Red Guards

By JUDITH SHAPIRO | The New York Times
October 08, 2006

CHINA's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, caused an estimated one million unnatural deaths. It is widely viewed as one of history’s most horrific political cataclysms. Yet there is a peculiar amnesia at play in China, where the regime, whose legitimacy depends on protecting the record of the Communist Party and its founder Mao Zedong, suppresses discussion of the past. Ordinary Chinese, influenced by Confucian traditions that emphasize social harmony, are complicit in the silence, preferring to withhold blame for the violence and to avoid reflecting on personal responsibility. Indeed, in the context of today’s rapidly changing China, the nightmare of denunciations by Red Guards, widespread torture, Mao worship, book burnings and government-orchestrated mass relocations seems a distant memory. Yet until China comes to terms with the root causes of the Cultural Revolution, it is unlikely that a genuinely open polity and legal system will emerge to support the economic freedoms that have dramatically transformed Chinese lives.

Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s book, “Mao’s Last Revolution,” the first major history of the elite politics of the period, may generate a wave of Cultural Revolution scholarship within China and encourage healthy debate over state manipulation of historical memory. It is not, however, a book for those lacking some knowledge of recent Chinese history. Its cast of characters includes relatively well-known figures like Mao Zedong, his wife, Jiang Qing, and the other members of the ultraleftist Gang of Four, as well as the top military leader Lin Biao, the beloved Premier Zhou Enlai and the Cultural Revolution’s top-ranking victims, President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping. But it also features numerous others who are unknown in the West except among specialists. With little hand-holding from the authors, readers are likely to confuse similar-sounding Chinese names, purges and counterpurges, and unfamiliar events whose significance is unclear.

Yet the book is an important first effort to establish the facts.

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