February 23, 2007

Books

The Chairman's Willing Subjects

Mao’s Last RevolutionRoderick MacFarquhar and Michael SchoenhalsBelknap/Harvard University Press, $35, 752 pp.

Nicholas Clifford

In the summer of 1967, a group of middle-school students, daughters of high-ranking officials in Beijing, forced their headmistress to crawl through a cement pipe and then beat her to death as she emerged. “These teenage girls,” wrote Yue Daiyun in To the Storm, her 1985 memoir of the Cultural Revolution, “ordinarily shy, mild, and gentle, had somehow become (...)


 

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