02278nam a2200181Ia 450000500170000000800410001702000180005808200170007610000260009324500430011926000090016230000140017150017610018565000120194694200120195899900190197095201070198920250728154339.0250728s9999    xx            000 0 und d  a9780192149978  a951.056bMAC  aMacFarquhar, Roderick 4aThe Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-1966  c1997  a770 pages  aThis is the final volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, personalities, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Roderick MacFarquhar is the first to use a multitude of new Chinese sources to answer the question: Why did Chairman Mao Zedong launch the Cultural Revolution which plunged China into chaos and almost destroyed its Communist Party? Volume 3 begins with the great famine of the early 1960s which resulted in tens of millions of deaths, setting in train a series of emergency measures which increasingly divided Mao from his comrades-in-arms. The Chairman's anger that they were prepared to adopt `capitalist' methods to rescue the country was sharpened by his belief that Moscow was denouncing his revolutionary diplomacy because the Soviet leadership had gone capitalist and sold out to the `imperialist' West. From 1961 to 1966, the increasingly urgent question for Mao was how to prevent a similar revolutionary deterioration in China. The Cultural Revolution, in which tens of thousands of loyal party veterans were publicly disgraced to make way for a supposedly more leftist generation of Red Guards, was his answer. Ironically, after it all ended with Mao's death, one survivor, Deng Xiaoping, was so appalled at the destructiveness of the Chairman's final cataclysm that he actually did turn to capitalism to revive the country. This volume is the first scholarly work for twenty years to focus on the whole gamut of events - political, economic, intellectual, military, and international - in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution and makes use of a multitude of Chinese documentary, biographical, and historical works that have only appeared in the last decade.  aHistory  cENGLISH  c577649d577649  00104070aACLbACLc7Bd2025-07-28l0o951.056 MACp190049r2025-07-28 15:43:39w2025-07-28yENGLISH