Macfarquhar: the Origins of the Cultural Revolution Vol 1 (Cloth)

Beschreibung:

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. Roderick MacFarquhar is the first
to use 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? Volume 3
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. This volume is the first scholarly work for twenty years to
focus on the whole gamut of events - political, economic, intellectual,
military, and international - in the years leading up to the Cultural
Revolution and makes use of a multitude of Chinese documentary,
biographical, and historical works that have only appeared in the last
decade.