The Cultural Revolution

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students formed Red Guard factions to attack the ‘four olds’ - old ideas, culture, habits and customs - and they also turned on each other, with mass violence on the streets and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution came to an end.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Rana Mitter 7 episodes
  Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford
• Sun Peidong No other episodes
  Visiting Professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris
• Julia Lovell 6 episodes
  Professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London

Reading list

• Life and Death in Shanghai
  Nien Cheng (Flamingo, 2007) Google Books →
• Mao's Little Red Book: A Global History
  Alexander C. Cook (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962--1976
  Frank Dikotter (Bloomsbury, 2016) Google Books →
• The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. Vol. 8.
  Gail Hershatter (University of California Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China
  Denise Y. Ho (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Making Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape
  Wessie Ling and Simone Segre-Reinach (eds.) (I.B. Tauris Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Maoism: A Global History
  Julia Lovell (Bodley Head, 2019) Google Books →
• Mao's Last Revolution
  Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (Harvard University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture
  Barbara Mittler (Brill, 2020) Google Books →
• Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution
  Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun (Routledge, 2018) Google Books →
• Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition Vol. 24.
  Elizabeth J. Perry (University of California Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Fashion and Politics: Everyday Clothing Choices in Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution
  Peidong Sun (People's Publishing House, 2013)
• China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed
  Andrew Walder (Harvard University Press, 2015) Google Books →
• Agents of Disorder: Inside China's Cultural Revolution
  Andrew G. Walder (Harvard University Press, 2019) Google Books →
• The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China
  Guobin Yang (Columbia University Press, 2016) Google Books →
• Spider Eaters
  Rae Yang (University of California Press, 1998) Google Books →
• The Cultural Revolution at the Margins
  Yiching Wu (Harvard University Press, 2014) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m000q9b6

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q9b6

Auto-category: 951 (China)