Roderick MacFarquhar – författare

The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century of communist rule. Before 1966, China was a typical communist state, with a command economy and a powerful party able to keep the population under control. But during the Cultural Revolution, in a move unprecedented in any communist country, Mao unleashed the Red Guards against the party. Tens of thousands of officials were humiliated, tortured, and even killed. Order had to be restored by the military, whose methods were often equally brutal. In a masterly book, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals explain why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and show his Machiavellian role in masterminding it (which Chinese publications conceal). In often horrifying detail, they document the Hobbesian state that ensued. The movement veered out of control and terror paralyzed the country. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing—Mao’s wife and leader of the Gang of Four—while Mao often played one against the other.After Mao’s death, in reaction to the killing and the chaos, Deng Xiaoping led China into a reform era in which capitalism flourishes and the party has lost its former authority. In its invaluable critical analysis of Chairman Mao and its brilliant portrait of a culture in turmoil, Mao’s Last Revolution offers the most authoritative and compelling account to date of this seminal event in the history of China.

This is the final volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, personalities, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Roderick MacFarquhar is the first to use a multitude of new Chinese sources to answer the question: Why did Chairman Mao Zedong launch the Cultural Revolution which plunged China into chaos and almost destroyed its Communist Party? Volume 3 begins with the great famine of the early 1960s which resulted in tens of millions of deaths, setting in train a series of emergency measures which increasingly divided Mao from his comrades-in-arms. The Chairman's anger that they were prepared to adopt `capitalist' methods to rescue the country was sharpened by his belief that Moscow was denouncing his revolutionary diplomacy because the Soviet leadership had gone capitalist and sold out to the `imperialist' West. From 1961 to 1966, the increasingly urgent question for Mao was how to prevent a similar revolutionary deterioration in China. The Cultural Revolution, in which tens of thousands of loyal party veterans were publicly disgraced to make way for a supposedly more leftist generation of Red Guards, was his answer. Ironically, after it all ended with Mao's death, one survivor, Deng Xiaoping, was so appalled at the destructiveness of the Chairman's final cataclysm that he actually did turn to capitalism to revive the country. This volume is the first scholarly work for twenty years to focus on the whole gamut of events - political, economic, intellectual, military, and international - in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution and makes use of a multitude of Chinese documentary, biographical, and historical works that have only appeared in the last decade.

The second volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, economics, culture and international relations of Chines from the mid-1950s to he mid-1960s, this volume tells the story of the Great Leap Forward-Mao's utopian attempt to propel China economically and socially into the twenty-fist century by mobilizing his nation's greatest asset: its disciplined, manpower. The effort produced economic disaster and political dissension, and helped to precipitate the Sino-Soviet split. Today's leaders point to it as the beginning of two decades of national trauma, which ended only after the death of Mao and the purge of the Gang of Four. Those leaders have recently authorized the release of a mass of new documentation in the form of political reminiscences, economic statistics, and leaders' speeches. This volume is the first scholarly work to use the new material comprehensively, weaving it into the narrative along with the contemporary record and the revelations published in Red Guard newspapers during the cultural revolution. The result is the most detailed account and analysis to date of what went wrong and why.

This is the final volume in a trilogy that examines the politics, personalities, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. It seeks to answer the central question: Why did Chairman Mao Zedong launch the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), which plunged China into chaos and almost destroyed its Communist Party? The Coming of the Cataclysm starts with the great famine of the early 1960s, which resulted in tens of millions of deaths and set in train a series of emergency measures that increasingly divided Mao from his comrades-in-arms. His anger that they were prepared to adopt "capitalist" methods to rescue the country was sharpened by his belief that Moscow had actually gone capitalist and sold out to the "imperialist" West. From 1961 to 1966, the period covered by this volume, the increasingly urgent question for Mao was how to prevent a similar revolutionary degeneration in China. The Cultural Revolution was his answer.Drawing upon new evidence from Party documents, personal interviews, books, and journals, MacFarquhar details the growing rift between Mao and his colleagues as they attempted to cope with domestic privation and an increasingly hostile international environment-until the Chairman finally decided to smash the unity of the Yan'an Round Table by unleashing society against the party-state.

Thirty years ago, China was emerging from one of the most traumatic periods in its history. The Chinese people had been ravaged by long years of domestic struggle, terrible famine and economic and political isolation. Today, China has the world's second largest economy and is a major player in global diplomacy. This volume, written by some of the leading experts in the field, tracks China's extraordinary transformation from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao, to its dynamic rise as a superpower in the twenty-first century. The latest edition of the book includes a new introduction and a seventh chapter which focuses on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, the godfather of China's transformation, under his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

Thirty years ago, China was emerging from one of the most traumatic periods in its history. The Chinese people had been ravaged by long years of domestic struggle, terrible famine and economic and political isolation. Today, China has the world's second largest economy and is a major player in global diplomacy. This volume, written by some of the leading experts in the field, tracks China's extraordinary transformation from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao, to its dynamic rise as a superpower in the twenty-first century. The latest edition of the book includes a new introduction and a seventh chapter which focuses on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, the godfather of China's transformation, under his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

This is the first of the two final volumes of The Cambridge History of China, which describe the efforts of the People's Republic of China to grapple with the problems of adaptation to modern times. Volume 14 deals with the achievements of the economic and human disasters of the new regime's first sixteen years (1949-65). Part I chronicles the attempt to adapt the Soviet model of development to China, and Part II covers the subsequent efforts of China's leaders to find native solutions that would provide more rapid and appropriate answers to China's problems. Each of the two parts of the volume analyzes the key issues and developments in the spheres of politics, economics, culture, education, and foreign relations. The contributors, all leading scholars of the period, show the interrelation of Chinese actions in all these spheres, and the describe how, gradually, events led to the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Tse-tung in 1966.

Volume 15 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes dealing with the People's Republic of China since its birth in 1949. The harbingers of the Cultural Revolution were analyzed in Volume 14 and Volume 15 traces a course of events still only partially understood by most Chinese. It begins by analysing the development of Mao's thought since the Communist seizure of power, and, in doing so, attempts to understand why he launched the movement. The contributors grapple with the conflict of evidence between what was said favourably about the Cultural Revolution at the time and the often diametrically opposed retrospective accounts. Volume 15, together with Volume 14, provides the most comprehensive and clearest account of how revolutionary China has developed in response to the upheavals initiated by Mao and Teng Hsiao-p'ing.

China’s bold program of reforms launched in the late 1970s—the move to a market economy and the opening to the outside world—ended the political chaos and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution and sparked China’s unprecedented economic boom. Yet, while the reforms made possible a rising standard of living for the majority of China’s population, they came at the cost of a weakening central government, increasing inequalities, and fragmenting society.The essays of Barry Naughton, Joseph Fewsmith, Paul H. B. Godwin, Murray Scot Tanner, Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, Tianjian Shi, Martin King Whyte, Thomas P. Bernstein, Dorothy J. Solinger, David S. G. Goodman, Kristen Parris, Merle Goldman, Elizabeth J. Perry, and Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko analyze the contradictory impact of China’s economic reforms on its political system and social structure. They explore the changing patterns of the relationship between state and society that may have more profound significance for China than all the revolutionary movements that have convulsed it through most of the twentieth century.

This eighth volume covers the period 1942 to 1945 when Mao asserted his status as the incarnation and symbol of the Chinese Revolution and the sinification of Marxism-Leninism.

The conveners (the editors of this book) of the September 1989 Four Anniversaries China Conference in Annapolis, asked the contributors to look back from that point in time to consider four major events in modern Chinese history in the perspective of the rapid changes that were shaping the Chinese society, economy, polity, and sense of place in the world in the 1980s, a time when China was making rapid strides toward becoming more integrated with the outside world. With contributions by distinguished scholars in the field, the four anniversaries considered are the High Qing, the May Fourth Movement, forty years of communism in China, and ten years of the Deng era.