Mao's Last Revolution (Hardcover)

by Roderick MacFarquhar (Author), Michael Schoenhals (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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."
Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 752 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; First edition. edition (August 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674023323
• ISBN-13: 978-0674023321
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #557,226 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Hows & Whys of a Historical Tragedy, September 1, 2006

By	Scot Carr "Film and book phanatic" (Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An encyclopedia of the Cultural Revolution, January 8, 2007

By	Sergey Radchenko (Pittsburg, KS USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wondrous scholarship of an unfathomable time, January 13, 2007

By	David Robinson (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.