Mao's Last Revolution
by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Belknap Press, $273
The Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong's brutal swansong: a terrifying decade that began in 1966 and ended with his death on September 9, 1976, during which hundreds of thousands were killed in the name of rooting out revisionists. In reality, they died for reasons nobody understood at the time. Even top Communist Party leaders, schooled in the purges and treachery of the party's early years, were some-times appalled by the hatred and violence that swept the country. In effect, the decade was planned and executed by Mao with one goal in mind - to stay in power.
Attempting to make sense of this flurry of vicious and often apparently meaningless activity is a huge challenge. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals' academic book, timed for the 30th anniversary of Mao's death, gracefully, and with a necessary forensic flair, weaves a web of fact from disparate sources. The result is a detailed mosaic of this baffling era. The two political scientists (MacFarquhar a Harvard professor, Schoenhals a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden) build a picture that shocks with its cool detail.
In Wuhan, officially sanctioned militias such as the Million Heroes paid teenagers 20 yuan to kill rival nine-year-olds. Called on to rebel in Beijing, Red Guards, students and others murdered at least 1,772 people in the months of August and September 1966. School students beat teachers to death - one study shows that students at each of 85 elite primary and secondary schools and colleges surveyed tortured their teachers. In the Beijing suburb of Daxing, 325 people were butchered in one night by local militias inspired by the Red Guards - the youngest victim 38 days old, the oldest 80, the authors report. Twenty-two households were wiped out that night, part of Mao's overarching vision of 'great disorder under heaven'. Mao hoped it would be followed by 'great order under heaven', as the 72-year-old explained in a letter to his wife, Jiang Qing, on July 8, 1966.
Mao's pronouncements reveal a chilling mindset. 'This man Hitler was even more ferocious. The more ferocious the better, don't you think? The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are,' he is quoted as saying.