Linda Jaivin, Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China.

- Any book written by Linda Jaivin on China is essential reading. Her previous one, The Shortest History of China, 2021, which I reviewed here, was superb.

- Bombard the Headquarters is a smaller book (117 pages), and focuses solely on Mao Zedong and his ugly, abusive, murderous regime. But it is also essential reading. Mao was ruthless, and millions were murdered because he would not tolerate any compromise to his revolutionary communist agenda on any level whatsoever. 

- In the mid-1960's the Red Guards were formed and the Cultural Revolution got underway. 'Academics estimate that between 500,000 and 2 million excess deaths took place in the Chinese countryside over next four years'. It was a killing machine on every level. Over 10 million homes were ransacked as the red terrorists sought evidence of disloyalty to Mao. He was adored like a god. Some enthusiasts even sought to mandate that traffic lights be changed to allow the red light to mean 'go'. 

- After Mao's regime ended most Cultural Revolution radicals paid little or no price for their actions, despite the people generally not tolerating any return to radicalism. Mao had brought ‘domestic turmoil and catastrophe to the Party, the state and the whole people’. 'They struggled to deal with the loss of ten years of their lives to what now seemed a shameful, collective mania, as well as feelings of victimhood, betrayal and guilt...If one thing united many of these diverse thinkers, creators and activists in the immediate post-Mao era it was the spirit of humanism.' 

- The Cultural Revolution 'turned Chinese people against themselves, saw the army preside over mass murder, turned cities into battlefields and villages into killing grounds...After the decade-long upheaval, at least 4.2 million people were detained and investigated and 1.7 million were killed, according to official statistics released in 1984.' 

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