Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

Based on a wide variety of unusual and only recently available sources, this book covers the entire Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76) and shows how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary Chinese at the base of urban and rural society. The contributors emphasize the complex interaction of state and society during this tumultuous period, exploring the way events originating at the center of political power changed people's lives and how, in turn, people's responses took the Cultural Revolution in unplanned and unanticipated directions. This approach offers a more fruitful way to understand the Cultural Revolution and its historical legacies. The book provides a new look at the student Red Guard movements, the effort to identify and cultivate potential "revolutionary" leaders in outlying provinces, stubborn resistance to campaigns to destroy the old culture, and the violence and mass killings in rural China.

The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

This is the first book to explore the global influence of Maoism on modern and contemporary art. Featuring eighteen original essays written by established and emerging scholars from around the world, and illustrated with fascinating images not widely known in the west, the volume demonstrates the significance of visuality in understanding the protean nature of this powerful worldwide revolutionary movement. Contributions address regions as diverse as Singapore, Madrid, Lima and Maputo, moving beyond stereotypes and misconceptions of Mao Zedong Thought's influence on art to deliver a survey of the social and political contexts of this international phenomenon. At the same time, the book attends to the the similarities and differences between each case study. It demonstrates that the chameleonic appearances of global Maoism deserve a more prominent place in the art history of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Cultural Revolution was an emotionally charged political awakening for the educated youth of China. Called upon by aging revolutionary Mao Tse-tung to assume a “vanguard” role in his new revolution to eliminate bourgeois revisionist influence in education, politics, and the arts, and to help to establish proletarian culture, habits, and customs, in a new Chinese society, educated young Chinese generally accepted this opportunity for meaningful and dramatic involvement in Chinese affairs. It also gave them the opportunity to gain recognition as a viable and responsible part of the Chinese polity. In the end, these revolutionary youths were not successful in proving their reliability. Too “idealistic” to compromise with the bourgeois way, their sense of moral rectitude also made it impossible for them to submerge their factional differences with other revolutionary mass organizations to achieve unity and consolidate proletarian victories. Many young revolutionaries were bitterly disillusioned by their own failures and those of other segments of the Chinese population and by the assignment of recent graduates to labor in rural communes. Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China reconstructs the events of the Cultural Revolution as they affected young people. Martin Singer integrates material from a range of factors and effects, including the characteristics of this generation of youths, the roles Mao called them to play, their resentment against the older generation, their membership in mass organizations, the educational system in which they were placed, and their perception that their skills were underutilized. To most educated young people in China, Singer concludes, the Cultural Revolution represented a traumatic and irreversible loss of political innocence, made yet more tragic by its allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of an old revolutionary to preserve his legacy from the inevitable storms of history.

Mao Zedong launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" 30 years ago. This documentary history of the event presents a selection of key primary documents dealing with the Cultural Revolution's massive and bloody assault on China's political and social systems.

Hong Yung Lee’s account of the Cultural Revolution illuminates its complexities and subtleties to an unprecedented degree. His primary concern is with the behavior of the masses once they were freed from party control, and his analysis of voluminous Red Guard publications highlights the different membership characteristics, positions, and strategies of both the student Red Guards and the worker Revolutionary Rebels, divided internally along a conservative-radical line. Rejecting the ideologically oriented assumption that workers and students of worker or peasant origin comprised the majority of the radical elements, Lee argues that students of bourgeois and other “bad” origins, workers in small factories, “sent-down” students, and demobilized soldiers were the radicals, whereas students from families with pre-1949 revolutionary careers and workers in large-scale and modern enterprises were found in large numbers among the conservatives. He contends that, contrary to some social science theories, the radicals were motivated by rational rather than ideological considerations, and that they attacked the status quo because it was they who experienced discrimination under the existing political system, whereas the conservatives generally belonged to favored social groups. Lee demonstrates that an adequate history of the Cultural Revolution cannot restrict itself to an analysis of policy difference among the elites, but must consider the behavior of the masses and their relationship with the elites. This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.