Why did Mao Zedong launch the cultural revolution that almost destroyed all that he had worked so long and so hard to create? In his highly praised study-now a classic-Roderick MacFarquhar seeks to answer that question by examining the politics, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780231057172 The second volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, economics, culture and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to he mid-1960s, this volume tells the story of the Great Leap Forward—Mao's utopian attempt to propel China economically and socially into the twenty-first century by mobilizing his nation's greatest asset: its disciplined manpower. The effort produced economic disaster and political dissension, and helped to precipitate the Sino-Soviet split. Today's leaders point to it as the beginning of two decades of national trauma, which ended only after the death of Mao and the purge of the Gang of Four. Those leaders have recently authorized the release of a mass of new documentation in the form of political reminiscences, economic statistics, and leaders' speeches. This volume is the first scholarly work to use the new material comprehensively, weaving it into the narrative along with the contemporary record and the revelations published in Red Guard newspapers during the cultural revolution. The result is the most detailed account and analysis to date of what went wrong and why.

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.