From the Toronto Star, another review of Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals:
Mao’s goals in the Cultural Revolution were threefold: to restore his position as unrivalled leader, to cut down his rivals and to ensure a “revolutionary successor generation” that would keep China on a Marxist path. To achieve those goals, he was willing to wreck the state and party apparatus, and to tolerate murder and vandalism on a vast scale.
Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor of history and political science at Harvard, and Michael Schoenhals, a lecturer on modern China at Sweden’s Lund University, describe the unfolding catastrophe in meticulous detail.
For MacFarquahar, author of the epic three-volume Origins of the Cultural Revolution
, published between 1974 and 1997, this is the culmination of almost 40 years of research. [Full text]
– Read more about the book, via CDT.
