Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, A People’s History, 1962–1976

University of Hong Kong Professor Frank Dikötter has completed his trilogy of Mao’s rule. The prior book in the series, BBC Samuel Johnson award-winning Mao’s Great Famine, was remarkable for its clarity of writing and unflinching exploration of how elite bureaucratic decisions came to starve tens of millions. Dikötter successfully applies the same model to Mao’s surreal and grisly final act in The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History.

Dikötter claims the Cultural Revolution was a direct follow-up to his Great Leap Forward. The radical attempt to remold thought was an “ageing dictator’s determination to shore up his own standing in world history,” a “second attempt to become the historical pivot around which the socialist universe revolved.” Mao desperately feared that a Chinese Khrushchev would denounce him after his death, and was willing to sacrifice another million to revolutionary ardor to bolster his legacy’s insurance policy.

A People’s History makes for more gripping reading than the classic English-language primer on the Cultural Revolution, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhal’s Mao’s Last Revolution. Employing research from interviews and memoirs as well as new archives, Dikötter gives the reader a sense of both the high politics driving events and how these decisions played out and took a life of their own in cities and villages across China.

One often gets the sense of how China ‘worked towards Mao,’ much how Ian Kershaw explained in his Hitler biography that the Third Reich “worked towards the Führer.” Fearful of persecution and eager to please the Chairman, one offhand comment of his could trigger a Beijing Daily article, sparking a new policy change and violent flare-up. Unlike Nazi Germany, however, the masses, as well as the bureaucracy, took initiative, to such an extent that by the end of the Cultural Revolution, people were seizing arms and fighting with artillery to overthrow the People’s Liberation Army.

Dikötter is particularly strong in the buildup and culmination of the 1966–1968 ‘Red Years.’ His writing gives a sense of the competitive and accelerating radicalization of the Cultural Revolution that by the summer of 1968 had students “forging weapons from high-carbon steel,” committing suicide rather than surrendering to competing Red Guard units, and even, he claims, ritually consuming class enemies.

Unfortunately, like the Cultural Revolution itself Dikötter loses steam after 1969. He ends too abruptly. Dikötter does a decent job explaining how Mao’s decisions undermined radical collectivization. Ill-planned schemes like ‘Learning from Dazhai’ self-reliance initiative and ‘Third Front’ rural industrialization wasted two-thirds of the state’s capital investment. Poverty compelled many to begin following the capitalist road.

However, he fails to adequately develop his thesis that the Cultural Revolution also led to “the destruction of the remnants of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.” A few dozen pages would’ve been appreciated on how Deng Xiaoping adapted to the Revolution’s legacy.

Overall, The People’ History is an accessible and impactful account of one of history’s strangest episodes of mass unrest. Not the usual culprits — race, religion or economics — but one man wielding ideology drove a nation in peacetime to turn on itself. The legacies of the Cultural Revolution still impact China to this day and both students and the reading public would be wise to turn to Dikötter for a gripping narrative introduction.