Özet
This is the final volume in a trilogy that examines the politics, personalities, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. It seeks to answer the central question: Why did Chairman Mao Zedong launch the Cultural Revolution (1966--76), which plunged China into chaos and almost destroyed its Communist Party?
"The Coming of the Cataclysm" starts with the great famine of the early 1960s, which resulted in tens of millions of deaths and set in train a series of emergency measures that increasingly divided Mao from his comrades-in-arms. His anger that they were prepared to adopt "capitalist" methods to rescue the country was sharpened by his belief that Moscow had actually gone capitalist and sold out to the "imperialist" West. From 1961 to 1966, the period covered by this volume, the increasingly urgent question for Mao was how to prevent a similar revolutionary degeneration in China. The Cultural Revolution was his answer.
Drawing upon new evidence from Party documents, personal interviews, books, and journals, MacFarquhar details the growing rift between Mao and his colleagues as they attempted to cope with domestic privation and an increasingly hostile international environment -- until the Chairman finally decided to smash the unity of the Yan'an Round Table by unleashing society against the party-state.
Özet
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.
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar was born in Lahore, India on December 2, 1930. He graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Keble College, Oxford University, in 1953. He briefly worked at The Telegraph of London before receiving a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University.
In 1960, he founded The China Quarterly, an academic journal on Chinese politics and economics published by the University of Cambridge. He was elected to Parliament in Britain as a Labour candidate in 1974 and served for five years. He went on to teach history and political science at Harvard. He was the director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard from 1986 to 1992, and again from 2005 to 2006. He wrote several books including The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. He died from heart failure on February 10, 2019 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar was born in Lahore, India on December 2, 1930. He graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Keble College, Oxford University, in 1953. He briefly worked at The Telegraph of London before receiving a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University.
In 1960, he founded The China Quarterly, an academic journal on Chinese politics and economics published by the University of Cambridge. He was elected to Parliament in Britain as a Labour candidate in 1974 and served for five years. He went on to teach history and political science at Harvard. He was the director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard from 1986 to 1992, and again from 2005 to 2006. He wrote several books including The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. He died from heart failure on February 10, 2019 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
