The World Turned Upside Down

Yang Jisheng¿s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail.

As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People¿s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966¿1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong¿s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union¿s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation¿s economy.

Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial