In the Washington Post, Orville Schell reviews Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals:
It has been enthralling to read Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s exhaustively researched new book on China’s Cultural Revolution — a sensation akin to returning to a Chinese painting in which a mist-shrouded landscape has miraculously cleared to reveal what was obscured beyond. While it was not difficult to feel the tension, even the fear, aloft in the land when I reported from Mao Zedong’s China for the New Yorker during the mid-1970s, being there gave few intimations of the dark complexity of the political struggle playing out beneath the surface. By making sense out of this opaque decade, MacFarquhar (who teaches at Harvard University) and Schoenhals (who teaches at Lund University in Sweden) have provided the most definitive roadmap to date of China’s odyssey through those tumultuous times. [Full text]
Read more about the book, via CDT.
