The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

by Yang Jisheng, Stacy Mosher (Translator), Guo Jian (Translator)

Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail.

As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy.

Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today.

The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, Audiobook, Historical

768 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2016

About the author

Yang Jisheng (Chinese: 杨继绳, born November 1940) is a Chinese journalist and author. His work include Tombstone (墓碑), a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward, and The World Turned Upside Down (天地翻覆), a history of the Cultural Revolution. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. His loyalty to the party was destroyed by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Although Yang continued working for the Xinhua News Agency, he spent much of his time researching for Tombstone. As of 2008, he was the deputy editor of the journal China Through the Ages (炎黄春秋), an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. A leading liberal voice, he published the Chinese version of Tombstone in Hong Kong in May 2008. Yang is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University. He lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.

Reviews

[Jaidee]

I will not be finishing nor rating this book. The book is 768 pages long and I got to 10 percent.

This is an exhaustive book written by a Chinese journalist on the Cultural Revolution in China.

I appreciate the rigor and the immense research but I do not have the patience nor brain power for this right now. I am having great difficulty following both the narrative and the huge number of historical figures listed.

I may return to it in the future (but I do not think that I shall.)

I would like to thank Netgalley, the authors and translators and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for an e-copy in exchange for my honest review. This was published in January 2021.

[Darya Silman · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took 11 years for Yang Jisheng to complete his research on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and publish it in Hong Kong, and another 5 years for the book to reach English-speaking audience. Yet, the publication in English couldn't be more timely as Chinese political and economical influence rapidly spreads throughout the world. Knowing the past which brought China to the rank of a modern superpower allows us to understand undercover internal currents and foresee its future moves in international relations.

For a person who read a lot about Communism, and especially Comnunism of Soviet Russia, it is hard not to compare Stalin's 1930s purges with those in China during the Cultural Revolution. Both countries fully endorsed Marxism-Leninism and created totalitarian systems of the new kind with supreme leaders at the top; both violently suppressed opposition to the ruling regime. Even the official language had similarities; opponents were named counterrevolutionaries, traitors, and evildoers. While families of the enemies of the people in Russia were sentenced to long prison terms under the infamous article number 58, wives and children in China faced the same fate as their heads of a family from the hands of the enraged masses. Downfall of Mao's successors - Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi - is similar to the proccesses over old Bolshevik cadres organized by Joseph Stalin. Both countries haven't declassified all archives of the era and there are materials still waiting for the meticulous scholars.

Yang Jisheng puts forward his own theory of Culturan Revolution which contradicts the official version held by modern Chinese historians. In his opinion, Cultural Revolution with its hundreds of victims wasn't a mass movement which ran out of control but rather an orchestrated redirection of people's discontent toward bureaucratic cliques. Ordinary people nurtured during 17 years of Communism were Mao's left hand and the system of officialdom were his right hand, and the struggle between them gave him opportunities to strengthen his leading positions. Year after year the unfolding of the internal struggle in the Chinese Communist party is desribed through and motivated by different political campaigns. All shifts in Mao's views as he struggled to preserve the balance are depicted in the text. Little details like emotional conversations and extracts from memoirs enliven the narrative constructed on the almost strict time scale. Every document's date/number, every significant building's address, every insignificant name/surname; all show the depth of the research. And that's what makes the text hard to read.

The research was done on the wide range of materials and was squeezed into one volume of more that 700 pages. As it is noted in Translator's Note, the text was cut in multiple places and three chapters had to be removed. These cuts are obvious in the chapters about pre-Cultural Revolution years where the language seems formal and focuses solely on politics. The whole book can be considered an excellent academic work for an experienced scholar/reader who has previous knowledge of the Chinese history. On the contrary, a mass reader can find the book dull and uneasy to comprehend when almost every paragraph begins with an introduction of a new name.

I'd recommend the book for the readers who want to deepen their knowledge about Cultural Revolution and my rating is 5 stars out of 5.

[Henk]

In her British Academy interview Margaret Atwood herself recommended this book and besides the early parts of The Three-Body Problem I don't know much of the period so excited to pick this up!

[Jonathan F · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like books that have a history of their own — Yang Jisheng's The World Turned Upside Down definitely has its own story, starting with the fact that Jisheng was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member who for many decades worked for Xinhua, the party's official news network. There is also the fact that The World Turned Upside Down was published in Hong Kong, banned in China, and subsequently translated into English. Books that have gone through ordeals like these deserve to be read and, fortunately, The World Turned Upside Down is quite a good book.

There is a mixture of penetrating insight and detail. At around page 250, I felt like there was too much detail. At around page 300, I could not put the book down. Jisheng's book is not for the meek. You are reading something that will be used as a reference in much future Western scholarship on the CCP. The detail will allow Western scholars to understand the trajectory and impact of the Cultural Revolution not just on a general level, but by province and region. I can forgive the detail knowing that, more than likely, these details would not necessarily be easily accessible anywhere else at the time the book was published.

All the same, I am left wondering what the editors didn't include from the original Chinese. And cut out a swath of the original they did. In fact, the English translation has three chapters less. The translators worked with the author to figure out what to excise without subtracting from the book's most important themes. Part of me wants to thank them for making the tome more tractable, but another part wonders whether this is what happened when Cassiodorus' history of the Goths was abridged by Jordanes. Of course not, ancient abridgments did not take the same level of care, but it's interesting to think of the parallels — and the West is certainly starved of many of the details necessary to truly understand the CCP and its roots.

In retrospect, a book like this one may have discouraged the West from ever believing that the CCP and the communist system were on the brink of collapse, which otherwise was natural to believe given that the original Soviet state did just that in the early 1990s. The World Turned Upside Down is a history of how the CCP's bureaucracy came out ahead of an attempt to purge it and used to experience to further cement its power, while enacting economic reforms that gave it a larger fiscal base on which to build its program of political control. Only the last few chapters are dedicated to the evolution of the CCP after the end of the Cultural Revolution, but they paint a picture not of a party reeling from the Cultural Revolution by rather learning from it and evolving into a more effective, entrenched organization.

Indeed, during Mao's chairmanship, the CCP was not as much breaking apart as much as it was proving how indispensable it was to Mao's power. Not that Mao was not often seeking to tear the bureaucracy down. In fact, the Cultural Revolution represents a see-sawing between two extremes: a true communist state of the people (anarchism) and a communist state built on the superstructure of the late Qing dynasty's bureaucracy. When Mao gave the advantage to the people and the bureaucracy started to be replaced by revolutionary councils and their kin, there was chaos. That chaos was solved by rehabilitating the bureaucracy. When this see-saw battle ended, and the bureaucracy came out the final victor, it was the people who paid the price. This is Jisheng's main thesis: that Mao used the people to purge the cadres, and then threw the people under the bus when the project failed.

There is an ongoing theme in the book that speaks to this evolution: the big-character posters. During classical antiquity, the city-state societies around the Mediterranean organized public life around the forum and agora. As the forums went into decay and disuse, public life began organizing around royal courts and the church. It strikes me as genius that Mao was able to organize public political life around the big-character poster. Big-character posters were used as propaganda tools, but were also written by intellectuals and others seeking to protest the government. They remind me of political cartoons in Western newspapers, but more accessible to the average person (in the sense of being able to contribute to the discussion). In a way, they were a method of letting off steam. Big-character posters did not survive Mao's death. The victorious bureaucracy quickly made them illegal as soon as the public was no longer necessary to restrain the last vestiges of the faction still supporting Mao's Cultural Revolution.

The bureaucracy was not a creation of communism. As Westerners, we have to remember that China "wasn't born yesterday." In fact, politically, China is perhaps the most sophisticated and evolved bureaucracy in the world, simply because it has had the longest time to do so. Unlike the Middle East, the core of modern China has been unified for thousands of years. Periods of disunity are disruptions, not the norm. Unlike the Middle East, foreign intervention in China has also been a disruption, not the norm. In other words, China has had a lot of time to figure the art of governance out. The direction of that art may not fit the preconceived notions of Western liberty-lovers, but it's an art built on thousands of years of learning. We would do our best not to trick ourselves into believing we are dealing with novices.

Mao's Cultural Revolution was an attempt to get rid of that bureaucracy. Mao saw it as an extension of the imperial politics of the past, politics he wanted to move past. Thus, he directly and (more so) indirectly caused the destruction of vast swaths of China's history. It sounds evil, and it was, but he had his reasons. That reason was what I just said, that Chinese bureaucracy is so entrenched in China that it is literally one of the cores of its institutional history. Replacing those institutions required a radical reform, and Mao only knew reform through violence. Thus, violence did Mao incite.

There are parts of the book where I am not sure if Mao really "planned" the Cultural Revolution or if he just rode the wave to accomplish some of his political objectives. What I mean is, consider that there was widespread disgruntlement over the handling of the Great Leap Forward and the consequent famine that beset the country. The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster and it was thought of as that by many of the cadres. Of course, while the Great Leap Forward might have been Mao's brainchild, it was the cadres and bureaucrats who enforced it. As such, there was a lot of disgruntlement among the public against the CCP in general. Mao was able to ideologically separate himself from the party, place himself above it, and ultimately play two sides of what was a civil war to get rid of those who threatened him. When big-character posters were thrown up at universities criticizing the party and the party responded by suppressing them, it was Mao who issued decrees protecting the right of the public to rebel. And rebel they did, with elements of the military supporting both sides. And what resulted was a civil war.

The Cultural Revolution is a history of a civil war dressed up as something else, as a natural facet of Chinese communism — the doctrine of continuous revolution (yes, Mao predicted that events like the Cultural Revolution would have to be repeated every 10 years or so). Mao used the chaos to purge the cadres of Liu Shaoqi and others (including Deng Xiaoping — who was later elevated to the position of successor when Mao switched sides, only to be purged again when Mao went back to supporting the rebels) who criticized the Great Leap Forward. In any case, Jisheng's history reminds me of something that is common to all governments, including Western ones: most of them are shooting from the hip most of the time. But, they have specific goals and they're just waiting for the right opportunity, even if they aren't exactly controlling how the opportunity arises.

All the same, one gets the idea that Mao truly believed what he sold. He believed in a form of communism close to communist anarchism. He believed that a communist state should be ruled by the people through communes. Well, that is, with him still at the very tippy top. His problem is that there could be no chairman at the tippy top without a military and bureaucracy to enforce his rule. Thus, when the bureaucracy reeled and the military was at the precipice of launching a coup or dying, Mao relented and reinstated them. Mao did not want the bureaucracy, but he could not survive without it. It turns out that if you wanted an autocracy, the institutions of the Qing dynasty were actually pretty solid for doing exactly that. In a way, the Cultural Revolution was Mao's learning curve to getting to that point. It was a learning curve ultimately gone awry as Mao lost his mental faculties and the Cultural Revolution dipped back toward the rebels, but one that the bureaucrats ultimately won after the Gang of Four were arrested and Hua Guofeng failed to grapple with the changing ideological times.

Jisheng's comments on the prospects of democracy in China are interesting. He writes that upon Mao's death there were four factions: (1) continuous revolution; (2) one-party bureaucrat rule with some economic reform; (3) one-party bureaucrat rule with a lot of economic reform; (4) democracy. The first was represented by the Gang of Four and, for the most part, died with their arrest. The second and third were the most popular, with the third being Deng Xiaopeng's platform. The fourth was not a faction within the CCP and never stood a chance. In fact, (2) and (3) simply united to squash (4), which was represented within parts of public opinion. That union between (2) and (3), more toward (3) during the 80s and 90s, is the stronger, evolved version of the CCP. Jisheng writes that the price has been an increase in public disgruntlement against the government, leading to widespread protests in the 2000s. His commentary ends with 2008, though. Xi Jinping's CCP is very different from Hu Jintao's, so one wonders what the prospects of democracy are given the shift.

I suppose we will have to wait until the truth of the CCP's recent history is slowly divulged through books like these, books that have to go through a journey of their own to see the light and be read by an international audience. With Hong Kong now almost fully gobbled up into the abyss of the CCP, we no longer have that outlet. That's why reading books like Yang Jisheng is so important while we still have the privilege.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) is widely cited and horrifically misunderstood. It is not, to give a more frivolous comparison that I have heard; a few college students yelling at their professor. It was a period of convulsion, a period of destruction of all of society, a time where much of China ground to a screeching halt and the streets of cities turned into an armed battle - not with stones and improvised shields, but with artillery, machine guns, encirclements, purges.

The sequence of events is overwhelming and I will include only a superficial summary here. The greatest strength of Yang's book, in my view, is listing out all of the events and details that he could find on the GPCR. This is an overwhelming read, with so many names and places that the details pile up. This is ten years over an entire country, and Yang is even sure to include breakdowns of events, province by province.

The book picks up the main course of the narrative in 1966, mostly in and around Beijing. High-school and college students were given free reign over their lives and the opportunity to tear down anything they could - which as teenagers and young adults, they would do. The children of top party officials seized the day, often proclaiming a 'blood lineage theory' (血统论), saying that descent from social class was hereditary, and that descendants from those from 'five black categories' were to be shunned or cast out.

The movement spread over the entire country - to the industrial sectors of the economy, and then to the army, where different detachments were forced to pick sides. Armaments disappeared from army stores, or were given away, and parts of the army soon found themselves marching into battle against their own people. Yang divides the factions into two loose groups: the 'conservatives', or those led by the top brass of the military, factory managers, health and education workers, and what was left of the party bureaucracy. Against them, the 'rebels', which was at first started by the children of party elites, but soon grew to incorporate factory workers, or really anybody else who would gain from the violence.

That is not to say that the 'conservative' faction is immune from blame. Many top party figures who had been previously written as moderating figures - Zhou Enlai, for example - turned out to be cold-blooded in dealing with their own political opponents. Liu Shaoqi, who was one of the highest-ranking figures to be removed from power and thrown aside in the events of the Cultural Revolution, was at first a supporter. A major turning point in the Cultural Revolution appears to have been in 1967, when Mao had come to the city of Wuhan to observe some of the pitched battles, and was so fearful for his life that he fled - just telling the pilot to go.

There is much I appreciate as a documentary history. Yang draws mostly upon some archival sources, more memoirs, and most importantly personal interviews that would be unobtainable elsewhere. But I have to modestly suggest there are some flaws in this approach. Yang Jisheng's greatest strength is in laying out the facts. In the interpretation of events, there is some shakier ground. It is baffling that something the Cultural Revolution could happen at all, and no doubt there are disagreements on why and how it happened. Was it only to purge Mao's competitors after the great catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward? Perhaps, but I imagine it would have been easier to purge a few people than to cause a civil disturbance.

In a coda near the end of the book, Yang goes on a tangent about the 'totalitarianism' of the Cultural Revolution, of the expansion of the role of the Chinese Communist Party in decades, and the result of subsequent state control. While totalitarianism is a contentious word - there are some who might apply that word to Nazi Germany and perhaps a few years in the Soviet Union, applying it to the People's Republic of China from 1966 to 1976 is a stretch. This is not a period of overwhelming state control, but perhaps the total lack of state control, of state self-sabotage, of state infighting.

This is not, and cannot be, the last word on the Cultural Revolution. That said, it is an improvement over what came before, and will no doubt be referenced for years. In the introduction, the translators note that a few chapters had to be cut from the book for brevity. One wonders what is missing.

[Alex MacMillan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The historian's role is the authority to censor history. That is to say, they sift through the facts and recollections left behind by past to assemble a story of what is important, and what isn't. The same could be said of the editors of this book, who had to condense and translate a 1600 page book into the 800 worth enshrining in English for non-Chinese historians. I'm not sure whether it's the author or the editors who are responsible, but their choices of what to omit from the narrative made this more of a slog than it has any right to be.

Yang Jisheng's magnum opus on the Cultural Revolution is not as interesting a read as Tombstone, his memorial to victims of the Great Leap Forward. World Turned Upside Down is not something I would recommend to someone who has not already read broadly about Mao-era China, or about the Cultural Revolution in particular. That was the only way I was able to follow along, or maintain interest. If you are not Chinese and familiar with the country, then the hundreds of names and dozens of state-sanctioned purges can blur together into a back-and-forth of insurrection and reprisal between communist and nationalist apparatchiks. In contrast, Frank Dikötter's People's Trilogy is a book series where the casual history buff can read them in any given order and learn a succinct social history of all three stages of misery.

Another issue for the casual reader is the subset of victims that Jisheng (or his editors) chooses to focus on. The pages of Tombstone were explicitly a tombstone to the tens of millions who starved to death in the Great Leap Forward. Stories of atrocity, survival and resistance to a cruel regime predominate. The Cultural Revolution, by contrast, presents a dilemma in that no matter which side's ox is being gored, both wings of the CCP were eager participants in the eradication of the Chinese people. You cannot really root for a side to prevail, or feel as bad when your team takes casualties, when both sides to a fight are irremediably evil and unfit for office.* This is particularly the case when the book focuses on palace intrigue between the highest CCP officials, groupies jockeying for position as they wait for Mao to bleed out. Jisheng frequently mentions that the vast majority of the Cultural Revolution's victims were the powerless peasants and county-level officials, but the half of the book the editors selected is instead meticulous about the catty infighting between slavish bureaucrats who are disconnected from the slaughter. The author translating new historical discoveries into English is valuable to professional historians, but a detraction to casual readers like me.

My enjoyment of this book came from seeing how Jisheng's revelations clashed with the current "party line" promoted by CCP officials from Deng onward to explain away Maoism's failure and mass death. I highlighted sections where the author summarized his heretical arguments and memories here. - 3/26/21

*(Kind of how most fictional portrayals of WW2 are about the heroic G.I.'s fighting Nazis on the Western Front, rather than the Bloodlands in the East or the race war in the Pacific.)

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yang Jisheng is a journalist who grew up and worked in China. I recently finished his book on the great famine in China in 1958. “The World Turned Upside Down” is a history of “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” a time of unbelievable political turmoil that last from 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976.

This is a fine book but one to which it is hard to respond. Some issues for me include:

1) It is 700+ pages and a large number of facts are presented. The author is not a professional historian and the writing style seems rough, but he knows about data, citation, and the need to consult multiple sources critically. That makes his accounts in this book very believable. It appears that he still lives in China. That helps me to know that he has access to both internal and external sources and that he is serious about his claims and their implications for Chinese history.

2) The GPCR was ostensibly an effort to maintain the dynamism of the Communist revolution in China after 17 years of rule by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party against the forces of bureaucratization and its tendency to create a “new class” that will work against the forces of revolutionary change. Once the forces of disorder were released, however, they proved impossible to contain. The bureaucracy can fight back. The army got involved early on. Old conflicts were reignited and re-litigated. In a country of 700+ million people, with a long history of political violence and major hostile external enemies, what could happen? By some accounts, over 100 million were seriously affected by the conflict and millions may have perished. That leads to a third point.

3) This is a thoroughly terrifying book. Do not read it if your idea of COVID reading is escape and/or stress reduction. Not only are the global totals of people affected difficult to grasp, but the author reports on what happened in all (or most) of the Chinese provinces. The author is also more than willing to go “into the weeds” to provide details on mass killings, who was tortured and how, and even how the government went about re-examining critical events and trying to resuscitate those killed and tortured wrongly. The book literally gives the impression of having “counted all the bodies”. While I think the book works well within the range of current critical thinking about the GPCR, even if the book is only half on target, it is one of the most terrifying accounts of political violence of which I am aware and this includes books like Snyders’s on WW2 genocides.

This was a difficult but rewarding read. A reassuring point after reading is that however terrible US politics have seemed recently, there is room for things to get much much worse - a small comfort.

[Alexander Boyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yang Jisheng writes as if for amnesiacs—which might not be all that far from the truth. His book opens and closes with his message written in plain English (thanks to the amazing translation work of Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian): "The experience of humanity over the past two centuries has shown us that constitutional democracy is an effective system for applying checks and balances on power." The World Turned Upside Down is a smashing indictment of life under a system without checks and balances designed to remind a world all too content to forget.

The Cultural Revolution is confounding from all angles. Although it is possible to trace the relatively simple logic of purges and counter-purges—the chengyu 卸磨杀驴 killing the donkey after it leaves the mill does the trick—the insanity of those ten, or eleven in Hua Guofeng's count, years beggars comprehension.

Yang approaches elite politics in exhaustive detail, flitting down to the provinces to show the toll of palace intrigues in Beijing and Shanghai. The elite politics of the era was fairly shocking to me. By the time the Cultural Revolution came into fruition, 17 years after the establishment of the PRC and 31 after Mao's ascension to the leadership after the Zunyi Conference in 1935, the fractures (in both psyche and body) of decades of revolutionary struggle were evident among the leadership. Decades long personal vendettas between wives of leading cadres became fodder for purges. The paramount importance of personnel file archives cannot be overstated—Jiang Qing even moved from her Diaoyutai quarters (which she'd set up at the beginning of the cultural revolution to be near the CCRSG and where she'd remained ever since) for a room next to Mao's in Zhongnanhai so that she could pounce on her own dossier as soon as he died.

I was shocked, too, by elite leaders' humiliating deaths. Unwashed Liu Shaoqi bound to his bed and cremated pseudonymously, marked only as a "highly contagious patient." Zhou Enlai's doctors held his cancer diagnosis from him until it was too late to treat yet he struggled onwards for years. He was nearly comatose in his final days—only awakening to hear of the public release of a decade old pair of Mao's poems, which he commanded his aides purchase and read to him. Was this slavish devotion or a man bent on staving off a final purge? Suave Zhou Enlai, paragon of diplomacy, steely assassin, disciplined bureaucrat, and Maoist revolutionary in all the terrible splendor of that mold, died in political exile. What was it all for?

I learned much from Yang's study of Jiang Qing, who he rather fairly describes as a dogmatic, aggressive woman who was not the ring leader of the Cultural Revolution, despite attempts afterwards to pawn her off as such. She truly was Chairman Mao's dog.

Yang's looks at daily life are no less tragic. A particularly poignant chapter is Mass Killings Carried Out By Those In Power which toured the most infamous killings of the CR: the Daxing County massacres, the Daoxian massacre, the Guangxi massacres, and the Shadian massacre.

There is more to say, but I won't be able to say it.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read, but a major work of scholarship that extends the knowledge of the Cultural Revolution available in the equally impressive Mao's Last Revolution by Farquahr and Schoenbfehls. Yang Jisheng participated/observed the events when he was a student and has delved with incredible depth and analytical balance into Chinese sources unavailable in the West. The picture he paints parallels M&S's in general outline: the explosion of 1966, the chaos of 1967, the retrenchment of 1968, and the long playing out of the forces unleashed during the 1970s. The difference is in the density of detail and the greater attention given to local events in The World Turned Upside Down. For western readers, the names--many of them overlapping--can become confusing; I found myself needing to jot notes as I went. That's necessarily exacerbated by the fact that there were literally thousands of orgnizations, all claiming similar ideological high ground and employing slogans that feel overblown from an outside perspective. Keeping track of who's calling whom an ox demon or a snake spirit isn't easy. But for all that, this is an absolutely crucial book for understanding one of the least clearly understood major events of the 1960s (and for that matter, the 20th century).

[Julio Yañez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un gran libro y la edición de Akal es una gran traducción al español. Como ya muchos comentaron, es un libro pesado, largo y que hace mención de una infinidad de personajes políticos chinos, por lo que a veces cuesta llevarle el hilo. Sin embargo, la investigación realizada para su escritura y el nivel de detalle de los acontecimientos de la revolución cultural lo hacen una lectura obligada a quienes busquen estudiar este periodo histórico desde una perspectiva crítica y no oficialista.

Mis únicas 2 críticas serían que para el lector menos familiarizado, la manera del autor de de nombrar o enlista a actores políticos, muchas veces sin contextualizar sobre ellos (el hacerlo haría este libro mucho más largo) lo vuelve algo confuso. Pero la crítica principal radica en un sesgo ideológico del autor que en ocasiones parece sugerir que los sistemas políticos y económicos de las “democracias” occidentales son la panacea, mientras que el progreso Chino y sus grandes méritos se lograron “a pesar” de Mao y no gracias en gran medida a Mao.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should start this by saying that I don't think I was the intended audience for this book. I think this book assumes you are fairly familiar with the politics of the cultural revolution and attempts to add nuance to the prevailing narrative. Overall this book feels like scanning through an HD picture with a 10x10 grid of pixels. There's an enormous amount of detail and it's hard to piece together into an overall narrative. This book mentions dozens of shortlived movements and groups. Pages of the book would introduce 10-20 names at a time. There were about ten separate events named after dates (The May 12th incident, The August 29th incident, etc.). Multiple leaders are demoted, tortured, exiled, re-educated, vindicated, restored to the party and exiled again throughout the course of the book. In some ways that's the point this book is trying to get across: the cultural revolution was a tug-of-war between competing factions who did not have solid control over their own power base. At the same time, this book reads like the author stapled together every scrap of research they came across.

This book is also a brutal read. There are at least a half a dozen anecdotes in here which are more wild most horror movies I've come across. Truly, truly heinous events litter the entire length of the book. It's hard to believe that a country made it out the other side of the cultural revolution with some semblance of organization in tact.

For anyone thinking about picking this up, I'd recommend binging about an hour of youtube videos on the subject at the very least before diving in. Make sure you have a rough timeline in your head, know who Lin Biao is, know who Jiang Qing is, know who the gang of four are and know what the PCC was before picking up the book. I'd also say that there's a huge opportunity-cost to reading this as your first book on the subject. If I had to guess, there are probably better, easier to follow accounts of the cultural revolution that you could read instead. That said, I'm ultimately not mad that I read the book I just wish this either had a more aggressive editor or that I'd started with another book first.

[Yupa · Rating 2 out of 5]

telenovela

Libro che avrebbe le carte in regola per essere un ottimo libro, se non eccezionale, ma fallisce perché è gestito davvero male.
L'autore è cinese, ha una familiarità con l'argomento e quel che gli sta intorno che un non cinese si sogna, ha trascorso dieci anni a studiarlo, ha anche l'accesso a una serie di fonti che un non cinese si sogna.
Il grave problema è che fatica a dar forma a un insieme leggibile di tutta l'enorme mole di dati che sciorina. Il libro alterna alcune brevissime parti in cui delinea la meccanica generale delle varie fasi della rivoluzione culturale, e poi pagine e pagine di resoconti minuziosissimi di quel che è successo giorno per giorno, a volte quasi ora per ora, chi ha visto chi, chi ha parlato con chi, chi ha deciso cosa, chi è andato dove, con una sequela infinita di nomi di personaggi cinesi, burocrati, militari, politici, attivisti, e di varî enti statali e formazioni rivoluzionarie, quasi tutte con nomi lunghissimi, oppure ridotti a sigle anche numerosi impossibili da memorizzare per distinguerle. Moltissimi passaggi sembrano il riassunto dell'episodio numero mille di una qualche telenovela, pochi minuti compressi in cui folle di personaggi si trovano e si lasciano e si ritrovano e si rilasciano.
Ed è un peccato, perché questo sarebbe potuto essere il libro definitivo sulla rivoluzione culturale cinese, ma lo è solo per chi desidera diventare, sull'argomento, un esperto da telequiz d'un tempo, di quelli che ricordano cos'ha mangiato a colazione Mao prima di fare la nuotata nel Fiume Azzurro nel 1966.
In sostanza, uno di quei libri con cui per avere il quadro della situazone, come si fa ad alcuni esami universitarî, basta leggere l'inizio e la fine, e saltare tutto quel che c'è in mezzo. In particolare l'ultimo capitolo è davvero ottimo, spiega l'evoluzione della Cina dopo la morte di Mao restituendole la sua complessità e permettendo di capire come si è arrivati a oggi.
Il libro è del 2021 e l'autore conclude dichiarandosi speranzoso per un'evoluzione democratica cinese, affermando che il regime è più fragile di quanto si creda, specie per problemi di corruzione dilaganti e irrisolvibili, tipici delle strutture statali ipertrofiche e onnicomprensive. A questo punto spero solo che abbia ragione.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was super fascinating even though my china history is super duper weak at best. It’s clear the author has a political bent but given how little I know it’s hard to say.

The Cultural Revolution in the details sounds too insane to be real. At various points teenagers were sufficiently mobilized by ideology to torture and kill each other. An insane number of swings back and forth between the various factions and trends. Somehow Deng Xioping survived it all and became the leader?

Maoism sounds nuts.

Side note on the translation. By using a semantic and probably very literal translation it becomes hard to know what’s going on some times. Clearly “sons of bitches” is a term of art, but does it carry the same connotations? What’s with the snakes and dogs etc? Big Character Posters took me a Wikipedia search to understand.

Overall not really an introduction to the Cultural Revolution but relatively coherent and follow-able even for a China novice like me. Need to learn more about china.

[Hal Triedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

so exhaustive as to sometimes be exhausting.

but still, there are moments in this book when, after reading four dense paragraphs about who struggled whom, I would snap to awareness on one of the most horrific descriptions of mass violence I have ever heard. in that sense, it was gripping — but still, a challenging read.

also was fascinating to hear about how personal and small-scale high level politics under Mao were. it was really about personal grudges as much as politics.

ps: love the little asides throughout the book where it goes into first person. to me, that’s a fun stylistic thing that you don’t get in most history books.

[Jim Pomeroy · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a few redeeming parts of this book. Yang’s attention to detail can’t be dismissed. But it’s the way in which the narrative gets bogged down in minutiae that’s frustrating. This book was clearly written for a Chinese audience and then haphazardly translated into English for an Anglophone audience. Thankfully I had previously read books about the CCR before picking this up. This meant I was only 50% lost. However, the book was still IMMENSELY dense. I would recommend Dikötter’s book on the CCR before this one. Much more accessible and concise.

[Ross Thorburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes this was a slog to get through. However, the level of detail is amazing, as is the analysis. The descriptions of atrocities aren't for the faint-hearted. Great ending talking about the Xidan democracy wall and the impossible task which faced Hua Guofeng.

[Michel Van Roozendaal · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a non Chinese with some knowledge of the events I was at times overwhelmed by the plethora of names of actors during the various phases of the Cultural Revolution; that being said I really enjoyed the book, well written (and translated), offering insights in a very confusing but important era.

[Josie]

“Every political incident, major to minor” the synopsis wasn’t lying

[Avery · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read and seen a lot regarding the Cultural Revolution, at a basic level, I do not find The World Turn Upside Down all that deviating from other Cultural Revolution histories. What does set Yang apart is how he details the roles of Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai in the Cultural Revolution. It was extremely clarifying to reading about Zhou's level of involvement and pushes back against some contemporary narratives of Zhou as bystander during that period.

[Alan Tsuei · Rating 4 out of 5]

上冊
講白了，文革就是毛發動要打倒反對自己勢力的一次全國的毀滅性運動：
1．劉少奇及他下屬對毛的人民公社、大躍進、大飢荒不滿，而開始對毛不完全服從
2．毛決定對劉的下屬與對自己不忠的人（彭羅陸楊）進行批鬥而發動文革
3．毛所利用的就是拉一派打一派，主要是先用劉鄧來對付次要的敵人
4．劉少奇鄧小平所主導的高官子弟保守派紅衛開始在學校內進行批鬥
5．等下層的次要敵人被一一打倒後，毛就轉向批劉批鄧
6．毛不信任劉鄧下的保守派紅衛兵，便煽動造反派紅衛兵出來與其對抗
7．毛拉攏以林彪主導的軍方來確保文革中最有力的力量站在自己身邊
8．造反派紅衛兵不只很好煽動，更是很好的缷責藉口，最後還很好處理
9．學生的力量畢竟有限，所以便煽動工人出來造反
10．最後軍方老將看不下去，便發動二月逆流
11．老將在林彪挺毛之下便一一被鬥倒
12．毛害怕軍中還有不服的力量，便開始武裝學生工人，進行更激烈的運動
13．所有敵人都被打倒後，便開始用軍中的力量來打造反派紅衛兵
14．毛還留了一個516伏筆，以後只要不服自己的，全都可以被打為516份子
下冊
1．毛的革命委員會取代造反派紅衛兵
2．劉少奇被開除黨籍
3．周恩來宣布文革全面勝利
4．利用完的紅衛兵就被踢下鄉接受再教育
5．文革所造成的人民不滿就利用珍寶島事件來轉移
6．林彪上位成為接班人
7．劉少奇死，毛開始批鬥林彪
8．毛廢除國家主席
9．毛和蘇聯不合，決定倒向美國
10．林彪出逃墜機身亡
11．鄧小平在林彪死後向毛表忠誠
12．鄧小平出任國務院副總理
13．毛開始批林批孔，鬥爭林彪留下的人馬
14．周恩來與四人幫的鬥爭越演熱烈
15．鄧出任軍委會副主席、總參謀長、中共副主席、政治局常委
16．毛要求鄧對文革表態，鄧不表示
17．華國鋒取代鄧小平
18．毛表示文革七分功三分過
19．毛死，華國鋒上台，提��兩個凡是，四人幫被捕，開始批鬥四人幫人馬
20．鄧重新上台，發動民主牆與華國鋒爭鬥
21．華國鋒下台，兩個凡是被否定，開始改革開放，讓中共高層與相關人士先富起來
22．鄧保留毛的地位，藉此來讓中共的統治合法化
23．四人幫被審判

[Kevin Fulton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yang Jisheng has done it again. This book is an excellent piece of scholarship that gives you an inside look into how Mao's CCP made it's decisions. And, therefore, solid insight into how the CCP makes its decisions today, under Xi. If you want to understand the Cultural Revolution from a birds-eye view, this book would be a great place to start.

