Books: The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 by Frank Dikotter

Of all Mao’s deeds, this was the one that left the deepest imprint on the Chinese mind. It is unorthodox to date its origins to 1962 — many scholars hold that it began three years later — but Dikotter says that the turbulent “conference of 7,000 cadres” sowed the seeds in the chairman’s mind of a whirlwind that would purify the party and put it at his feet.

What was the Cultural Revolution? It is still hard to understand. It was not like the French, Russian or Iranian revolutions, which all had clear outcomes. It did not overthrow the existing order but ended up fortifying it. One could argue that it was a giant confidence trick.

It began in earnest with an essay crisis. On November 10, 1965, two radical newspapers in Shanghai printed an article savaging Wu Han, a historian and the deputy mayor of Beijing. It was signed by Yao Wenyuan, an acolyte of the chairman’s ferocious wife, Jiang Qing. But Mao himself had sat up late, feverishly revising it through nine drafts.

The ostensible target was a play by Wu Han, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, which honoured a mandarin of the Ming dynasty famed for speaking honestly to a cruel emperor. It did not take much imagination to see Mao as the allegorical ruler.

As Mao intended, the article lit a fire. The People’s Daily called for the hunting down of “monsters and demons”. A Cultural Revolution Group was formed to execute the chairman’s wishes. It became an alternative fount of power.

Naturally this group included Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan, as well as an ideologue named Zhang Chunqiao and a brash young Shanghai worker, Wang Hongwen. They became the Gang of Four.

Dikotter does a good chronological job of threading together the confusing sequence of propaganda campaigns, campus riots, worker revolts and politburo intrigues that amounted to a revolution orchestrated by the party against itself, with Mao, the lord of misrule, as conductor.

Others have sketched the madness, the cannibalism and the absurdities; the Red Guards who smashed coffins and tombstones because they were signs of tradition, the millions waving little red books, all in pursuit of real or imaginary “class enemies”.

The author gives full acknowledgement to memoirs and scholarly works, generously citing Nien Cheng and Jung Chang, among others, but it is his own archival research, allied to a piercing critique, that lifts this book to a higher level.

He has mastered the details so well that with the most sparing use of description he weaves a vivid tapestry of China at the time, a place too huge to be monolithic, full of local jealousies, private compromises and silent deals.

He dispels the myth that there was no crime: in fact gangs, rape and looting flourished in the anarchy. Weapons proliferated. They fell into the hands of rival factions, who were parried by the army and broken at the whim of the chairman. With Mao’s gleeful approval, the country fell into civil war.

Dikotter marks the beginning of the end as the burning of the British embassy on August 22, 1967. The army restored order. Millions of Red Guards were sent to empty swill with the peasants. Slowly, the millennial bureaucracy of a vast agrarian nation regained its poise.

Nonetheless, Mao got most of what he wanted. The military fell under his control and his distrusted heir, the red warlord Lin Biao, fled to his doom in an air crash. Nobody ever queried the chairman again. To the end of his life in 1976 his oracular utterances were law.

The Cultural Revolution was not about culture. Dikotter shows that it was all about power. It completed the destruction of Mao’s rivals and created his cult of personality, making him a symbol of rebellion in the 1960s to a Third World in ferment.

The chairman’s plump visage, adorned by a seraphic smile, also captivated a generation of western youth, eager to embrace revolutionary chic manufactured in a country of which it was almost wholly ignorant.

Nowadays it seems laughable, if not tragic, that Maoism was indulged as intellectual “contestation” in the streets of Paris when it meant murder in China, where the country’s intellectuals were made slaves.

Like an early retro brand, the Cultural Revolution had great slogans and posters, even if the soundtrack — Jiang Qing’s stirring martial operas — left much to be desired.

“Bombard the headquarters!” was Mao’s own edict to millions of ardent and bored young people — schoolchildren who played truant, students who beat up their lecturers and workers who went on strike.

Chaos was glorious, the chairman held, enjoying the fear of his subordinates, playing with them via enigmatic statements followed by long retreats into seclusion. Seldom can one man have toyed with the psyches of so many.

This brilliant book leaves no doubt that Mao almost ruined China and left a legacy of paranoia that still grips its modern dictatorship under the latest autocrat, Xi Jinping.

Perhaps that is why those of us who have been privileged to wander in Beijing through the Great Hall of the People have sometimes sensed that it is peopled by ghosts.

Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website

Bloomsbury £25 pp399

Buy for £21, including p&p, from the Sunday Times Bookshop

Broken lives
Though the Cultural Revolution was much less murderous than many earlier Maoist campaigns, it still left behind it a trail of broken lives and cultural devastation, Dikotter shows. ‘By all acounts, during the 10 years spanning the Cultural Revolution, between 1.5m and 2m people were killed, but many more lives were ruined through endless denunciations, false confessions...and persecution.’