The Cultural Revolution in China

During the Cultural Revolution most western journalists saw China lurching to self-destruction in an orgy of random violence, mad adulation, inexplicable jargon and meticulous, meaningless ritual. How, they asked, could the Red Guards believe their own wall posters? What was the meaning of a 'party person in authority taking the capitalist road'? And how could the Thoughts fo Mao make crops grow on a stony hill? In this documentary investigation, which she has now updated with an extended postscript, the author calls upon the Chinese themselves to explain their revolution. Joan Robinson, Professor of Economics at Cambridge and author of the Pelican Economic Philosophy, visited China in late 1967. From conversations, reported here, and from the key documents, which had not previously been published in the West, she focuses attention on the phenomenon most puzzling to those outside China--a ruler so hostile to his own administration that he incited and led a nation-wide popular revolution against it.