The Tragedy of Liberation

The Tragedy of Liberation
Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2013-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1620403471
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A groundbreaking chronicle of the violent early years of the People's Republic of China, by the author of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize–winning Mao's Great Famine. "The Chinese Communist party refers to its victory in 1949 as a 'liberation.' In China the story of liberation and the revolution that followed is not one of peace, liberty, and justice. It is first and foremost a story of calculated terror and systematic violence.†? So begins Frank Dikötter's stunning and revelatory chronicle of Mao Zedong's ascension and campaign to transform the Chinese into what the party called New People. Following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, after a bloody civil war, Mao hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City, and the world watched as the Communist revolution began to wash away the old order. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known before now about the eight years that followed, preceding the massive famine and Great Leap Forward. Drawing on hundreds of previously classified documents, secret police reports, unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, eyewitness accounts of those who survived, and more, The Tragedy of Liberation bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history. Interweaving stories of ordinary citizens with tales of the brutal politics of Mao's court, Frank Dikötter illuminates those who shaped the "liberation†? and the horrific policies they implemented in the name of progress. People of all walks of life were caught up in the tragedy that unfolded, and whether or not they supported the revolution, all of them were asked to write confessions, denounce their friends, and answer queries about their political reliability. One victim of thought reform called it a "carefully cultivated Auschwitz of the mind.†? Told with great narrative sweep, The Tragedy of Liberation is a powerful and important document giving voice at last to the millions who were lost, and casting new light on the foundations of one of the most powerful regimes of the twenty-first century.

Salt of the Earth

Salt of the Earth
Author: Ralph Thaxton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis US
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520203181
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"This original, important, and readable work offers a stimulating new interpretation of the Chinese Revolution and a mass of fresh, interesting evidence. Thaxton's argument breaks with conventional wisdom on a number of significant points and poses important challenges to all extant interpretations of the revolution as a whole. Thaxton's work explodes the simplistic dichotomies that have framed too many discussions of the Revolution itself and of the longer-term relationship between the CCP and the rural population. Salt of the Earth heralds a new post-Cold War era in our understanding of the Chinese Revolution."--Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Making of a Hinterland "A most vivid and impressive contribution to a growing corpus of scholarly works on the various concrete ways in which the Chinese Communist Party was able to link itself to a rural 'mass base' in various areas of North China during the decades before 1949. Based on a judicious analysis of a vast body of oral history data drawn from interviews with peasants in three counties during the years 1985 and 1993, it sheds enormous light on the specific socioeconomic and cultural situation in one particular area while at the same time raising serious questions about both the Chinese Nationalist and Communist official histories of the period. Quite apart from its relevance to the general political history of China during those fateful years, it provides an amazingly vivid example of the possibility of doing local rural history in a way that brings alive the abstractions of socioeconomic and cultural history."--Benjamin Schwartz, author of Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao

From Revolution to Politics

From Revolution to Politics
Author: Benjamin Yang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre:
ISBN: 9780367012823
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Providing fresh analysis of the history and politics of Chinese communism, this book utilizes previously inaccessible sources to reassess the epic Long March. It sheds new light on the revolutionary momentum and political structure of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s.

From Rebel to Ruler

From Rebel to Ruler
Author: Tony Saich
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674259599
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A Project Syndicate Best Read of the Year On the centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the definitive history of how Mao and his successors overcame incredible odds to gain and keep power. Mao Zedong and the twelve other young men who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 could hardly have imagined that less than thirty years later they would be rulers. On its hundredth anniversary, the party remains in command, leading a nation primed for global dominance. Tony Saich tells the authoritative, comprehensive story of the Chinese Communist Party—its rise to power against incredible odds, its struggle to consolidate rule and overcome self-inflicted disasters, and its thriving amid other communist parties’ collapse. Saich argues that the brutal Japanese invasion in the 1930s actually helped the party. As the Communists retreated into the countryside, they established themselves as the populist, grassroots alternative to the Nationalists, gaining the support they would need to triumph in the civil war. Once in power, however, the Communists faced the difficult task of learning how to rule. Saich examines the devastating economic consequences of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the party’s rebound under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Leninist systems are thought to be rigid, yet the Chinese Communist Party has proved adaptable. From Rebel to Ruler shows that the party owes its endurance to its flexibility. But is it nimble enough to realize Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”? Challenges are multiplying, as the growing middle class makes new demands on the state and the ideological retreat from communism draws the party further from its revolutionary roots. The legacy of the party may be secure, but its future is anything but guaranteed.

The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution
Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1632864231
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The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. 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 Cultural Revolution's goal 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. 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. 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.