The Origins of the Cultural Revolution : Volume 3: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961-1966

Abstract

This is the final volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, personalities, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. The book uses a multitude of new Chinese sources to answer the question: Why did Chairman Mao Zedong launch the Cultural Revolution which plunged China into chaos and almost destroyed its Communist Party? This book begins with the great famine of the early 1960s, which resulted in tens of millions of deaths, setting in train a series of emergency measures which increasingly divided Mao from his comrades-in-arms. The Chairman's anger that they were prepared to adopt ‘capitalist’ methods to rescue the country was sharpened by his belief that Moscow was denouncing his revolutionary diplomacy because the Soviet leadership had gone capitalist and sold out to the ‘imperialist’ West. From 1961 to 1966, the increasingly urgent question for Mao was how to prevent a similar revolutionary deterioration in China. The Cultural Revolution, in which tens of thousands of loyal party veterans were publicly disgraced to make way for a supposedly more leftist generation of Red Guards, was his answer. Ironically, after it all ended with Mao's death, one survivor, Deng Xiaoping, was so appalled at the destructiveness of the Chairman's final cataclysm that he actually did turn to capitalism to revive the country.