CHAOS OF THE REVOLUTION LAID BARE

TITLE: The Cultural Revolution AUTHOR: Frank Dikötter REVIEWER: Christopher Hardin

IN THE spring of 1980 the earth sprouted books. From numerous newly dug holes around the city of Nanjing, old tea chests were retrieved, their contents used to refill ransacked library shelves. As Mao Tse-tung’s formaldehyde-infused corpse passed a fourth year inside its Tiananmen Square mausoleum, young Nanjingese sat under street lights in the warm evening air, making the most of their harvest before the power went off for the night.

How to explain the decade of winter that had gone before? Many of these women and men had been corralled into acts of extreme violence, of which few would have believed themselves capable.

Then followed eviction from their city, so that, along with millions of other young urbanites across China, they could “learn” from their rural comrades – by being beaten, starved and raped.

China ’ s leadership opened and closed the book on the chaos of the Cultural Revolution as quickly as it could, diverting blame away from the recently deceased chairman and making it risky business for anyone in mainland China to offer an alternative view. But since the late 1970s, people outside China have mined party propaganda, interviews with refugees in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and a flood of memoirs – from The Private Life of

Chairman Mao by his personal physician to Jung Chang ’ s Wild Swans – for insights into Mao’s final throw of the dice.

As with the first two parts of his People ’ s

Trilogy on Maoist China – Mao ’ s Great

Famine (2010) and The Tragedy of Liberation (2013) – Frank Dikötter promises, with rare archival access, to immerse us as never before in the everyday lives of the Chinese who survived the surreal events of 19621976, and of those – around a million – who did not.

Culture was political. Mao was more determined than ever to rip out the “ideological rot”, as Dikötter puts it, replacing all that was “feudal, superstitious, Confucian, preposterous and pornographic” with Mao Tse-tung Thought, available in the form of a little book encased in “gaudy red plastic… no bigger than the palm of a hand”.

In August 1966, whipped up by an elite “Cultural Revolution Group” including Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing. School children and students with the right party connections were encouraged, as “Red Guards”, to beat schoolteachers to death with nail-studded clubs, pour boiling water over them, and post public target lists encompassing any and all remnants of the “old world” – from tailors to pedlars, flower-sellers to the inappropriately dressed. Books were sent by the lorry-load to be pulped, public monuments destroyed. Even cats were declared bourgeois – put into sacks and smashed against walls.

Dikötter never allows his intense account of the Cultural Revolution's “Red Years” – in his chronological scheme of Red, Black and Grey – to degenerate into melodrama. Networks of power and information – committees, newspaper editorials, gangs of guards marching in formation – are carefully traced, revealing a movement that spiralled into general score-settling on such a scale that Mao and his allies had only intermittent control.

But beyond noting the power of frenzy and peer pressure, and the young people’s calculation that joining the conformist mayhem was the only way to survive and get ahead, Dikötter draws few parallels between this period and China’s modern culture of political violence. –