This book has been groundbreaking for scholars of the Cultural Revolution, but hitherto was only available in Japanese and Chinese. This edition allows English-language readers to access the work for the first time. The author explains how political struggles within the state, competing sectarian interests, and other complex factors intertwined to produce various forms of collective violence that had a major impact on the political, economic, and social order of the time.

In this important and hugely ambitious book, one of the world’s leading political scientists working on China demonstrates how Western views of China are flawed because the long tradition of Western scholarship studying China views China from the Western philosophical and intellectual perspective rather than viewing China on its own terms through the lens of China’s own long-established and reputable philosophical and intellectual tradition. Providing a deep analysis of Western scholarship on China, including work from Leibniz to Marx to Weber and then to Wittfogel, and a thorough account of the evolution of China’s own thinking about governance as expressed in the practices of successive Chinese dynasties, the book goes on to examine how the current Chinese body politic fits with and is the natural outcome of China’s own long, well-thought-through and well-practiced intellectual consideration of what the nature of civilized governance should be. By focusing on philosophical and intellectual approaches rather than on theoretical or methodological ones, the book shows how the huge and increasing disconnect between non-Chinese views of China and Chinese ones has come about.

Uses the framework of 'market in state', to argue that the Chinese economy is state-centered, dominated by political principles over economic principles.

The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.

Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed. The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above," and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy. The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.