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 stated goal of the Cultural Revolution 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. Frank Dikötter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era.
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"A fine, sharp study of this tumultuous, elusive era . . . [An] excellent follow-up to his groundbreaking previous work . . . Dikotter tells a harrowing tale of unbelievable suffering. A potent combination of precise history and moving examples."
— Kirkus Starred Review
Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian who specializes in modern China. He is best known as the author of Mao’s Great Famine, which won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize.
Paul Costanzo earned both his BA and MA from Juilliard in trumpet performance. As a freelance performer his musical credits range from the Metropolitan to the San Francisco Symphony. He has also been a voice actor for over twenty years and has performed numerous radio commercials, television promos, and narrations for major corporations nationwide. As an audiobook narrator and director, he records regularly for Brilliance Audio, Tantor Media, and Deyan Audio.