Bombard the Headquarters!: The Cultural Revolution in China

Great Events #2

by Linda Jaivin

A riveting account of a turbulent period in Chinese history.
In 1966, with the words ‘Bombard the Headquarters!’ Mao Zedong unleashed the full, violent force of a movement that he called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. By the time he died ten years later, millions had perished, China's cultural heritage was in ruins, its economic state was perilous, its institutions of government were damaged and its society was bitterly divided.


The shadow of these terrible years lies heavily over the twenty-first-century nation. The history of this period is so toxic that China’s rulers have gone to great lengths to bury it – while a few brave men and women risk their freedom to uncover the truth. For as both they and the Party know, to grasp the history of the Cultural Revolution is to understand much about China today.


Bombard the Headquarters! is not just Mao’s story. It’s the unforgettable stories of countless individuals, mass manias, sacred mangos and spectacular falls from grace. At once rigorous and readable, brief yet teeming with colourful detail, this is a marvel of historical storytelling.


'Deftly narrated in precise, pellucid prose, Jaivin wears her meticulous research lightly to provide a lively and essential reading on the maddeningly complex politics of the Cultural Revolution. With insightful commentary and vivid sketches of some of its operatic protagonists, this brilliant short history is a great start for anyone who wants to understand a central decade in the Maoist epoch whose catastrophic legacy endures to this day. A tour de force.' —Jianying Zha, author of Tide Players


'A beautifully concise account that makes sense of a hugely complex event in modern Chinese history. Linda Jaivin puts her formidable, deep experience both of Chinese history and language to excellent use, conveying in 100 pages what most would struggle to achieve in a thousand.' —Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College, London


'To upend an entire society, to pitch a country into a decade of chaos – Linda Jaivin expertly and concisely dissects the origins and the gruesome trajectory of China's Cultural Revolution. Mao's ego, the Party's compliance and the ideological mass hysteria that left perhaps 1-2mn ordinary Chinese citizens dead and drove many of its intellectuals and brightest talents to kill themselves rather than suffer torture and suffering.' —Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking


'Excellent . . . a powerful account of a truly extraordinary period in recent Chinese history, surefooted and perceptive, enlivened by a wealth of vignettes and anecdotes which bring to life the dramatic and frequently horrific events that have played a seminal role in forming Chinese society as it exists today.' —Philip Short, author of A Life

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China, Politics, Asia

173 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 29, 2025

About the author

Linda Jaivin is the author of twelve books, including the forthcoming (May 2021) The Shortest History of China and the novel The Empress Lover, published in April 2014 as well as the travel companion Beijing, published in July 2014. Other major publications include the Quarterly Essay: Found in Translation (late 2013), five novels and a novella, a collection of essays (Confessions of an S&M Virgin) and a China memoir (Monkey and the Dragon). Her first novel was the internationally bestselling comic erotic Eat Me. The Empress Lover follows A Most Immoral Woman, which is set in China and Japan in 1904 and based on a true story. She is also a translator from Chinese and a playwright. She was the winner of the 2014 New South Wales Writers Fellowship.

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley]

Good, vivid summary of a moment of barely believable, almost surreal turmoil, with great pictures and anecdotes - though it does leave you none the wiser as to why millions of people would passionately participate in such a thing.

[Milo van Bokkum]

Dit boek versterkt bij mij de indruk dat de Culturele Revolutie een van de raarste dingen van de tweede helft van de 20e eeuw is

[Tony Tone]

In a couple of hundred pages, Jaivin adroitly explains the origins, history and various players in historic events that involved millions of people and lasted for more than a decade. Bombard the Headquarters captures the chaos, horror and sheer magnitude of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

[Zach]

Linda is arguably the best writer on china. actually no she is the best. this is such a good short read. she tells the little stories, the overlooked stories, the feminist perspective stories that bring to life this period of pain and profound change that indisputably shapes china today. a must read.

[Vinayak Hegde]

Bombard the Headquarters! is a disturbing account of the Cultural Revolution and the destructive power of ideological fanaticism combined with the cult of personality around Mao Zedong. The book chronicles how Mao’s personal impulses and political paranoia cascaded into nationwide chaos under the slogan “Bombard the Headquarters.” It portrays Mao as both the insider and outsider attacking his own government and the bureaucracy.

The book vividly captures the brutality of the Red Guards as they rampaged through temples, churches and mosques, destroyed libraries and museums, vandalised tombs and attacked intellectuals, artists and religious communities. The destruction of Tibet’s monasteries and the humiliation of Muslims in Xinjiang show how the Cultural Revolution became not just political repression, but also cultural and spiritual erasure. The cultural revolution was a self-inflected wound and cultural pillage of China own history and culture.

