Two decades after Mao Zedong ignited the Great Proletarian Revolution there is still no satisfactory accounting for the upheaval which Beijing now says caused millions of deaths and left some 100 million people scarred victims. Ordinary imagination cannot grasp what took place during those “10 bad years of great disaster” (shinian haojie) as the Chinese now call them. Since so much at that time defied conventional theories of politics, outsiders quickly put the phenomenon out of mind once the turmoil ceased. For the Chinese, however, it has not been so simple. Those who personally suffered have tended to summarize the story according to their individual tragedies. Chinese seeking a larger perspective are caught between the inexplicableness of its causes and the incalculability of its consequences.

Few episodes in history have been the object of such widely divergent interpretations as the events of Mao Zedong's last decade. For the sake of convenience, I shall refer to the movement launched in 1966 by the name Mao gave it, but disputes have raged since the beginning as to whether it was in fact either cultural or revolutionary, let alone proletarian.

Mao Zedong, dissatisfied with the growing ossification of the Party and government bureaucracies, in the spring of 1966 launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He believed that China's youth required a “revolutionary experience” to renew their faith in a revolution that had taken place before most of them had been born or were old enough to remember. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) quickly became a period of widespread, often violent, social upheaval that affected the performance of industry.

The China of the 1980s seems so very different from that of the mid 1960s: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is now widely denounced, seemingly both for the mid 1960s' diagnosis of the ills afflicting Chinese society and for the remedies chosen at the time to cure them. Today few would wish to defend the treatment meted out by Red Guards, but a condemnation of past actions is no substitute for an understanding of what happened and why.

On the 18 April 1936 General Li Zongren gave a stirring, patriotic interview to the Canton Gazette. In the current situation argued Li, China must stand and resist the Japanese since, “despite sacrifices, a war of resistance may pave the way for the regeneration of our nation.” He was later even more emphatic, ”… a war of resistance is essential for national regeneration.” These seem rather prescient remarks in the light of subsequent events; a new type of society did emerge in parts of China during the war against Japan. Perhaps it should be noted in passing that the form of regeneration expedited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was nevertheless hardly what Li Zongren had in mind in 1936. Indeed, he felt able to endorse it only late in life.

Historians have long recognized that Chiang Kai-shek's (Jiang Jieshi) anti-communist purge in April 1927 marked a crucial turning-point in the history of the Kuomintang. It answered with finality some very basic questions about the fate of the party. Most importantly, the purge ensured that the Chinese Communist Party would not be able to take control of the Kuomintang, something which had not been a foregone conclusion before the purge. In addition, the conflagration drove many young activists from the Kuomintang and dampened the enthusiasm of many who remained in its ranks.