A new book, Mao’s Last Revolution
There is a play on words popular among Beijing intellectuals that transposes the characters for “cultural revolution” — “wenhua da geming” — to create a satiric expression, “da ge wenhua ming,” which translates loosely as “the revolution that destroyed the life of culture.”
As a campaign against the “Four Olds” — “old ideas, old culture, old customs , and old habits” — the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 turned Chinese society against itself. But as Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals suggest in “Mao’s Last Revolution”
“To understand the `why’ of China today,” they write, “one has to understand the `what’ of the Cultural Revolution.” [Full text]
See additional reviews of the book from The Economist, The New Republic, and an abstract of a review by Jonathan Spence in the New York Review of Books.
