Search Results

“... of the Great Leap is described with authority and a wealth of detail in the middle volume of Roderick MacFarquhar’s formidable Origins of the Cultural Revolution. It was a failure which left the country in a state of near-chaos. The mortality rate, nationwide, had doubled from 1.08 per cent in 1957 to 2.54 per cent in 1960 – a year in which the ...”

“... What do we know of recent Chinese history and how do we know it? This third, massive volume of Roderick MacFarquhar’s Origins of the Cultural Revolution, the first volume of which appeared in 1974, completes what is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet undertaken to unravel why and how this great and confusing event came about ...”

“... been the leader of the reforms and denigrates Deng’s role. This may have arisen from a line in Roderick MacFarquhar’s foreword, in which he says it was Zhao ‘rather than Deng who was the actual architect of reform’. But MacFarquhar is speaking for himself, not for Zhao, and in any case what he means is only ...”