Abstract
In the first five years after the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, one of the largest political upheavals of the 20th century paralyzed a powerfully centralized party state, leading to a harsh regime of military control. Despite a wave of post-Mao revelations in the 1980s, knowledge about the nationwide impact of this insurgency and its suppression remains selective and impressionistic, based primarily on scattered local accounts. Employing a dataset drawn from historical narratives published in 2,213 county and city annals (99% of all local jurisdictions), this article charts the temporal and geographic spread of a mass insurgency, its evolution through time, and the repression through which militarized state structures were rebuilt. Sample selection models yield estimates of 1.1 million deaths and 24 million victims of various forms of political persecution. The vast majority of casualties were due to organized repression by authorities, not the actions of insurgents in the course of rebellion. Despite the large death toll, on a per capita basis the Cultural Revolution was considerably less deadly than the Salvadoran civil war or Guatemalan counterinsurgency campaign of the 1980s, the Indonesian massacres of 1965-66, and the Soviet purges at the height of the Stalinist terror in the late 1930s.
About the speaker
Prof Andrew Walder received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 1981. He was faculty at Columbia University from 1981 to 1987 and at Harvard University from 1987 to 1995. He was Professor and Head of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from 1995 to 1997. He joined Stanford University in 1997, and is currently the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor. He is also Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies.
Prof Walder has long specialized on the sources of conflict, stability and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His current research focuses on changes in the ownership and control of large Chinese corporations and the parallel emergence of new corporate elite with varied ties to state agencies. He also continues his research interest in Mao-era China, with a focus on the mass politics of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1969. He published widely on political economy, social structure, inequality, social mobility, and political conflict under state socialism and afterwards, with a special emphasis on contemporary China. His most recent book is Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Prof Walder received numerous awards including the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore Award, Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award and European Group on Organization Studies Book Award, and the Distinguished Contribution Award from the International Association for Chinese Management Research, etc. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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