Agents of Disorder: Inside China's Cultural Revolution Inside China's Cultural Revolution

Why did the Chinese party state collapse so quickly after the onset of the Cultural Revolution? The award-winning author of China Under Mao offers a surprising answer that holds a powerful implicit warning for today’s governments. By May 1966, just seventeen years after its founding, the People’s Republic of China had become one of the most powerfully centralized states in modern history. But that summer everything changed. Mao Zedong called for students to attack intellectuals and officials who allegedly lacked commitment to revolutionary principles. Rebels responded by toppling local governments across the country, ushering in nearly two years of conflict that in places came close to civil war and resulted in nearly 1.6 million dead. How and why did the party state collapse so rapidly? Standard accounts depict a revolution instigated from the top down and escalated from the bottom up. In this pathbreaking reconsideration of the origins and trajectory of the Cultural Revolution, Andrew Walder offers a startling new conclusion: party cadres seized power from their superiors, setting off a chain reaction of violence, intensified by a mishandled army intervention. This inside-out dynamic explains how virulent factions formed, why the conflict escalated, and why the repression that ended the disorder was so much worse than the violence it was meant to contain. Based on over 2,000 local annals chronicling some 34,000 revolutionary episodes across China, Agents of Disorder offers an original interpretation of familiar but complex events and suggests a broader lesson for our times: forces of order that we count on to stanch violence can instead generate devastating bloodshed. "Agents of Disorder is the first book to shed a clarifying light on the pattern of rebellion and repression that swept across China during the tumultuous first years of China's Cultural Revolution. Among its novel discoveries is the crucial role played by supposed 'forces of order' in the collapse of the state and the subsequent intensification of collective violence. Internal rebellions by party-state cadres were crucial in the collapse of the state in early 1967, and the intervention of army units nationwide, instead of stabilizing the situation, accelerated the slide into factional warfare. Also notable is the finding that the vast majority of the estimated 1.6 million who died during these upheavals, and the close to 25 million estimated to have directly suffered political persecution, were victims not of the violent upheavals, but of the repression that re-established political order."-- Provided by publisher Why did the Chinese Communist Party state collapse so rapidly during the Cultural Revolution? Consulting over 2,000 local annals chronicling some 34,000 revolutionary episodes across China, Andrew Walder offers a new answer, showing how the army, brought in to quiet brewing rebellions, escalated the violence that took nearly 1.6 million lives.