Making sense of the `great disorder' of the Cultural Revolution

``To understand the `why' of China today," they write, ``one has to understand the `what' of the Cultural Revolution."

MacFarquhar, director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, covered it for several British media outlets. Schoenhals is a Swedish scholar who was studying in China during the Cultural Revolution .

Their account is authoritative, and presented with powerful narrative sweep. As they make clear, the Cultural Revolution was all Mao, all the time. He was determined, they write, ``to create `great disorder under heaven' " in order to achieve ``great order under heaven."

It all started when Mao, wanting to topple a prominent party leader who was mayor of Beijing, orchestrated a campaign against a historical drama written by the city's vice mayor. Then ``he [manipulated] a mass movement" -- the Red Guards -- ``to unseat the head of state [Liu Shaoqi]."

It was the Red Guard movement that caught the attention of the outside world, 40 years ago this summer, with their mass rallies in Tiananmen Square, waving Little Red Books with the sayings of Mao, freed from social restraints to roam through the country and attack scholars, landlords, even members of the political old guard -- and smash the ``Four Olds."

``Don't be afraid of people making trouble," Mao told a meeting of People's Liberation Army officers in 1967 as China descended into what he would later toast as ``all-around civil war."

``The bigger the trouble gets, the longer it lasts, the better. . . . Something is bound to come out of it!"

As the Red Guards disappeared from the scene by mid-1968 -- sent ``up to the mountains and down to the villages" or dismissed to their classrooms -- the story becomes one of ``elite politics," and the authors' account captures the turmoil.