Some of the most sad sections describe the assault on China’s own civilizational heritage, especially the destruction in Confucius’s hometown of Qufu, where classical texts, artefacts and ancestral graves were systematically desecrated, burnet and destroyed. The treatment of figures like Tian Han, author of the Chinese national anthem, further illustrates how revolutionary movements often turn against even their loyal supporters.

The book portrays Mao as both visionary and tyrant - capable of inspiring revolutionary fervour while unleashing and turning a blind eye to immense suffering and cultural devastation. The book also includes some good pictures along with the text and also a bibliography at the end for those who want to understand more about this era. Overall, the short book is a powerful reminder of how personality cults, ideological extremism and unchecked political power can devastate a society’s people, history and culture.

[Janine]

In the midst of the turmoil unleashed by the second Trump presidency, China and Xi Jinping are presenting themselves as a calm, considered and stable presence on the world stage in comparison. It's a seductive thought, but after reading this small book, I came away convinced that there is a fundamental difference between China and Western democracies in terms of both means and ends that we ignore at our peril.

This is only a short book, running to just 107 pages of text. Bombard the Headquarters opens with a timeline and a cast of characters, but I found the brevity of Jaivin's character list made it hard to establish the various protagonists in my mind, exacerbated further by unfamiliar names. What I really did like was the way that she interwove the stories and experiences of individuals alongside the 'massed' nature of this revolution. When we see the huge crowds of people in Tienanmen Square, and the chilling precision of the Chinese army at the parades that dictators are so fond of, it is hard to find the individual, but she has worked hard to keep our attention on the people who lived through, suffered, and did not always survive such a huge experiment in social engineering.

For my complete review, please visit:
https://residentjudge.com/2025/08/24/...

[Peter Tillman]

Sophie Roell of Five Books recommends this highly:
"a book on the Cultural Revolution, which, in an age of a rising China, is important to understand for the dark shadow it casts over the present. To grossly oversimplify, Mao Zedong, feeling his leadership under threat after making some terrible mistakes, encouraged attacks on other Chinese Communist Party leaders. The populist movement he unleashed tore China to pieces from 1966-1976 and left hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—of people dead. It’s a well-known story, but what’s so good about Bombard the Headquarters! is that it’s by Linda Jaivin, an Australian Sinologist who really knows China. The book takes about three hours to read and even has good photos."

[Nia Nymue]

The second chapter had a lot of events included, which made it difficult for me to understand.

I don't read many history books, so I don't know how this one compares. But I finished this, which says something about its accessibility.

[Sarah]

Brief, snappy, accessible. This would be a good first book on the cultural revolution, but it could definitely go deeper.

[Sid Rees]

A short read on the cultural revolution. Wasn't bad, but there's probably better books on the subject. If you wanna short stop-gap-read to keep you busy it's worth grabbing

[Elliot Duke]

Pretty one-sided take on the cultural revolution.

[Not_british_floof]

Good but due to its briefness, it lacks much depth.

[Amber]

The audiobook begins with the following words:

Warning. This book contains themes of violence, sexual assault and suicide.

[Tristan Máni]

Really well put together for how confusing the true story is. I only wish it was more detailed.

[Ben Couki]

Superb intro to modern chinese history/mao and a succinct review of a key time in Mao’s reign. Does what a lot of chinese history books fail to do very well in 1000 pages in a tenth of that.

[JennyB]

It's so short, you wouldn't believe it would be so boring that you could not even finish it, yet here we are. I mean, how do you even render a topic this interesting so dull? Too bad.

[J.D. Kessey]

I good introduction to the topic. Covers the main points well and is accessible to the layman.

[Iain Hawkes]

I'm not sure what I could really add to the discussion about the Cultural Revolution beyond what's been said already. This is certainly an 'abridged' version of history, given its low page count, but it manages to say a lot in its short pay count, and say it effectively.

Anyway, it wastes no time in showing how widespread and destructive the Cultural Revolution was. Reading about the type of activities conducted and the Kafka trial style activities, certainly reminded me a lot of what we saw in the 2010s with cancel culture and "purity tests," but here, it's on steroids. That, and the disturbing accounts of "Red Guards" within China, not to mention the tragedy that the Cultural Revolution destroyed so much of Chinese culture, Taiwan, ironically, possesses more artifacts than mainland China.

Another thing I took away (and again, this is hardly the most original observation in the world) was how a so-called revolutionary state can't sustain itself, because if you're in a constant state of "revolution," despite being the establishment, you're eventually going to run out of enemies to "revolution against," whether they be internal or external. That, and if fascism has to sustain itself through "the other" (usually based on ethnicity/nationality), communism's own form of "other" is based on class (i.e. "classicide"). Problem is, as the Cultural Revolution demonstrated, you're eventually going to classes to liquidate.

Anyway, good, but harrowing read.

[Ella]

Good little summary of the era.