The Cultural Revolution (Audiobook)

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958-1962, an aging Mao Zedong 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, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. Frank Dik�tter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era.

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958-1962, an aging Mao Zedong 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, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. Frank Dik�tter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era.

Book format	Audiobook
Fiction/nonfiction	Non-Fiction
Genre	History
Publication date	November, 2016
Edition	Unabridged
Publisher	Tantor Media, Inc.
Original languages	English
Language	English
Digital audio file format	Dolby Digital, DTS, MPEG-2 Multichannel, MP3, MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP)
Narrator	Daniel York Loh
Recording time	15 h
Assembled product height	1.5 in
Assembled product weight	1 lb
Bisac subject heading	History