Professor Frank Dikötter Discovers New Insights into the Cultural Revolution and Modern China

Chair Professor of Humanities Frank Dikötter in an interview with the Bulletin discusses his latest book The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976, in which he has drawn on archival work on the period of the Cultural Revolution to pull the roots of modern China into the light.

“The punchline is, the people are as usual far ahead of their own government. The people are the true architects of economic reforms, not Deng Xiaoping.”

See the full article on Bulletin October 2016 (Vol. 18 No. 1) here:
http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/ebook_2016Oct(18.1)/#25-26

Generation Mao: Historian Frank Dikötter’s Take on Modern China

23 June 2016 (Thursday) – online              26 June 2016 (Sunday) – hardcopy

Professor Frank Dikötter from the Department of History spoke to Fionnuala McHugh of the South China Morning Post about his recently published book, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976. His latest publication is the third in a trilogy on modern China, which also includes, Mao’s Great Famine, winner of the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957.

Source: SCMP

Please click on the following link for the complete article: 

http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/1979870/what-drives-frank-dikotter-chronicler-chinas 

Frank Dikötter Launches Final Installment in the People's Trilogy

The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976

Frank Dikötter

May 2016, Bloomsbury, 432 pp

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.

The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. Frank Dikötter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

For the publisher's page: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-cultural-revolution-9781632864215/

See more reviews on:

The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21698632-how-maos-call-disorder-under-heaven-tore-china-asunder-heat-sun
Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8b2cb53e-0d32-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515.html
The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/09/cultural-revolution-peoples-history-frank-dikotter-review

The Times: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/book-of-the-week-the-cultural-revolution-by-frank-dikotter-h0gr3bcn5
WSJ: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-scars-of-maos-cultural-revolution-1462294170