What Dikotter calls the “Red Years” from 1966 to 1968 saw the worst of the urban violence. Student Red Guards were organized to defend Mao against his enemies. They attacked their teachers (humiliations, beatings, torture and suicides are described in wrenching detail) and raided homes in search of bourgeois “articles of worship, luxury items, reactionary literature, foreign books, concealed weapons, hidden gold, foreign currency, signs of a decadent lifestyle, portraits of Chiang Kai-shek.” Then new factions targeted elite party members, along with intellectuals, artists and writers, miscellaneous class enemies and victims of earlier campaigns, until competing groups were fighting one another in the streets. So many campaigns, work team investigations and political reversals characterized the early Cultural Revolution that even the activists were confused. They had no way to know why a signal for radical behavior one day would be rescinded the next. Ordinary people were paying for political struggle at the elite level, often with their lives, but they were also responsible for the petty vendettas they carried out when given the chance.

Mao eventually brought in the military to quell factional violence, but China descended further into civil war as the army, too, sought revenge. The country became a dictatorship under the command of Mao’s chosen successor Marshal Lin Biao, who installed revolutionary party committees to direct institutions throughout the country. Another wave of purges and counterpurges ensued. Armed battles, most famously in Wuhan, strengthened the left-wing Cultural Revolution Group associated with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. The army had split against itself.

During what Dikotter calls “The Black Years” from 1968 to 1971, the Cultural Revolution moved to the countryside, as former Red Guards were rusticated by the millions to “learn from” the peasants and prepare for war with the Soviet Union along the border. Dikotter describes the experience as an unremittingly terrible time of suffering, hunger, rape and abuse. Yet the rustification movement has produced hundreds of Chinese-language memoirs, many of which testify that for some young people, the time in the country­side was more nuanced or even bittersweet than he indicates. The rusticated youth, arguably, helped China to break with its Maoist past, for they later became known as the “awakened generation” and the “thoughtful generation” as they gradually inherited the leadership of the country. Their experiences in the countryside gave them the chance to re-evaluate the very premises of the revolution.

During this period, a campaign brought rural self-reliance to cult level, as local officials throughout the country were organized to visit Shanxi Province to study an arduously hewed terrace system claimed to free the community from the need for government help. Meanwhile, heavy industries and their workers were relocated inland to shelter them from an expected Soviet attack, a program Dikotter describes as an economic disaster. By then, many officials were in May Seventh Cadre Schools, compounds in remote areas where they were made to self-criticize while conducting hard labor. Compared with the violent purges and near civil war of the first few years of the Cultural Revolution, the dispersals and forcible relocations of these years make less painful, if equally dramatic reading. The period ended when Marshal Lin Biao, the man most responsible for the Mao cult, died on Sept. 13, 1971, in a plane crash in Mongolia. He is alleged to have tried to flee China after conspiring to assassinate Mao.