Chinese leader Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966 as a series of violent political campaigns, aiming to purge his enemies and to establish a Millennium Dynasty centered on his personal cult with absolute power and absolute truth. In the tears-and-blood-shedding decade that followed, the country was turned into a meat grinder, as sanguinary as the Dark Age. The major social experiments during the time were not utopian fantasies but unforgiven crimes. Mao’s demise in September 1976 and the subsequent arrest of his wife and adherents, the “Gang of Four,” finally brought the chaos to an end. Read more
