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

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

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374716912
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/19/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	768
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. For fifteen years, he was a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. In 2015, he resigned under official pressure. Yang currently serves on the editorial board of Economic Reference, while continuing to write political commentaries. For his groundbreaking work Tombstone (FSG, 2012), Yang won Sweden’s Stieg Larsson prize for journalistic courage in 2015, and the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, presented by the Nieman Fellows at Harvard University in 2016. Tombstone also won the Manhattan Institute’s 2013 Hayek Prize and the 2013 Lemkin Award of the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Yang Jisheng lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.

Stacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for nearly 18 years. A long-time journalist, Mosher currently works as an editor and translator in Brooklyn.

Guo Jian is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Originally trained in Chinese language and literature, Guo was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his PhD in English in the mid-1980's.

Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. He is now a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. He is the author of the book Tombstone.

Stacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for nearly 18 years. She is the co-translator of Yang Jisheng's Tombstone. A long-time journalist, Mosher currently works as an editor and translator in Brooklyn.  

Guo Jian is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Originally trained in Chinese language and literature, Guo was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his PhD in English in the mid-1980’s. He was a translator of Yang Jisheng's Tombstone.

Table of Contents

Map vii

Translators' Note ix

Author's Note xv

Preface: The Road, the Theory, and the System xxi

Chronology of the Cultural Revolution xxxiii

1 Major Events Preceding the Cultural Revolution 3

2 Lighting the Fuse 33

3 Removing Obstructions 48

4 The May Conference: Formal Launch of the Cultural Revolution 64

5 Liu Shaoqi's Anti-Rightist Movement 81

6 Major Incidents During the Eleventh Plenum 95

7 The Red Guards and Red August 111

8 Denouncing the Bourgeois Reactionary Line 135

9 The Rise, Actions, and Demise of Mass Organizations 149

10 The "Workers Command Post" and Shanghai's "January Storm" 167

11 The "February Countercurrent" and the "February Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries" 187

12 The Armed Forces and the "Three Supports and Two Militaries" 205

13 "Red Through Every Hill and Vale" 227

14 The Wuhan Incident and Mao's Strategic Shift 263

15 The Baffling "May 10" Investigation 284

16 The Cleansing of the Class Ranks 305

17 The One Strike and Three Antis Campaign 327

18 Mass Killings Carried Out by Those in Power 345

19 The Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee: Eliminating Liu Shaoqi 365

20 The Ninth National Party Congress: From Unity to Division 379

21 Fogged in on Lushan: The Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee 400

22 Chen Boda's Denunciation and Lin Biao's Escape Attempt 421

23 Criticizing Lin Biao-as a Leftist or Rightist? 453

24 Internal Struggle During the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius 477

25 From General Overhaul to the Campaign Against Deng and Right-Deviating Verdict-Reversal 509

26 The April Fifth Movement 534

27 The Curtain Falls on the Cultural Revolution 557

28 China's Foreign Relations During the Cultural Revolution 585

29 Reform and Opening Under the Bureaucratic System 602

Notes 623

Index 697

Editorial Reviews

09/28/2020

Fanatical ideology, cut-throat intrigue and vast bloodshed roil China in this sweeping history of the Cultural Revolution. Journalist Yang (Tombstone) styles the 1966–1976 upheaval as a civil war declared by dictator Mao Zedong against the Communist Party bureaucracy in order to undermine Party rivals, deflect public discontent with his disastrous policies, and achieve a purer Marxist utopia. The conflict pitted radical Red Guard groups against the Party establishment’s more conservative Red Guards, and then against each other, in “large-scale armed conflicts.” Whenever the chaos grew too unruly, Yang contends, Mao switched sides and backed the bureaucracy and military in suppressing radicals. Yang’s sometimes disjointed narrative concentrates on leadership struggles as they played out in party conferences, backroom maneuvering, and factional propaganda couched in dreary jargon and hysterical invective. (“Thoroughly smash the bourgeois restorationist countercurrent,” exhorted one slogan.) He also explores the human cost with statistics, and some appalling specifics, on the millions of people imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and, in the case of the Guangxi massacre, even cannibalized. Though not the most elegantly written—or translated—study of the Cultural Revolution, this exhaustive and sometimes horrifying account demonstrates how deranged governments become when unconstrained by democracy and individual rights. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Monumental . . . Yang now brings his reputation as one of China's most daring historical writers to another open wound in modern Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution . . . The World Turned Upside Down is a formidable work of research and analysis, and Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian’s lucid translation is a major achievement . . . Read this book to be reminded about one of China's darkest periods, and to mourn that so much of its modern history is still, ironically and tragically, told outside the country's own borders."
—Rana Mitter, Financial Times

