Andrew G. Walder Knihy

China's Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976 -- an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong. Mao's China, Andrew Walder argues, was defined by two distinctive institutions established during the first decade of Communist Party rule: a Party apparatus that exercised firm (sometimes harsh) discipline over its members and cadres; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Although a large national bureaucracy had oversight of this authoritarian system, Mao intervened strongly at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao's greatest achievements -- victory in the civil war, the creation of China's first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life -- also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution. Misdiagnosing China's problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative. At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided--Publisher

"Based on an unusually broad and deep range of primary sources (including work diaries, interviews with key informants and military officers, and official and unofficial documents), this book systematically examines the structure of political conflict in China's the poor and relatively remote Feng County during the decade-long period that began with the Red Guard movement in 1966 and ended with the death of Mao Zedong and the "Gang of Four" in 1976. It is the first to focus on county-level politics during this decade, and it reveals a surprising level of social and political disruption that continued almost without end throughout the 10-year period. These dramatic events run very much against the grain of a longstanding scholarly consensus that the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were primarily an urban phenomenon. This rural county was as deeply disrupted by ongoing factional struggles as any documented locality in China. The book is structured chronologically, in short chapters that take the reader through the unfolding factional warfare that took place in the county, reflecting both on how the conflict reflected national trends during the period as well as and the ways in which Feng County's experience appears to be unusual. Ultimately what emerges is a painstaking chronicle of how one rural county experienced the Cultural Revolution--illuminating the all-encompassing nature of the Cultural Revolution and bringing attention to the overlooked rural experience"-- Provided by publisher

A masterful analysis of Guangxi's unusually severe violence during the Cultural Revolution.