The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960

Why did Mao Tse-tung launch the cultural revolution which almost destroyed all that he had worked so long and so hard to create? The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward 1958-1960 is the second volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s in order to answer that question.

This volume tells the story of the Great Leap Forward. Mao's utopian attempt to propel China economically and socially into the twenty-first century by mobilizing his nation's greatest asset: its disciplined manpower. The effect produced economic disaster and political dissension, and helped to precipitate the Sino-Soviet split. Today's leaders point to it as the beginning of two decades of national trauma which ended only after the death Mao and the purge of the "gang of four". Those leaders have recently authorized the release of a mass of new documentation in the form of political reminiscences, economic statistics, and leaders' speeches. This volume is the first scholarly work to use the new material comprehensively, weaving it into the narrative along with the contemporary record and the revelations published in Red Guard newspapers during the cultural revolution. The result is the most detailed account and analysis to date of what went wrong and why.