authors note that, along with the tumult engendered by Mao's 'Great Leap Forward', the GCR was equally cataclysmic for China. Widespread famine resulted from the GLF and vast economic disruption from the CGR. Many millions of people died as a combination of these attempts at social engineering, much like the collectivization efforts undertaken in the USSR in Ukraine. Presumably, as a result of these two upheavals, the stage was set for a more pragmatic form of statecraft by Deng and his successors.

The parallels to Stalin's purges of the ranks of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union are evident, but are unstated, as are detailed explanations of Mao's motives (the purging of "revisionism", the backlash against Nikita Krushchov's reforms and the imagined threats to Mao's own rule); these aspects of the history are largely left to the reader's own background knowledge

Finally, the authors note that, along with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Mao will be remembered as one of the great tyrants and murderers of the 20th Century. In summary, this is a highly detailed work which is not for the casual reader.

The Kindle version of this book is full of typos that look like the result of text conversion errors. I got a fifth of the way through before giving up. I'm going to wait for them to fix it before I try to read any more.

Mao Zedong, a utopian Marxist philosopher, who was Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, was appalled at Khrushchev's post-Stalinist "revisionism". But he was furthermore alarmed when the Soviet central party apparatus deposed Khrushchev. Feeling threatened, Mao reacted against his own strong centralized party.

Unlike Stalin who in the 1930's merely purged the old Bolsheviks from the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party, Mao set out to destroy the Chinese central party apparatus itself with his "great disorder under heaven", as he called his Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. Mao fully expected that a new party would spontaneously emerge from the induced violent social chaos.

But the chaos was so great that officers of the People's Liberation Army under Lin Biao ended up taking most of the positions in the emergent party apparatus. This controlling role of the army also alarmed Mao.

When Mao signaled that Lin would soon be purged, Lin Liguo, Lin Biao's son and senior army officer, hatched a conspiracy to assassinate Mao. The attempt was never carried out, but the conspiracy was discovered. Lin Liguo wrote the following description of Mao contained in a document later uncovered:

"Today he uses this force to attack that force; tomorrow he uses that force to attack this force. Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices, and tomorrow he puts them to death for some fabricated crimes. Those who are his guests today will be his prisoners tomorrow.

"Looking back at the history of the past few decades, [do you see] anyone whom he has supported initially who has not finally been handed a political death sentence?

"Is there a single political force which has been able to work with him from beginning to end? His former secretaries have either committed suicide or been arrested. His few close comrades-in-arms or trusted aids have also been sent to prison by him....

"He is a paranoid and a sadist. His philosophy of liquidating people is either don't do it, or do it thoroughly. Every time he liquidates someone, he will put them to death before he desists; once he hurts you, he will hurt you all the way, and puts the blame for all bad things on others." (P. 334)

Chairman Mao's Great Revolution was more damaging to China than Chairman Mellon's Great Depression was to America. Both produced reversing reactions from their respective extremes: The reaction to the Cultural Revolution was less intervention in the Chinese economy - the revisionist "capitalist road". The reaction to the Great Depression was more intervention in the American economy - Keynesian fiscal policy.

But the most important difference, of course, is that Mao was a shrewed sociopath - certifiably insane as Stalin - who became one of the twentieth-century'e most monsterous mass murderers.

This book is probably one of the best chronologies of the Cultural Revolution period in China, until the Chinese Communist Party archives are opened, as occurred after the fall of the party in Russia.

Thomas J. Hickey

Is there anything that is more over-valued than ideological purity? What happens when circumstances change? Rational people change approach to fit circumstances, stupid people are afraid of flip flopping (whatever that is) and stay the course no matter what. Common sense is not always all that common.

Common sense was in short supply during the time of Chairman Mao's Great Cultural Revolution and the victim of ideological purity is always the common people. The Cultural Revolution came soon on the heels of the "Great Leap Forward" which itself lead to widespread famine, starvation, and countless acts of individual terror against the very people who could have provided some improvement to their circumstances.

