Roderick MacFarquhar, a consummate scholar of Communist China whose writing on Mao’s power politics influenced how people around the world understood China, died on Sunday in Cambridge, Mass., where he had long taught at Harvard University. He was 88.His son, Rory, said the cause was heart failure. Professor MacFarquhar specialized in the origins of the Cultural Revolution, the decade of turmoil that terrorized China beginning in 1966. His three-volume work, “The Origins of the Cultural Revolution,” came to be considered a classic.
