![]() ![]() ![]() This final volume, however, provides a compelling, lucid and authoritative delineation of this most labyrinthine revolution, and proves a fitting conclusion to Dikötter’s great project. 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. The Cultural Revolution is less reliant than the preceding texts on the archival material which made Mao’s Great Famine, in particular, such a groundbreaking work here, the author prefers, as the subtitle implies, to illustrate his historical points with personal anecdote, often drawn from published accounts. ![]() Despite Dikötter’s lucid explanations, it becomes almost impossible to keep track of the continual oscillations of political legitimacy in this period. ![]() The impressive array of evidence that the author has uncovered in the course of his research is marshalled in support of a single thesis: that Communist rule in China in its first three decades was nothing other than catastrophic on both a human and an economic level, and that the cause of the catastrophe was not the party as a whole, but rather-very specifically-Mao Zedong. ![]()
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