1971 Guangxi school textbook. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.Fifty years ago, on 16 May 1966, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily published an official statement which would come to symbolise the start of the decade-long mass convulsion known as the "Great Cultural Revolution". The "5.16 resolution", as it was later known, called for a purge of the so-called "capitalist roaders" within the party, in order to avoid a repeat of the "revisionist" path taken by the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev's abandonment of Stalinism following the death of Stalin himself in 1953.
The cultural revolution, usually dated as lasting from 1966 to 1976, has been compared in its atrocities to what took place in Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. It has become a stereotyped image of communist evil and craziness. Frank Dikötter’s new book, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 (Bloomsbury, 2016) uses evidence from Chinese archives to illustrate how ordinary Chinese were affected by the political turmoil.
I asked professor Dikötter, when he came to London recently to launch the book, whether it portrays a darker and grimmer picture of the event than most people who had personal experience in the decade after 1966 in China might themselves recall.