The book also shows how the government fomented societal divisions in order to create the Cultural Revolution. People followed the government's lead and became barbarians.

[Louise Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed and comprehensive, this is essential reading for people interested in one of the biggest sociopath-political events in modern history. The book looks at the Revolution from multiple perspectives, giving keen insights into what happened and how it impacted different societal groups. The author clearly has a sense of wanting the information to be accessible and appealing, whether the reader is a history buff or not, and this is reflected in a clear, concise writing style.

[Naoe Kanata · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detailed introduction to the Cultural Revolution, each chapter describing one movement in those ridiculus years in time order. Although I have read some articles about Cultural Revolution before, I think this book renews my knowledge about it thoroughly. In my opinion, for anyone interested in Cultural Revolution, this book could be the first book to read.

[Brendan Sheehan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book is more a 4.5 but I will round up to congratulate the author on a truly immersive study on the failure that was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

I don’t recommend going in as blind as I did going into the subject as I did here. It would probably be best if you aren’t as aware of the history of the PRC to read a more introductory book first. You jump right into the deep end.

Nevertheless I learned so much. The Cultural Revolution was launched by an essay criticizing a play because it seen as a defence of revisionism! The structures of the regional parties! The dueling Red Guard factions all throughout China! What was Lin Biao’s gameplan was on September 13, 1971! How relevant the Paris Commune was! While these were the entertaining part, it is not for the soft of heart. Especially in the first three years of the Revolution hundreds of thousands to millions of people innocent people were imprisoned, beaten, killed, forced into exile or driven to kill themselves.

There were two quotes that stuck out to me both reflections on the Cultural Revolution. Zhang Chunqiao one of the leftist Gang of Four leaders that were smashed after the death of Mao said before his trial: “Although the Cultural Revolution launched and led by Chairman Mao failed, its spirit and principles are eternal, and if the governing Communist Party doesn’t sincerely resolve the problem of degeneration and becomes a principled class separated from the vast masses, remote and high above and acting like mighty and paternalistic officials, sooner or later the masses will launch another revolution according to Chairman Mao’s instructions, and will strike down to the capitalist class within the party.”

The next is the reflection of the author at the end is also powerful: “Mao mobilized the masses to expose and criticize this problem and surmount it through continuous revolution, but without acknowledging that the bureaucratic class of capitalist reader power-holders was the inevitable product of the Communist Party’s political and economic monopoly that combined Marx with Qin Shihuang. Mao himself was the originator and ultimate controller of the system that doomed his Cultural Revolution.”

Mao tried to be a faithful Marxist-Leninist. His efforts however resulted in practical anarchy throughout the country and ultimately was unable to convince the majority of his party, the bureaucratic clique, to adhere to such continuous revolution. In part Mao became disillusioned himself with some of the tactics of the Red Guards and other rebel factions, but he still supported them in spirit. It did feel like he was acting as the French Republican Directory continual moving to extinguish challenges from the left and right when it challenged the central government. As much as Mao wanted to support the left, he was also unwilling to permanently get rid of the bureaucrats needed to keep the country afloat and the PLA which was essential to the security of the national particularly in the dance between the two hegemons of the Soviet Union and the USA.

Reflecting on what I learned I think first of the teachers and local party officials who did nothing wrong but were beaten or killed for some supposed ideological error. But then I think of the ordinary members of the Red Guards (not the astroturfed ones like the Million Heroes of Wuhan created by the local party) and rebel factions. While they did heinous things, they were at best maligned in the 3 in 1 revolutionary committees created in the wake of the destroyed local government and often they were sent to the countryside to work or ended up suppressed by local party apparatus and the PLA which became essential to the stability of local government (initially to support the left). Much like Gang of Four they were the ones left holding the bag of Mao’s actions. Sure many of these rebels were probably caught up in the personality cult of Mao. But some of the students were genuinely caught up in the spirit of Marxist-Leninism and the commitment to a fairer and more equal society and recognized that despite nearly two decades of Communist Party rule, equality was not yet realized. While this book has demonstrated to me why a one-party state cannot be the ideological endpoint of a political system, I hope that one day that there is a more fair and just society because that sickness identified by the students exists across the world. Hopefully it can be achieved without senseless extra-judicial murders.

Mao was a genius in many things and I had not realized just how committed he was as a genuine Communist. Nevertheless, no matter how many times he referenced Marx’s works on the Paris Commune, he could not create the dictatorship of the proletariat he wanted. He was constantly torn between various desires and realities. Ultimately, the PRC ended up becoming the country he feared of capitalist-roaders and his attempt to prevent this from happened caused immense bloodshed including of people that were ideologically support of his goals.

Why this book is probably closer to a 4.5 is because I found the structure a little confusing because the author often had to take breaks from the narrative approach to discuss other phenomena or to take steps to explain what has happened or what will happened. I appreciated those chapters but I often was confused of where I was in the narrative.

[Yuke Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

无论是曾经在国内历史课本那简单略过的描述，还是维基百科上碎片似的信息，对于这段历史都像是裹着一层纱看不通透。杨继绳老师这本书毫无疑问帮我极大解决了这个问题。用时一年多才看完，一是一边看书（由于本身是英文翻译的「精华版本」）一边额外查资料，二是读到从上到下的各种乱象惨剧实在是心头难受。从对自己权力失去的担心从而发动这场「天地翻覆」的革命，到最后面对必然的死亡而在选取接班人上犹豫不决，毛这个披着马克思皮的秦始皇只是走了一条在中国这片土地上重复了上千年的老路。到最后，八十年代初期西单民主墙的那一丝火光，看得让人如此向往又令人遗憾。没有法律约束，没有纠错机制，我们在这个圈子里无限循环，皇帝不行，毛不行，邓不行，现在不行，未来行不行呢？

[FantasticRICHAR · Rating 5 out of 5]

绝对好评，太给力了

[Marsha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Birds eye view of the unfolding Cultural Revolution critically marred by the authors need to add long list of names and details that bog down what would otherwise be a good read.

