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. Believing that Nikita Khrushchev was leading the Soviet Union into a policy of "revisionism" that could be a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in his own country against "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party, and as Yang Jisheng explains here, this ten-year-long class struggle devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation's economy, resulting in the deaths of millions.

"A potent and sprawling history of the Cultural Revolution, a little-understood and catastrophic decade in modern Chinese history…. Essential."—Kirkus Reviews