The books by Frank Ching and Zhang Xianliang are vastly different in content, aim, and style, as opposite as yang and yin. Yet each casts light on the Cultural Revolution. Considered together, they may even begin to explain it.Mao’s venomous “class struggle” against his own Communist party’s elite in 1966–1976 continued his egalitarian struggle against the
An account and critique of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which portrays the "revolution" as a factional squabble within the Communist Party bureaucracy which enabled the working class to begin to assert themselves as an independent force for a time before being crushed by the state.