The seminal English language work on the subject’ Sunday Times ‘A major contribution to scholarship on modern China, one that is unequalled, certainly in the English language … both revealing and rewarding reading – for specialists and non-specialists alike' Literary Review SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2017 After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture. Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity.