Roderick MacFarquhar, who has died aged 88, was one of the most significant sinologists of the last 100 years, a figure who through a variety of academic posts and a series of books from the 1960s onwards opened up to the outside world the opaque machinations of elite politics in the People’s Republic of China.

The three volumes of his best-known book, Origins of the Cultural Revolution, published between 1974 and 1997, remain a monument of scholarship, a meticulous account of the years from the 50s onwards as Mao Zedong seemed to be growing increasingly marginalised in Beijing before his spectacular, and in many ways disastrous, comeback in 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution.

That revolution had baffled many people outside China, but MacFarquhar was able to bring clarity to the picture by concentrating on the group of elite figures at its centre and analysing the dense set of arguments and ideological disagreements over the period that followed a falling out with the Soviet Union in 1957. The book remains definitive in its treatment of sources and the way in which it sheds light into the deeper recesses of the Chinese Communist party – something that had not been thought possible up to that point. Any study of China in that era remains dependent on its pioneering work.

Born in Lahore in British India (now Pakistan), Roderick was the son of Sir Alexander MacFarquhar, a senior diplomat in the British colonial and foreign service, and his wife, Berenice (nee Whitburn). Educated at Fettes school in Edinburgh (1944-49), he did national service in the Royal Tank Regiment in Jordan before going to Keble College, Oxford, where he gained a degree in philosophy, politics and economics (1953). Then, in a life-changing move, he completed a master’s degree at Harvard University under John Fairbank, the American scholar who did most in modern times to disseminate and shape the study of China in the US.

Back in London, MacFarquhar was the inaugural editor of the China Quarterly for almost a decade from 1959. He was also variously a journalist for the BBC and the Daily Telegraph, and a fellow both at Columbia University and the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). It was while in the latter role that he produced the first volume of Origins of the Cultural Revolution, titled Contradictions Among the People 1956-1957.

Alongside his work on China, MacFarquhar also had an active public life as a politician. Standing for the Labour party in general elections from the 60s onwards, in 1974 he was finally successful in the Derbyshire constituency of Belper, serving as a parliamentary private secretary in the Foreign Office and then the Department of Health and Social Security during the turbulent years in power of Harold Wilson and then, after his resignation in 1976, Jim Callaghan. He was also a member of the select committee on science and technology. However, MacFarquhar was swept out of parliament at the 1979 election, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power, and though he later stood for South Derbyshire as a member of the newly founded Social Democratic party in 1983, he was never to hold public office again.

Politics’ loss was academia’s gain: in 1983 he produced the second volume of his trilogy, which looked at Mao’s “great leap forward” of 1958-60, and followed up with four more books in the 90s on post-1949 Chinese history before, in 1997, releasing the final volume of Origins of the Cultural Revolution, titled The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961-1966. He did much of his writing while working as director, from 1986 to 1992, of an institute at Harvard named after his former teacher, the Fairbank Centre for China Studies. He then became professor of history and political science at the same university until 2012.

MacFarquhar was active into his seventh decade in working on China, co-authoring his final book, Mao’s Last Revolution (2006), with the Swedish sinologist Michael Schoenhals – a work that displayed characteristic attention to detail and an ability to craft a compelling narrative.

As a teacher MacFarquhar educated various generations of scholars on China, not only from Europe and the US but from across the world. He was also, despite the sensitivity of some of the issues he tackled, able to enjoy good access within China itself, and his translated work was available there at least up to the 2000s.

Unfailingly patient and kind, he managed throughout his career to avoid the usual complaints of fractiousness sometimes levied at prominent academics and remained respected both as a scholar and as a human being.

He married Emily Cohen in 1964; she died in 2001. He is survived by his second wife, Dalena Wright, whom he married in 2012, and the children from his first marriage, Larissa and Rory.

• Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar, sinologist, born 2 December 1930; died 10 February 2019