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A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 240 pp. $29.95; £25.00 (pbk). ISBN 9780691213217
In A Decade of Upheaval, two top experts on Mao's China continue and expand their remarkably prolific collaboration to provide a richly grounded study of the rise and fall of factional political battles during the Cultural Revolution. With a focus on a little-known rural county in Central-Eastern China, this study zeroes in on the political conflicts and state violence that spanned the entirety of Mao's last decade and finds a local case study with broad implications for the whole field of Cultural Revolution historiography. The study is based on extraordinarily solid evidentiary ground, utilizing a large array of freshly unearthed primary sources such as Red Guard materials, Party archives, diaries and memoirs.
The book makes a multi-pronged intervention to deepen the existing scholarship on the Cultural Revolution. First, Dong and Walder depart from the conventional view that portrays party-state cadres as defending the bureaucratic order. Through detailed documentation, they argue that insurgent cadres in fact played a key role in the destruction of the very political organizations in which they had deeply vested interests. This intriguing and apparently counterintuitive view has profound implications for how scholars understand the basic patterns of Cultural Revolution conflicts. Instead of focusing on the bottom-up nature of Cultural Revolution insurgent politics as conventionally emphasized, the book develops an “inside-out” view which contends that the party-state bureaucracy did not crumble under mass rebellions from below but rather imploded from within, largely as the result of insurgencies by its own agents. The book's second major argument concerns...