I have read Dikotter's earlier Mao's great Famine. I just finished this. A very well-written and enjoyable (albeit tremendously sad) book.

First, I am a fan for some reason of history of mid-20th century political pathologies. So I have read a lot of Stalin books and a lot of Hitler books. If you are not particularly interested in that topic--or more particularly interested in China--then you may find this dry. But if you have any interest at all in the topic, you will find it enjoyable.

The story is told in chapters that correspond to phases of the Cultural Revolution. This makes the book a little hard to follow, since (this was one thing I learned) the Cultural Revolution was far from linear. Mao lent support first to one faction then to another. Power ebbed and flowed between factions, yesterday's political oppressors becoming today's political prisoners (and then back again).

Random amazing fact: Demand, instilled by a desire to avoid being politically suspect, for copies of Mao's Little Red Book was so high that industrial output had to be redirected; soap production fell by 15% nationally to allow for production of the book.

For the general reader (like me) the book is well written and clear enough to be enjoyable. From the footnotes, it appears the Dikotter has been in the archives a lot. Nealy all the notes refer to original sources.

Good book.

A superbly researched and written account of Mao Zedon's dictatorship, focusing on how he designed The Cultural Revolution to destroy his Communist Party enemies and millions of decent Chinese. His enduring hatred of the educated class did more harm to China than all its external enemies, as teachers, writers, artists, and small businessmen were wiped out or driven to suicide through public torture. A primer in how a dictator manipulates the political and military apparatus to destroy their own people in the name of Marxism-Leninism.

The Cultural Revolution has failed, at least on an ideological level. The revisionist plot to overthrow communism has succeeded, and capitalism (with Chinese characteristics) is now the economic model of the People's Republic. What has not failed operated on a more practical level, the securing of Mao's unchallenged power. This worked so well his successors are in control a half century later.

The Cultural Revolution ('66-'76) was a mass social upheaval of students and workers unleashed by Mao against his perceived enemies within the party and army. During the Great Leap Forward ('58-'62) command economy and collective farming starved some thirty million people to death. Mao's political capital was nearly expended and comrades were emboldened to criticize his policies. It was at once a brilliant and ruthless gambit to weaponize the people against his political enemies.

When the Cultural Revolution was over the party was purged and the comrades were chastened, notably Mao's No. 2, President Liu Shaoqi (who died under Mao's arrest) and future Chairman Deng Xiaoping (who survived to succeed Mao). The student uprisings nearly led to civil war, until Mao dialed them down and declared the military in charge by late '68. Mao's cult of personality had now been unquestionably established and backed by his junta he was worshipped throughout the land.

In the later phases of the revolution, the people too were purged, by military-led revolutionary committees. Ordinary citizens were denounced, interrogated, imprisoned or executed by their peers for perceived or fabricated class crimes. Professionals, teachers, and students were banished from large cities to be re-educated in the countryside. There they labored and starved amongst a peasant population unable and unwilling to absorb them. As the years ground on the revolution devolved into an endless cycle of upheaval whose ultimate purpose was to intimidate and control the people.

This third and last volume of a trilogy on post WWII China is told by historian Dikotter mainly through memoirs, news articles and provincial archives recently made available. The memoirs run a range from popular accounts such as Wild Swans to unpublished diaries. Anecdotes and data are pasted together like snippets in a scrapbook, arranged chronologically to form a narrative. This becomes a formidable wall of information, and there is an absence of analysis apart from interjected comments. Readers are left to their own conclusions, although the events often speak for themselves.

The book does not take an overtly polemical stance, although some may assert that it does. Is Dikotter a red-baiter​ or Mao hater? The author wrote prior works on the positive aspects of the opium trade and Republican China. He is a card carrying member of the Hoover Institution. Interviews on NPR and the South China Post note the dilemma he faced was "the level of horror to present". The book does have a sensational tenor at times. Perhaps it is the extremity of the era, but it is also the focus of the author. Dikotter reflects "to be silent risks complicity", a line of thought once expressed by Elie Wiesel.

What is described in this book is so troubling that unless one denies its veracity, one must criticize the regime that made it possible. The hardest lesson may not be what an unchecked leader can do to his people, but rather what an unchecked people can do to each other. It is a disturbing portrait of the events that unfolded.

Another nice entry by Dikötter into Chinese history. He covers the era in depth, with all of the death, denunciations, and economic calmity that happened in this time period (along with some of the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of the times, as well). I found the entry on the Great Leap Forward to be a more fascinating read, but this book is still eye-opening. You certainly get the sense of the great respect Dikötter (and the reader also gets) has for the Chinese people in getting though the Cultural Revolution.