Mao’s Last Revolution

"Mao’s Last Revolution , which I wrote with Michael Schoenhals. But, in the dedication to historians of Chinese origin, we say that we dedicate the book to them because one day, when the archives are open, they will write it for themselves. From the information that’s available now, I think we’ve provided a pretty good account of the Cultural Revolution in that book. But the essence of the Esherick, Pickowicz & Walder book is that these are graduate students who are beginning to come to grips with how you use the materials which are all fragmentary and of very different types in order to study the Cultural Revolution. Only the one chapter I mentioned really goes into the mass violence, and I suspect that we may never, even when the archives are open, be able to fully estimate the number of people killed. All I think I would say with reasonable confidence is that far fewer people died during the Cultural Revolution than died as a result of the Great Famine of 1959-61. The Chinese authorities have effectively banned any academic work on the Cultural Revolution. In December 2006 I gave a lecture in Shanghai, in what I was told was the first seminar ever given anywhere in China on the Cultural Revolution. People who do research on the Cultural Revolution are forced to publish abroad, usually in Hong Kong or Taiwan – except in the case of a couple of very trusted Party historians, who have given semi-official accounts."

"What I find particularly convincing about this book is its wide-ranging quest for blame in the Cultural Revolution, which is one of the most puzzling and unprecedented events in the history of global Communism, in that a leader—Mao—mobilises people at the grassroots in order to destroy the Party-state that he has built. The book begins with and does not spare Mao as a driving-force, but also carefully analyses Mao’s own motivations and complexities. Under the pen of MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao was driven by both ambition for power—the desire to purge comrades whom he resented for sidelining him in the early 1960s—and by some degree of ideological conviction that this was the way to rescue the world Communist revolution from the corrupting influences of the Soviet Union. But responsibility for the political culture that made the Cultural Revolution possible spread far beyond Mao: two of the principal victims, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, were themselves deeply implicated in the PRC’s culture of political violence and humiliation. Technically, the book is a tour-de-force. It offers a survey of Cultural Revolutionaries at every level of Chinese society; it makes use of a fascinating range of primary sources including interviews, memoirs, pamphlets, posters and diaries."