New perspectives on the Cultural Revolution /

Edited by Joseph (Wellesley, author of The Critique of Ultra-Leftism in China, 1958-1981, CH, Dec'84) Wong (University of California Santa Cruz, co-editor of The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China, 1985), and Zweig (Tufts, author of Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968-1981, 1989), this illuminating collection of 12 essays restudies the Cultural Revolution (CR) based on new information and new conceptual approaches to the CR. The contributors include such renowned China scholars as Lowell Dittmer (University of California, Berkeley), author of Liu Shao-ch'i and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CH, May'75) and China's Continuous Revolution (CH, Feb'88), Andrew G.Walder (Harvard), author of Communist Neo-Traditionalism (1986), and Lynn T. White (Princeton), author of Politics of Chaos (CH, Mar'90) and Careers in Shanghai (CH, Jan'79). The book is not intended to offer a comprehensive reappraisal of the CR. While presenting fresh perspectives on politics, economics, and cultural policies of the CR, the authors evaluate the relationship between the goals and the outcomes of the CR, emphasize its inherent contradictions and ambiguities, and examine the legacies of the movement in post-Mao China. Notes and index but no bibliography. Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.