Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution

This book is the first to systematically document and analyze the atrocities surrounding the Cultural Revolution in China.

Yang Su (Author)

9780521173810, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 February 2011

322 pages, 2 b/w illus. 3 maps 32 tables
22.6 x 15 x 2 cm, 0.44 kg

"Yang Su deserves great credit for uncovering the collective killings and for his penetrating analysis of their multiple causes"Jeremy Brown, Simon Fraser University, H-Net Reviews

The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.

1. Kill thy neighbor
2. On the record
3. Community and culture
4. Class enemies
5. Mao's ordinary men
6. Demobilizing law
7. Framing war
8. Patterns of killing
9. Understanding atrocities in plain sight.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP], Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions [HBTV]