This year, Andrew G. Walder from Stanford University offers new insights into the Cultural Revolution in China.
In the first four years after the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, one of the largest political upheavals of the 20th century paralyzed a powerfully centralized party state, leading to a harsh regime of military control. Despite a wave of post-Mao revelations in the 1980s, knowledge about the nationwide impact of this insurgency and its suppression remains selective and impressionistic, based primarily on a handful of local histories and individual memoirs. Employing a dataset of more than 34,000 events drawn from historical narratives published in 2,243 county and city annals (97 percent of all local jurisdictions), we can trace the waves of rebellion and repression across China and assess the damage wrought by both the popular insurgency and its subsequent suppression. This macro- perspective yields some surprising new insights into the conflicts of the period, and permits us to gauge the scale and impact of the upheaval compared with analogous historical cases of political strife and state-directed repression.
Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Previously, he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and as Director of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
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