History: Mao Zedong famously described the Cultural Revolution as "a single spark that started a prairie fire", an inferno that scorched China for 10 years until the man still known as the Great Helmsman died in 1976, writes Clifford Coonan
Mao wanted to create "great disorder under heaven", which would be followed by "great order under heaven". The Cultural Revolution declared war on bourgeois culture, capitalist-roaders and class enemies, but it was primarily a bloody purge aimed at entrenching Mao's hold on power and establishing a cult of personality around him.
"Beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong thought - no matter who they are, what banner they fly, or how exalted their positions may be." This was the message of the Cultural Revolution and it was carried out to the letter.
The Communist Party describes the Cultural Revolution as a disaster for China and its people, and refers to it as the "10-year catastrophe". But Mao's portrait still gazes over Tiananmen Square and adorns every bank note. Officially, the Great Helmsman is 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad.
This detailed, important book, which is published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Mao's death, describes the reign of terror that ended with his demise on September 9th, 1976.
Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar is a well-known expert on the era, while Michael Schoenhals teaches about modern Chinese society at Lund University in Sweden. This thoroughly researched book is not aimed at the general reader, but for anyone interested in the period it contains real insights into the Cultural Revolution, when hundreds of thousands were killed, many dying without knowing what they had done wrong. The book communicates an amazing sense of escalation as Mao's "Red Terror" spread through the campuses and schools of Beijing and then into factories, the countryside and people's homes.
Intent on preserving his power, Mao constructed elaborate intrigues around himself and the book captures the hysteria of the era in its descriptions of Red Guards, leftist students and schoolchildren roaming the streets attacking intellectuals, screaming denunciations of "rightists" and "revisionists", forcing their elders to wear dunce hats, beating them up and exiling them to the country.
Victims were bamboozled by the movement's crazy language, with calls to "energetically destroy the four olds" - the ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes. People were "struggled" as part of efforts to root out "monsters and freaks" and "black gangs".
The Cultural Revolution exposed all kinds of individual rivalry and bitterness. A minister's driver put up a poster suggesting his boss was having an affair because he was working late. There were constant allegations of "illicit sexual liaisons" and "moral depravity". Another official was denounced by poster-writing cadres for playing mahjong during a visit to Morocco and allowing his car drive him through a nightclub district while on a Paris visit.
The Red Guards were diligent. In November 1966, 200 teachers and students from Beijing Normal University headed to Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius in Shandong province, and destroyed 6,618 cultural artefacts, including hundreds of paintings and thousands of books and graves.
The Red Guards also dug up the body of a 19th-century hero called Wu Xun, an illiterate beggar who founded schools with what little money he could raise and was attacked as a "propagator of feudal culture". His exhumed corpse was put on trial at a mass sentencing rally, then broken into pieces and burned.
When you talk to many older people in China today about the Cultural Revolution, the mistreatment of the dead is one thing that causes real sorrow. Even the Japanese had respect for the dead, but not the Red Guards, said one man I spoke to recently.
President Liu Shaoqi's comparatively moderate views and reformist economic policies cost Mao's heir apparent his job and his life.
The authors compare the rule by young Red Guards in the Red Terror year of 1966 to the juvenile state of nature in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Investigations at 85 elite colleges and schools after the Cultural Revolution produced evidence that at each one, students tortured teachers. At 12 schools, students beat their teachers to death. Four of the schools were girls' schools.
The call went out on August 26th, 1966 for the immediate wholesale extermination of "landlord and rich peasant elements" at Daxing, on the southern outskirts of Beijing. On that night, 325 people were killed, the dead aged between 38 days and 80 years.
The Cultural Revolution is typically blamed on a conspiracy around Mao, led by Marshal Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, which included Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and three other leftist hardliners.
This book paints the Gang of Four as stooges bent on doing Mao's will and places responsibility for the Cultural Revolution squarely on Mao's shoulders. The Cultural Revolution was an astonishing political experiment and shows how in many respects Mao outdid all the other despots of the 20th century in ruthlessness - even Adolf Hitler.
"This man Hitler was even more ferocious. The more ferocious the better, don't you think? The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are," Mao said.
Mao purged his old comrades as well as future rivals. At a time of massive economic instability following the disastrous collectivisation attempts of the Great Leap Forward, he ignored the country's starving millions and pushed instead for a revolution focused on his political ambitions. And in doing so, he transformed the Communist Party, which still runs China, unlike their internationalist allies in Russia, East Germany or Poland.
Mao's Last Revolution leaves the reader in no doubt that Mao was a monster, but its dispassionate tone points a way towards understanding the genesis of that evil.
Showing how Mao conceived and carried out the Cultural Revolution is crucial to building a broader understanding of that tumultuous period in Chinese history and also what China's future means for the world. This book brings that understanding closer.
Clifford Coonan is a journalist based in Beijing and a regular contributor to The Irish Times
Mao's Last Revolution By Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 688pp. €29.80