Reassessing the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

Two decades after Mao Zedong ignited the Great Proletarian Revolution there is still no satisfactory accounting for the upheaval which Beijing now says caused millions of deaths and left some 100 million people scarred victims. Ordinary imagination cannot grasp what took place during those “10 bad years of great disaster” (shinian haojie) as the Chinese now call them. Since so much at that time defied conventional theories of politics, outsiders quickly put the phenomenon out of mind once the turmoil ceased. For the Chinese, however, it has not been so simple. Those who personally suffered have tended to summarize the story according to their individual tragedies. Chinese seeking a larger perspective are caught between the inexplicableness of its causes and the incalculability of its consequences.