The failure of Mao's ideas in the late 50s and the horrors it inflicted on the Chinese people lead to the rise in power of both Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaping who were pragmatists and who wanted to undo some of the more glaring errors of Mao's programs. Deng made the statement that it did not matter what colour the cat as long as it catches mice. Such intelligent and pragmatic thinking was an anathema to an ideologist like Mao, however as the authors point out this was only a portion of the motivation behind the Great Cultural Revolution.

Mao feared revision for three main reasons, that he could be sidelined from real power by Liu and Deng (much as Khrushchev was following his policy failures) was the first of these, followed by concerns arising the Sino Soviet split. He was willing the sacrifice the well-being of his country to satisfy an ideological whim Once Liu was gone and Deng sidelined, the people at the heart of the cultural revolution came under Mao's scrutiny leading to the minister of defense, Lin Biao's unsuccessful flight to the Soviet Union. Deng was back in 1973 and then he wasn't in 1975. In the end it was the leaders of the Great Cultural Revolution who were arrested, the so-called Gang of Four (which included Mao's wife and her cronies from Shanghai). These people were surprised when the country expressed delight at their passing. Ideologues are always among the most self delusional of people.

This book by Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals aside from going over familiar ground also adds considerably to the understanding of this disastrous period in Chinese history in which experts were beaten and humiliated, temples were razed and no one was sure quite what was going on. Where new ground is established is largely over the role of Zhou Enlai, which was less activist than is currently portrayed in official histories. This is likely to be the definitive study of the subject until the archives in Beijing are opened for extensive inspection. Although Mao did view the Great Cultural Revolution as one of his great accomplishments it is not quite sure what was accomplished and why if any of the results should be considered praise worthy. Were Mao to have won his battle with history to maintain China in a state of continuous revolution, China would never have scaled the heights that it has today. Such are the ironies of history.

This fine book is a narrative and analysis of the disastrous Cultural Revolution. The authors are recognized experts on modern Chinese history and this book synthesizes their own primary research and a large volume of secondary research, drawing on both Western and Chinese sources. A major focus is the complex politics at the apex of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Macfarquhar and Schoenhals do a good job of integrating information about provincial politics and the general social impact of the Cultural Revolution. More detail about the social consequences of the Cultural Revolution would have been helpful but this is probably limited by sources.

The central figure of this book, not surprisingly, is Mao Zedong and his central role is a part of the reason much of the book focuses on the higher politics of the Cultural Revolution. Though the Cultural Revolution unleashed latent, destructive forces within China, Mao set the Cultural Revolution in motion and sustained it for years. The authors describe Mao accurately as one of the great tyrants of the 20th century and the text shows his incredible egoism very clearly. Mao clearly set out to produce a state of chaos in China. Why? Mao definitely believed in some idea of a perpetual revolution and mass mobilization. More important, however, seems to have been his insecurity about his paramount position. In the aftermath of the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and seeing the example of the deposition of Krushchev in the Soviet Union, Mao was concerned that there was a risk of no longer being the Supreme leader. Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution by destroying important centers of independent leadership within the CCP and decapitating the military leadership. These moves were followed by mass mobilizations that essentially destroyed the existing formal governmental structures and party discipline. In this chaos, Mao's position and authority as the central arbiter were enhanced greatly. Stalin used similar tactics in the great Purges of the 30s. Recurrent purges and contrived crises produced states of virtual civil war in many parts of China, enormous economic disruption, and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The Cultural Revolution ended only with Mao's death and the re-emergence of more pragmatic leadership. The authors are very good at depicting many of the major actors. The charismatic Zhou Enlai emerges as a profoundly ambiguous figure. A pragmatic leader who tried hard to govern China in the Cultural Revolution, he also displayed slavish devotion to Mao. This book is written well and authors display a nice eye for telling detail. Who would have thought that On The Road was popular among the Red Guards or that Mao's ruthless henchman Kang Sheng was known for the elegance of his calligraphy. Most revealing of all, Mao enjoyed being compared with Qin Shi Huangdi, the tyrannical first emperor of China.

This is also an unusually well produced book. There are some thoughtful features that enhance readability. The authors provide a nice list of the many acronyms describing important organizations in China and a glossary of important figures during the Cultural Revolution.