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The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

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Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail.

As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Following Tombstone, his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Yang Jisheng presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding the lasting influence of those years.

The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and a Mao-style cult of personality.

ISBN-13: 9781250829702

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Picador

Publication Date: 01-18-2022

Pages: 768

Product Dimensions: 5.54(w) x 8.34(h) x 1.33(d)

Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. For fifteen years, he was a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirted censorship with articles on controversial political topics. In 2015, he resigned under official pressure. For his groundbreaking work Tombstone, Yang won Sweden’s Stieg Larsson Prize for journalistic courage in 2015, and the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, presented by the Nieman Fellows at Harvard University, in 2016. Tombstone also won the Manhattan Institute’s 2013 Hayek Book Prize and the 2013 Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Yang Jisheng lives in Beijing with his wife and two children. Stacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for more than seventeen years. A longtime journalist, Mosher currently works as a translator and editor in Brooklyn, New York. Guo Jian is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Originally trained in the Chinese language and literature, Guo was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his Ph.D. in English in the mid-1980s.

Table of Contents

Map vii

Translators' Note ix

Author's Note xv

Preface: The Road, the Theory, and the System xxi

Chronology of the Cultural Revolution xxxiii

1 Major Events Preceding the Cultural Revolution 3

2 Lighting the Fuse 33

3 Removing Obstructions 48

4 The May Conference: Formal Launch of the Cultural Revolution 64

5 Liu Shaoqi's Anti-Rightist Movement 81

6 Major Incidents During the Eleventh Plenum 95

7 The Red Guards and Red August 111

8 Denouncing the Bourgeois Reactionary Line 135

9 The Rise, Actions, and Demise of Mass Organizations 149

10 The "Workers Command Post" and Shanghai's "January Storm" 167

11 The "February Countercurrent" and the "February Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries" 187

12 The Armed Forces and the "Three Supports and Two Militaries" 205

13 "Red Through Every Hill and Vale" 227

14 The Wuhan Incident and Mao's Strategic Shift 263

15 The Baffling "May 10" Investigation 284

16 The Cleansing of the Class Ranks 305

17 The One Strike and Three Antis Campaign 327

18 Mass Killings Carried Out by Those in Power 345

19 The Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee: Eliminating Liu Shaoqi 365

20 The Ninth National Party Congress: From Unity to Division 379

21 Fogged in on Lushan: The Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee 400

22 Chen Boda's Denunciation and Lin Biao's Escape Attempt 421

23 Criticizing Lin Biao-as a Leftist or Rightist? 453

24 Internal Struggle During the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius 477

25 From General Overhaul to the Campaign Against Deng and Right-Deviating Verdict-Reversal 509

26 The April Fifth Movement 534

27 The Curtain Falls on the Cultural Revolution 557

28 China's Foreign Relations During the Cultural Revolution 585

29 Reform and Opening Under the Bureaucratic System 602

Notes 623

Index 697