The World Turned Upside Down

September 28, 2020
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.

January 1, 2021

The Cultural Revolution was a mass movement launched in the People's Republic of China from 1966 to 1976. In 1981, the Chinese Communist Party wrote an official history of that event interpreting it as a mistake by Mao Zedong that was taken advantage of by "counterrevolutionary cliques." Journalist Yang (Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962), the first mainland China-based independent scholar to provide a complete history of the Cultural Revolution, offers a more nuanced interpretation here. According to Yang, the revolution was a complex and chaotic situation that multiple interest groups used to try and advance their position. Liu Shaoqi (Mao's onetime designated successor), rather than being the helpless victim of the revolution as portrayed in the official history, was the leader of the bureaucratic clique. And while Liu's fate was personally disastrous, it was his clique that eventually emerged victorious over the rebel faction after the deaths of Lin Biao, Mao, and the arrests of the Gang of Four. Yang also points out that while the various factions were competing for power, it was the common people who suffered from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. VERDICT This detailed and thoroughly researched work is essential reading for all students of modern Chinese history.--Joshua Wallace, Tarleton State Univ. Lib. Stephenville, TX

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2020
A potent and sprawling history of the Cultural Revolution, a little-understood and catastrophic decade in modern Chinese history. Nearing 80, Yang participated in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as an actor in what was called the "Great Networking" and then became a journalist for the Xinhua News Agency. As he writes in this essential history, the revolution was initiated by Mao Zedong in a purported effort to purge the Communist Party of bureaucrats and enemies of his version of permanent revolution; instead, the decade of infighting only bolstered the bureaucracy and weakened the political power of the general populace. Said one higher-up, later purged, "I was Chairman Mao's dog, and whomever he told me to bite, I bit." But Mao's greatest allies were the Red Guards, an organization--really, several organizations, sometimes at odds with each other--that had its origins in urban high schools. Imagine a political movement dominated by teenagers, and it's clear that the path will be paved with dangers. Thousands of Chinese people were murdered, their bodies buried in rice paddies or stuffed into wells, an example of the "unprecedented brutality" of the period that the author captures so well. Eventually, Mao had to conclude that the Red Guards must be reined in, an effort that led to civil war. The revolution, Yang asserts, was doomed to fail, and he is now far from the true believer of old. "Even if we allow that Mao's intentions were good," he writes, "socialism, as a form of collectivism, is predicated on the obliteration of the individual and can be achieved only through the evil of coercion." The conflict's effect was contrary indeed, serving to end the faith of most Chinese in communism. Today, Yang writes, "social injustice and lack of upward mobility are causing people in the lower rungs of society to lose hope." A comprehensive history that belongs alongside The Gulag Archipelago as a denunciation of tyranny.

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