Fifty years ago this year, Mao Zedong issued the directive that launched the Cultural Revolution. His “May 16 Notification” exposed and denounced supposed traitors (“counter-revolutionary revisionists”) at all levels of the Chinese Communist party (CCP). By the time Mao died, just over a decade later, his final, extended purge had torn Chinese government and society apart. Perhaps one and a half million people died unnatural deaths (including two of Mao’s designated successors), millions more had been brutalised, the economy and education had been stultified by political dogma, and some 20 million had been banished from the cities to a countryside that could not feed them. The Cultural Revolution’s hyper-Maoism had devastated and disillusioned the population.

Public memory of these events remains fractured in China today. Some former Red Guards – Mao’s shock troops for propelling the early violence of the purge – have apologised for their actions, while others still defend their beliefs; far more have buried their pasts. Leading novelists – Mo Yan, Tie Ning, Yan Lianke, Yu Hua – stress the sufferings of victims: the ordinary people persecuted by ideologues, opportunists and mindless thugs. Born-again neo-Maoists – many of them too young to remember the Mao era in any meaningful way – celebrate the Cultural Revolution as a utopian experiment in mass democracy.

The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter – review Read more

But reticence, above all, is the keynote of Cultural Revolution commemoration in contemporary China. In the late 1970s, after an internal party wrangle, Mao’s successors (many of whom had suffered between 1966 and 1976) vetoed de-Maoification in the style of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” against Stalin in 1956. To denounce Mao comprehensively or permit open conversation about the Cultural Revolution, they decided, would jeopardise CCP legitimacy. In 1981, therefore, the party issued a resolution on “certain questions left over from our party’s history”, which acclaimed Mao as a pioneering genius, condemned the Cultural Revolution as a freak error of excess leftism and blamed its horrors on the “Gang of Four”, Mao’s wife and her three closest collaborators. On the anniversary this year, the spokesman for the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs flatly responded thus to a question about the revolution: “The Chinese government already made the correct verdict on it long ago.” Public discussion of it remains so minimal that many who did not experience it directly are vague or incredulous about its details. The 50th anniversary has generated conferences, articles and books outside mainland China; within China, academics are fearful even of mentioning it in class.

Since its publication a decade ago, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s Mao’s Last Revolution has provided the most authoritative, comprehensive single-volume account of the Cultural Revolution in English. Its coolly analytical narrative exposed the unedifying mix of high-flown ideology and sordid factional wrangles. Now comes Frank Dikötter’s The Cultural Revolution, the last in his trilogy of works on the Mao era.

It importantly extends MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’s impressive work in two ways. First, Dikötter makes more intensive use of evidence drawn from China’s local archives, where historians (both Chinese and non-Chinese) have been able to uncover abundant research materials on the Mao era for the past decade and a half. Second, he excavates the unintended socioeconomic consequences of the Cultural Revolution, arguing that a purge launched to preserve the anti-capitalist “purity” of Mao’s revolution had the opposite effect.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zhang Hong Bing, who denounced his mother during the Cultural Revolution and said she should be executed. Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian

In the early 70s, years before Mao’s demise, exasperated inhabitants of rural China were dismantling collectivisation and rebuilding private enterprises, paving the way for the resurgence of the market in China after 1978. The book is subtitled “A People’s History” but plenty of attention is given to leadership machinations, especially in the early chapters.

Dikötter describes both persecutors and persecuted at the top echelons of the CCP as repugnant: in turn vindictive, bullying, treacherous and cowardly. Like MacFarquhar and Schoenhals before him, Dikötter illuminates how high-level victims of the Cultural Revolution (such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping) helped build the culture of political violence that brought them down after 1966. Occasionally, the characterisation threatens to elide psychological complexity. Dikötter unwaveringly represents Mao as a scheming megalomaniac, “deliberately turning society upside down and stoking the violence of millions to retain his position at the centre”. There is a good deal of truth in this portrait, but Mao was also an ideologue, who genuinely believed in his political mission as the architect of world revolution. Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing who became the first target of the Cultural Revolution, is described both as an anti-intellectual hatchet man and, a few pages later, the friend and protector of one of China’s most respected writers.

Elsewhere, though, the book fully acknowledges the contradictory intricacies of the revolution. The campaign as a whole was justified by an appeal to mass government (“Trust the masses … [Let] the masses … expose all the monsters and demons”), yet was dominated by top-down manipulation. One of the many tragedies is that through it Mao pledged greater political transparency and responsiveness to China’s dispossessed, without any idea of the mechanics or implications of providing it; grotesquely bloody civil war ensued. This failure notwithstanding, Dikötter also points out instances where ordinary people tried to make good the liberatory promises of revolution rhetoric, denouncing the inequalities and inequities of life under communist rule. In the archives, Dikötter encountered striking examples of individual rebellion: a man who swore to resist “re-education” however many years the party made him sit through it; a family who dreamed of liberation by foreign invasion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Handicrafts that had been condemned as ‘capitalist’ were practised once again in rural communities in the 1970s. Photograph: Andrew Wong/Getty Images

Dikötter is best on the growth of a private economy during China’s reddest decade. By the early 70s, some rural communist cadres – perhaps exhausted by the caprices of central party directives – allowed local farmers to distance themselves from the tyrannies of central socialist planning. Free-wheelers carved off private plots from communes, sowed non-staple crops that were highly profitable in a growing black market, and returned to sidelines (animal rearing, handicrafts) that had been condemned as “capitalist” since the mid-50s. In south China, goods supposedly controlled by government monopoly were openly sold privately; gangs of entrepreneurs roamed the coastline “going all the way to Shanghai to trade in prohibited goods”.

While Mao remains enshrined at the heart of Tiananmen Square and of the legitimacy of China’s ruling party, the CCP will not lift the lid on discussions of individual and collective responsibility for the Cultural Revolution. But the CCP’s reluctance to revisit this history is not just down to sensitivity about Mao’s legacy. The party also dreads remembrance of the political spontaneity that characterised phases of the revolution: the way in which hundreds of millions of discontented ordinary people, given the opportunity, lashed out violently at the party and government. China in 1966 was, like China today, a maelstrom of economic, social and political grievances, fertile ground for an anarchic mobilisation that easily escalated into civil war.

Since 2012, Chinese media voices and ordinary citizens have muttered that contemporary China – as it confronts economic slowdown after three decades of rising inequality – may be approaching a cultural revolution 2.0. This is a dangerous and appalling prospect, especially given the lack of public understanding within the country about what actually happened between 1966 and 1976. For this, and many other reasons, Dikötter’s well-researched and readable new book on the Cultural Revolution’s causes and consequences is a crucial reminder of the tragedies, miscalculations and human costs of Mao’s last experiment.

Julia Lovell is the author of The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador).

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