Revolution revisited

Frank Dikotter likes to shock. In Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (2004), he argued that the eradication of opium use in China after the Communists came to power in 1949 did the country more damage than its consumption. In this book, the third and most recent volume of his 'people's history' of China after 1949, he does not have to stretch his argument quite so far in order to shock. There is enough that is unique, barbaric and shocking in Cultural Revolution China for Dikotter to only have to catalogue and narrate the facts for the reader to be engrossed and appalled.

Dikotter performs masterfully the narrative function of history, of collecting data and telling a chronological story. The tale is told unremittingly, and it is a grim one, hard for anyone who was not there to believe it. In doing so, he draws on official provincial archives and the vast outpouring of Chinese memoirs and writings (though Ji Xianlin's The Cowshed-surely the most piercing account of what the Cultural Revolution meant for an intellectual-is strangely omitted). He also stands on the shoulders of Roderick MacFarquhar and others who have produced magisterial works on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.