Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 432 pp. £22.50.
Editor's Introduction: Frank Dikötter's landmark three-volume history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the era of Mao Zedong is a compendium of self-inflicted catastrophes. Tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation during the famines produced by Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s; vast numbers of others had already been killed during the rampantly violent consolidation of Mao's Communist regime in the early to mid-1950s; and nearly all of Chinese society was swept up in the systematic cruelty of Mao's Cultural Revolution. This forum deals with the last of these three periods, as recounted in the final volume of Dikötter's trilogy, The Cultural Revolution; A People's History, published on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution. An earlier forum on China's Cultural Revolution...