The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

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.

Now known to the Chinese as the "ten years of chaos," the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought death to thousands and persecution to millions. Xing Lu identifies the rhetorical features and explores the persuasive effects of political language and symbolic practices during the period. She examines how leaders of the Communist Party enacted a rhetoric in political contexts to legitimize power and violence and to dehumanize a group of people identified as class enemies.

China's decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution shook the politics of China and the world. Even as we approach its fiftieth anniversary, the movement remains so contentious that the Chinese Communist Party still forbids fully open investigation of its origins, development, and conclusion. Drawing upon a vital trove of scholarship, memoirs, and popular culture, this Very Short Introduction illuminates this complex, often obscure, and still controversial movement. Moving beyond the figure of Mao Zedong, Richard Curt Kraus links Beijing's elite politics to broader aspects of society and culture, highlighting many changes in daily life, employment, and the economy. Kraus also situates this very nationalist outburst of Chinese radicalism within a global context, showing that the Cultural Revolution was mirrored in the radical youth movement that swept much of the world, and that had imagined or emotional links to China's red guards. Yet it was also during the Cultural Revolution that China and the United States tempered their long hostility, one of the innovations in this period that sowed the seeds for China's subsequent decades of spectacular economic growth.

The Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China started in 1966 and lasted about a decade. This revolutionary upsurge of Chinese students and workers, led by Mao Zedong, wreaked havoc in the world's most populous country, often turning things upside down and undermining the party, government, and army while simultaneously weakening the economy, society, and culture. Tens of millions of people were killed, injured, or imprisoned during this period and relatively few benefited, aside from Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four, the group that would eventually receive the blame for the events of the Cultural Revolution. Given the turbulence and confusion, it is hard to know just what happened. The Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution tackles this task. First, in an extensive chronology, which traces the events from year to year and month to month, then in an introduction puts these events in context and helps to explain them. But most importantly, the bulk of the information is provided in a dictionary section with numerous cross-referenced entries on important persons, places, institutions, and movements. A bibliography points to further sources of information and a glossary will help those researching in Chinese.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which took place in China between 1966 and 1976, was a major political and social tragedy in Chinese history. As part of an effort to understand how the state enforced control amid seeming chaos, this book looks at the ubiquitous revolutionary presentations and performances of power, such as political rituals, revolutionary rhetoric, and public gatherings, in people’s everyday lives during the Cultural Revolution as performances that contributed to the control of the Chinese people. In particular, this book discusses how the promotion of revolutionary models in real life contributed to people’s eagerness to perform the role of the ideal revolutionary, and how the possibility of complete revolutionary transformation, promoted by the state media, and the hard fact that no one was able to completely become a Maoist subject, who would be completely selfless and think and speak only Maoist teaching, subjected people to a state of becoming but never fully having become. The fear of failing in the Maoist transformation constituted the inner mechanism that propelled ordinary people’s radical revolutionary behavior. In addition, this book examines the audience’s reaction to Jiang Qing’s court performance in the trial of the Gang of Four as an anarchic liberation from the revolutionary performance of the Cultural Revolution. Utilizing methodologies of cultural anthropology, linguistics, acting theory, and literary criticism, this book reveals how people’s performances of their everyday life functioned as mechanisms of social control.