Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution

Yang Su is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. A social movement scholar, he has published work on social movements in the United States and in China. His research has appeared in flagship journals including American Sociological Review, Law and Society Review, the Journal of Asian Studies, and China Quarterly. A native of Guangdong, he holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

“This is a truly terrific book, and long overdue too, leaving behind the well-trodden ground of the Red Guards in Beijing to focus unflinchingly on the horror of mass killings in the countryside. Yang Su has written a model of rigorous scholarship that squarely places the Cultural Revolution where it should have been all along, in the area of genocide studies on a par with Rwanda, as villagers turned against villagers, slaughtering each other in the hundreds of thousands.” —Frank Dikotter, University of Hong Kong, author of Mao’s Great Famine

• 1. Kill thy neighbor; 2. On the record; 3. Community and culture; 4. Class enemies; 5. Mao's ordinary men; 6. Demobilizing law; 7. Framing war; 8. Patterns of killing; 9. Understanding atrocities in plain sight.