[Brandon Wilde · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author described the Cultural Revolution as a triangular game between Mao, rebels and the bureaucratic clique. Although the full history is more complex, the main drama occurred in stages between the rebels and the "elite" bureaucrats, with real power alternating between them, while Mao seemed to exert sufficient influence to sway the balance of power between the two classes.

My unfamiliarity with most of the subject matter and names posed a challenge. I often struggled to follow the storylines of key figures and recognize the salience of their various meetings, but the narrative was always brought back into sharp relief by shocking quotes and statistics. I suppose my overall ignorance may have allowed me to focus more on the book's overarching themes and its parallels in today's cultural landscape.

Here are a few of my take-aways:

- Beware those permitting or promoting chaos for political gain.

- Beware the deification of mortals, lest it lead to believing in their infallibility (daily study of Mao's writings was common and "shrines that had once held images of deities ... now displayed little red books [of Mao's quotes]", Chap. 17)

- What seems like grassroots rebellion can be a tool used by those in power—especially when only certain factions are permitted to rebel. ("We only allow leftists to rebel and not rightists", Chap. 6)

- Beware retribution - framed as justice, it often brings greater injustice.

- Be reluctant, slow to punish dissent/disagreement ("The [One Strike and Three Anti's] campaign resulted in more than two million deaths by unnatural causes", Chap. 17)

- Be quick to punish violence ("the Municipal Party Committee handed down an urgent notice demanding the greatest possible effort to patiently persuade and firmly halt all killing phenomena," "In the Guangxi Massacre ... a death toll of 89,700 named individuals had been reported... More than 20,000 [were missing] and more than 30,000 unidentified people had also died", Chap. 18)

- Beware moralizing illiberal theories that pit groups against each other, perhaps especially those based on immutable traits or political class. ("The class line evolved from exclusive emphasis on class origin to blood lineage theory. People classified as landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, and later capitalists were regarded as black elements, and they and their children became a political underclass," "The son of hero is a good fellow, the son of a reactionary is a bastard", Chap. 7)

- Beware iconoclasm and the impulse to erase disagreeable elements. ("Nearly 5,000 of Beijing's 6,843 registered cultural relics and historical sites were destroyed", Chap. 7) ("Believing in religion means opposing Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, and opposing the party's leadership.", Chap. 18)

- Beware censorship and psychological manipulation, used to coerce conformity through fear and ignorance. Many were killed in order to discourage thinking contrary to the party line. Those that weren't were often subjected to struggle sessions, compelled to confess the error of their ways, made to self-deprecate ("The Red Guards ordered the black category students to frankly confess their reactionary thinking and the crimes of their parents. And to repeat three times, "I am a son of a bitch, I am a bastard, I deserve to die," then they punched the students and poured black ink over them.", Chap. 7)

- Oppose violence. Small acts of violence led to massacres ("At the height of the Daoxian Massacre in August 1967, hundreds of bodies flowed through the county seat['s river] every day at a reported rate of 1.6 per minute.", Chap. 18)

[Kent Fortin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings.

Grateful for the intense infusion of insight into the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong, and the clash of philosophies guiding Mao’s zigzagging approach to socialism and revolution and persecution and order that he inflicted upon the Chinese people.

Not so in love with the level of detail, which felt understandable given the level of propaganda operating at this time and subsequently. Yang Jisheng is eager to set the record straight, so it’s tough to begrudge this deliberate and steady stream of who did what when at the high levels of state. Plus, China is vast, so what happened happened differently in different places. That’s a lot of story to tell and it’s important to tell it all.

I realized regularly while reading that I am probably not the audience for this book. But then it also felt like it was too light for proper scholars. It’s readable for the rank and file, but who among the rank and file has the time or the patience or attentive capacity to keep all those names straight? Me, I guess? And oddly, the length of the book helped me get those names straight because persistence wears down resistance.

Ultimately, I’m glad I read this, though I struggled and had to do some reluctant skimming in the middle during the umpteenth Plenum or when yet another in-depth chronicling of this or that organized denunciation got underway. The spectacular violence and horror is what I wanted to know more about when picking up this book. The terrifying inversions that took place. The Cultural Revolution has that in spades. Some of that is here, but those details are oddly passed over in favor of high-level accounting amongst the major players. The big picture of totalitarianism as it came to its end in China and the help in understanding the China that emerged is what ended up being the big takeaway. I’m glad I got that. Still putting it together, but big chunks of the puzzle have coalesced and I’ll keep reading to gather in the rest.

[Laurent Reinhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Painstakingly researched, intensely detailed and often disturbing history of the Cultural Revolution by a Chinese journalist and historian who lived through it. Fascinating insights into how Mao Zedong played off rebel and bureaucratic factions, at times losing control of the former. But it was the latter who inflicted far more damage, ultimately prevailed and led China through its emergence as 21st century economic superpower.

I learned a great deal from the final two chapters, "China's Foreign Relations During The Cultural Revolution" and "Reform and Opening Under the Bureaucratic System." It was interesting to learn more about the Chinese perspective in normalizing relations with the US and how the bureaucratic faction's dominance has set the stage for things as they are today.

There are still unresolved issues: "Reforms that employed 'Soviet learning as the base and Western learning for application' created a freak: the power market system. . . a society with a power market economy will never be harmonious. Fairness requires a new system that provides checks and balances on power and controls capital." (pp619-622) Yang's narrative is especially timely in view of Xi Jinping's consolidation of power in recent years. "Strengthening of checks and balances" needed to "prevent a public servant from becoming a master" (p616) seems further from reality than ever.