Since the Cultural Revolution, data have been uncovered to illuminate that tumultuous decade. In this volume 13 scholars examine the gap between the ideology of the Revolution and the harsh and contradictory reality of its outcome. They focus particularly on the violence, coercion, and constant tension between the need for centralization to enforce policies and the need for decentralizing decision-making if those goals were to be achieved.

Publisher description

Examines the radical Chinese Communist movement called the Cultural Revolution, a period of suppression so controversial in China, that the Chinese government forbids a full investigation into it even 50 years later. Original.

A revealing exploration of political disruption and violence in a rural Chinese county during the Cultural Revolution A Decade of Upheaval chronicles the surprising and dramatic political conflicts of a rural Chinese county over the course of the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on an unprecedented range of sources—including work diaries, interviews, internal party documents, and military directives—Dong Guoqiang and Andrew Walder uncover a previously unimagined level of strife in the countryside that began with the Red Guard Movement in 1966 and continued unabated until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Showing how the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were not limited to urban areas, but reached far into isolated rural regions, Dong and Walder reveal that the intervention of military forces in 1967 encouraged factional divisions in Feng County because different branches of China’s armed forces took various sides in local disputes. The authors also lay bare how the fortunes of local political groups were closely tethered to unpredictable shifts in the decisions of government authorities in Beijing. Eventually, a backlash against suppression and victimization grew in the early 1970s and resulted in active protests, which presaged the settling of scores against radical Maoism. A meticulous look at how one overlooked region experienced the Cultural Revolution, A Decade of Upheaval illuminates the all-encompassing nature of one of the most unstable periods in modern Chinese history.

The Chinese Communist system was from its very inception based on an inherent contradiction and tension, and the Cultural Revolution is the latest and most violent manifestation of that contradiction. Built into the very structure of the system was an inner conflict between the desiderata, the imperatives, and the requirements that technocratic modernization on the one hand and Maoist values and strategy on the other. The Cultural Revolution collects four papers prepared for a research conference on the topic convened by the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies in March 1968. Michel Oksenberg opens the volume by examining the impact of the Cultural Revolution on occupational groups including peasants, industrial managers and workers, intellectuals, students, party and government officials, and the military. Carl Riskin is concerned with the economic effects of the revolution, taking up production trends in agriculture and industry, movements in foreign trade, and implications of Masoist economic policies for China's economic growth. Robert A. Scalapino turns to China's foreign policy behavior during this period, arguing that Chinese Communists in general, and Mao in particular, formed foreign policy with a curious combination of cosmic, utopian internationalism and practical ethnocentrism rooted both in Chinese tradition and Communist experience. Ezra F. Vogel closes the volume by exploring the structure of the conflict, the struggles between factions, and the character of those factions.

The Cultural Revolution in China generated a cascade of commentaries and interpretations on the development and meaning of the upheaval. Many students and researchers have found it difficult to locate and identify literature on the period. This bibliography, first published in 1976, corrects this situation. It lists all books, monographs and journal articles in English on the Cultural Revolution, each annotated to show its relevance – a vital reference source.

This book provides an alternative analytical approach to the study of China's political changes since the Cultural Revolution, which treats those changes as a transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism. While depicting important political-economic events, it focuses on the changes in such major sociopolitical factors as the people's attitude toward the regime, government policy, the ruling methods of the regime, and the interrelationships among them. Based on the analyses of these factors, the book also predicts the future of the current Communist regime in terms of the challenges it will face and its ability to meet them.