{"product_id":"the-cultural-revolution-a-peoples-history-19621976","title":"The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962―1976","description":"The concluding volume--following Maos Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Diktters 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 19581962  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 stated goal of the Cultural Revolution 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 Peoples History  19621976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents  from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. Frank Diktter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution  ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the partys ideology. In short  they buried Maoism. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear  The Cultural Revolution casts Chinas most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44918977298485,"sku":"ByrdShop_1632864215","price":56.65,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/ByrdShop_1632864215.jpg?v=1768475402","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-cultural-revolution-a-peoples-history-19621976","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}