The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century of communist rule. Before 1966, China was a typical communist state, with a command economy and a powerful party able to keep the population under control. But during the Cultural Revolution, in a move unprecedented in any communist country, Mao unleashed the Red Guards against the party. Tens of thousands of officials were humiliated, tortured, and even killed. Order had to be restored by the military, whose methods were often equally brutal.

In a masterly book, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals explain why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and show his Machiavellian role in masterminding it (which Chinese publications conceal). In often horrifying detail, they document the Hobbesian state that ensued. The movement veered out of control and terror paralyzed the country. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing—Mao’s wife and leader of the Gang of Four—while Mao often played one against the other.

After Mao’s death, in reaction to the killing and the chaos, Deng Xiaoping led China into a reform era in which capitalism flourishes and the party has lost its former authority. In its invaluable critical analysis of Chairman Mao and its brilliant portrait of a culture in turmoil, Mao’s Last Revolution offers the most authoritative and compelling account to date of this seminal event in the history of China.

China’s bold program of reforms launched in the late 1970s—the move to a market economy and the opening to the outside world—ended the political chaos and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution and sparked China’s unprecedented economic boom. Yet, while the reforms made possible a rising standard of living for the majority of China’s population, they came at the cost of a weakening central government, increasing inequalities, and fragmenting society.

The essays of Barry Naughton, Joseph Fewsmith, Paul H. B. Godwin, Murray Scot Tanner, Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, Tianjian Shi, Martin King Whyte, Thomas P. Bernstein, Dorothy J. Solinger, David S. G. Goodman, Kristen Parris, Merle Goldman, Elizabeth J. Perry, and Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko analyze the contradictory impact of China’s economic reforms on its political system and social structure. They explore the changing patterns of the relationship between state and society that may have more profound significance for China than all the revolutionary movements that have convulsed it through most of the twentieth century.

In 1957 and 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong led China into two major experiments: the Hundred Flowers policy of encouraging literary and political free expression and the economic Great Leap Forward. Each was a disaster. Repression followed the first when it became clear that intellectuals would criticize the Communist Party itself; famine followed the second.

During two crucial years when the movements were being initiated, however, Mao addressed various Party groups behind closed doors to explain the new policies and exhort compliance. Recorded at the time and collected for limited circulation in the 1960s by his admirers among the Red Guards, the speeches, question-and-answer sessions, and letters here translated have never before been published in China or the West. These new, candid materials revise our understanding of how the policies developed and reveal not only the extent of Mao’s power but the startling flights his untethered thought could take.

Introductory essays by Roderick MacFarquhar, Benjamin Schwartz, Eugene Wu, Merle Goldman, and Timothy Cheek provide a context for evaluating and interpreting the nineteen texts translated in this volume.