Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing' this is the final volume of 'The
People's Trilogy' begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine. 'The
seminal English language work on the subject' Sunday Times 'A major contribution to
scholarship on modern China one that is unequalled certainly in the English language . both
revealing and rewarding reading - for specialists and non-specialists alike' Literary Review
After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives
between 1958 and 1962 an ageing Mao 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 capitalist elements he claimed were
threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to
turn on his colleagues some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms subjecting them to public
humiliation imprisonment and torture. Young students formed Red Guards vowing to defend the
Chairman to the death but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with
semi-automatic 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. When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural
Revolution ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the
party's ideology. In short they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at
last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced undermining the picture of
conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao's regime. By
demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of
violent purges and entrenched fear Frank Dikötter casts China's most tumultuous era in a
wholly new light. Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents
from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches this third chapter
in Frank Dikötter's extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking 'People's Trilogy' is a
devastating reassessment of the history of the People's Republic of China.