"Rather than being chastened, Yang has done it again . . . Yang’s book has no heroes, only swarms of combatants engaged in a “repetitive process in which the different sides took turns enjoying the upper hand and losing power, being honored and imprisoned, and purging and being purged”—an inevitable cycle, he believes, in a totalitarian system. Yang . . . benefited from the recent work of other undaunted chroniclers, whom he credits for many chilling new details about how the violence in Beijing spread to the countryside.”
—Barbara Demick, The Atlantic

“A potent and sprawling history of the Cultural Revolution, a little-understood and catastrophic decade in modern Chinese history . . . Essential . . . [The World Turned Upside Down] belongs alongside The Gulag Archipelago as a denunciation of tyranny.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Fanatical ideology, cut-throat intrigue and vast bloodshed roil China in this sweeping history of the Cultural Revolution . . . This exhaustive and sometimes horrifying account demonstrates how deranged governments become when unconstrained by democracy and individual rights.”
—Publishers Weekly

"Yang's book offers the most comprehensive journalistic account yet of contemporary China's foundational trauma. . . [he] describes, in often overwhelming detail, the intricate internal power struggle that eventually erupted into the Cultural Revolution."
—Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker

From the Publisher

01/01/2021

The Cultural Revolution was a mass movement launched in the People's Republic of China from 1966 to 1976. In 1981, the Chinese Communist Party wrote an official history of that event interpreting it as a mistake by Mao Zedong that was taken advantage of by "counterrevolutionary cliques." Journalist Yang (Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962), the first mainland China-based independent scholar to provide a complete history of the Cultural Revolution, offers a more nuanced interpretation here. According to Yang, the revolution was a complex and chaotic situation that multiple interest groups used to try and advance their position. Liu Shaoqi (Mao's onetime designated successor), rather than being the helpless victim of the revolution as portrayed in the official history, was the leader of the bureaucratic clique. And while Liu's fate was personally disastrous, it was his clique that eventually emerged victorious over the rebel faction after the deaths of Lin Biao, Mao, and the arrests of the Gang of Four. Yang also points out that while the various factions were competing for power, it was the common people who suffered from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. VERDICT This detailed and thoroughly researched work is essential reading for all students of modern Chinese history.—Joshua Wallace, Tarleton State Univ. Lib. Stephenville, TX

Library Journal

★ 2020-09-29
A potent and sprawling history of the Cultural Revolution, a little-understood and catastrophic decade in modern Chinese history.

Nearing 80, Yang participated in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as an actor in what was called the “Great Networking” and then became a journalist for the Xinhua News Agency. As he writes in this essential history, the revolution was initiated by Mao Zedong in a purported effort to purge the Communist Party of bureaucrats and enemies of his version of permanent revolution; instead, the decade of infighting only bolstered the bureaucracy and weakened the political power of the general populace. Said one higher-up, later purged, “I was Chairman Mao’s dog, and whomever he told me to bite, I bit.” But Mao’s greatest allies were the Red Guards, an organization—really, several organizations, sometimes at odds with each other—that had its origins in urban high schools. Imagine a political movement dominated by teenagers, and it’s clear that the path will be paved with dangers. Thousands of Chinese people were murdered, their bodies buried in rice paddies or stuffed into wells, an example of the “unprecedented brutality” of the period that the author captures so well. Eventually, Mao had to conclude that the Red Guards must be reined in, an effort that led to civil war. The revolution, Yang asserts, was doomed to fail, and he is now far from the true believer of old. “Even if we allow that Mao’s intentions were good,” he writes, “socialism, as a form of collectivism, is predicated on the obliteration of the individual and can be achieved only through the evil of coercion.” The conflict’s effect was contrary indeed, serving to end the faith of most Chinese in communism. Today, Yang writes, “social injustice and lack of upward mobility are causing people in the lower rungs of society to lose hope.”

A comprehensive history that belongs alongside The Gulag Archipelago as a denunciation of tyranny.

Kirkus Reviews