The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976. By Frank Dikötter. Bloomsbury; 382 pages; $32 and £25.

The Cowshed. By Ji Xianlin. Introduction by Zha Jianying. New York Review of Books; 188 pages; $24.95 and £14.99.

FIFTY years ago the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it was officially known, plunged China into Maoist madness. It left well over 1m people dead and wrecked the lives of many millions of others. It was Mao Zedong, then 72, who launched the “red terror”, as young participants proudly called it, partly to purge the party of officials who were sceptical about his radical policies. He feared that such waverers might expose him to the kind of posthumous condemnation that was heaped upon Josef Stalin after the Soviet leader’s death. Another of Mao’s motives was a Utopian one. He appeared to believe that people power, no matter how bloody, could turn China into a socialist paradise.

The Communist Party does not like to dwell on what happened. In 1981 it issued a formal pronouncement on the late chairman’s rule. It called him a “great” and “outstanding” leader, but said the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 until his death in 1976, had been a “catastrophe”, initiated and led by him. That, the party hoped, would be the end of the discussion. It did not want Chinese people to examine evidence that the Cultural Revolution was not just an aberration of Mao’s—the act of a man sadly misguided by his fanatical wife, Jiang Qing, and other members of the “Gang of Four”—but an event that had his imprint all over it, and one that revealed a profound flaw in Communist rule itself.

A new history of the period by Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong describes the Cultural Revolution as “an old man settling personal scores at the end of his life”. But, as he notes, there were other forces at work, too: Mao’s colleagues settling scores of their own; citizens taking aim at anyone they disliked; and the support given by different military leaders to various factions, resulting in widespread armed clashes.

The book is the final volume in a trilogy about the horrors of Mao’s rule. The other two (“Mao’s Great Famine” and “The Tragedy of Liberation”) made illuminating use of numerous local archives in China to which Mr Dikötter had gained unusual access. These archives appear not to have shed as much light on the Cultural Revolution as they did on these earlier events. The book’s strength is more in the telling: the interweaving of insight from local documents with detail from a wide range of published memoirs and histories.

One work that Mr Dikötter omits from his lengthy bibliography is “The Cowshed”, the story of what happened during the period to an eminent scholar at Peking University, Ji Xianlin. It was published in 1998 in China, a rare exception to the party-imposed reign of silence. An English translation has now been released for the first time. With dozens of other academics, Mr Ji was kept under the thumb of a clique of Red Guards who had been his students and colleagues. For nine months he was shunted into a shanty—nicknamed the cowshed—on the university campus. He was forced to do hard labour, moving and stacking coal, and was given so little food he was always on the brink of collapse.

In his own introduction, Mr Ji, who died in 2009, says he felt compelled to write about his experiences because so many of the perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution were now pretending to be “upstanding citizens”. Some, he writes, are “waiting for the right opportunity to make a grab for power again”.

For all his praise of Mao, it is very hard to imagine China’s president, Xi Jinping, launching another Cultural Revolution. China at that time was dirt poor and all but cut off from the rest of the world; Mao did not worry about the global impact, or the economic one, of the “great disorder under heaven” he boasted of having created. Mr Xi appears to fear chaos more than anything else. And few Chinese people, leaders included, would be willing to sacrifice the enormous wealth the country has created since Mao’s death.

As Mr Dikötter describes, even during the Cultural Revolution there were signs that commitment to it was sometimes only skin deep. As general literacy declined, he notes, “opportunities to read forbidden literature paradoxically increased”. Red Guards quietly pocketed the sensitive works they confiscated; a “thriving black market” in such material sprang up. An illicit, hand-copied, book, “The Heart of a Maiden”, describing a student’s sexual encounters, “may well have been one of the most studied texts after the Chairman’s ‘Little Red Book’,” Mr Dikötter says.

But it is the pain, not the stolen pleasures, that persists in public memory. In a foreword to the English edition of “The Cowshed”, Zha Jianying, a China-born journalist who went on to live partly in America, says that during the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust last year, her thoughts often turned to China. A friend whose family was battered by the Red Guards told her: “We are the Jews in this country.” The analogy between the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution is a bit stretched, Ms Zha says. Still, she encourages readers to imagine the impossible: that the Jews of Germany still had to live with Hitler’s portrait hanging in the main square of Berlin, and their tormentors went on unpunished. That, she says, is contemporary China. At least to some, mostly now elderly, Chinese, it is.