The Cultural Revolution was one of the greatest disasters in human history, the result of a self-reinforcing cycle of ideology failing to match reality and unsolved social problems, and the deranged reaction of zealots triggering defection and civil warfare.

Dikötter’s history of the Cultural Revolution (The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962^–₁₄1976_48ya Frank Dikötter2016★★★★) offers a broad overview of the multiple failures and follies of Maoism, which culminated in some of the most destructive and disastrous events in human history: the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward/Great Famine, and the Third Front.

The Cultural Revolution was not prompted by any extraordinary famine, or invasion, or genuine threat of invasion, or civil war, or disaster of any kind. How then could it have happened? The Cultural Revolution was sponsored by Mao as a way to purge the middle and upper ranks of the Communist Party of doubters, who might do to him what the Soviets had just done to Stalin: tear down his cult by revealing his monstrous crimes to the world. But Mao didn’t realize the forces he unleashed. Maoism had benefited from taking credit for post-WWII recovery and the defeat of Japan, but the more its policies were implemented and it tightened its grip, the greater the gap between its utopian promises and the grim impoverished Chinese reality became. Because its theories were radically and systematically wrong, any honest attempt to implement them was doomed to fail, and anyone pragmatic would necessarily betray the system. Old systems and ‘inequities’ reasserted themselves, to the frustration of true believers.

The only ideologically-permissible explanations were excuses like saboteurs and spies and corrupt officials. Usually kept in check, when given Mao’s imprimatur and active egging on, mass social resentment and ideological frustration boiled over, leading to a frenzy of virtue-signaling, denunciations, preference falsification spirals, murders, cannibalism, and eventually outright civil war and pandemic. Finally, Mao decided enough purging had happened and his position was secure, and brought it to an end. As strange and awful as it was, the Cultural Revolution offers food for thought on how politics can go viciously wrong, and dangerous aspects of human psychology.