In the first few years of China's Cultural Revolution, one of the largest political upheavals of the 20th century immobilized a highly centralized party state, leading to a harsh regime of military control. Employing a dataset drawn from historical narratives published in 2,215 county and city annals, we can trace the temporal and geographic spread of a mass insurgency, its evolution through time, and the repression through which militarized state structures were rebuilt. The macro-patterns yield observations that conflict with impressions of the period based on accounts from selected large cities, and reveal previously unsuspected political dynamics. The materials also yield grounded estimates of the numbers of dead and other victims and permits us to assess these upheavals from a broader comparative perspective.

Andrew Walder is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, and the author of "Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement" (Harvard University Press, 2009), and "China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed" (Harvard, 2015). This talk is based on a book in progress that will analyze, from the perspective of historically-oriented political sociology, the conflicts that destroyed China’s civilian state in 1967 and the repression through which state structures were rebuilt over the following two years.