The World Turned Upside Down
A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
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Narrated by:
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Nancy Wu
About this listen
As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong's ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union's "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This 10-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation's economy.
Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today.
The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those 10 years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.
©2016 by Yang Jisheng. Translation copyright © 2021 by Yang Jisheng (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete.
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Important story, imperfectly executed
- By jackifus on 12-08-12
By: Anne Applebaum
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The Jakarta Method
- Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
- By: Vincent Bevins
- Narrated by: Tim Paige
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.
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Great book, but the narration has serious flaws
- By Prof. Neil Larsen on 08-03-20
By: Vincent Bevins
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Stalin
- New Biography of a Dictator
- By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Nora Seligman Favorov - translator
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.
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Loved it, but wouldn't want to live it
- By Neil on 01-12-20
By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, and others
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The Coming of the Third Reich
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 21 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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There is no story in 20th-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time.
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Compelling and depressing
- By Tad Davis on 06-30-10
By: Richard J. Evans
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The Bhutto Dynasty
- The Struggle for Power in Pakistan
- By: Owen Bennett-Jones
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A major new investigation into the Bhutto family, examining their influence in Pakistan from the colonial era to the present day.
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Excellent coverage of the dynasty
- By Junaid Qurashi on 04-26-21
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Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris
- By: Ian Kershaw
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 28 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried and rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of World War I.
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The heart of evil
- By Mike From Mesa on 01-20-14
By: Ian Kershaw
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America and Iran
- A History, 1720 to the Present
- By: John Ghazvinian
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 27 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In this rich, fascinating history, John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of the relations between these two nations back to the Persian Empire of the 18th century - the subject of great admiration by Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams - and an America seen by Iranians as an ideal to emulate for their own government.
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Distortions Galore
- By Chuck S. on 03-15-21
By: John Ghazvinian
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The Third Reich in Power
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 31 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive account of Germany's malign transformation under Hitler's total rule and the implacable march to war. This magnificent second volume of Richard J. Evans's three-volume history of Nazi Germany was hailed by Benjamin Schwartz of The Atlantic Monthly as "the definitive English-language account... gripping and precise." It chronicles the incredible story of Germany's radical reshaping under Nazi rule.
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Great book, annoying narrator
- By Maria on 08-14-10
By: Richard J. Evans
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How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs
- The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance
- By: Elizabeth F. Thompson
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs' fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the Prophet. In October 1918, Faisal, Lawrence, and the Arabs victoriously entered Damascus, where they declared a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. At the Paris Peace Conference, Faisal won the support of President Woodrow Wilson.
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Good listen
- By Amazon Customer on 08-09-24
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The Unfathomable Ascent
- How Hitler Came to Power
- By: Peter Ross Range
- Narrated by: Paul Hodgson
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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On the night of January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler leaned out of a spotlit window of the Reich chancellery in Berlin, bursting with joy. The moment seemed unbelievable, even to Hitler. After an improbable political journey that came close to faltering on many occasions, his march to power had finally succeeded. While the path of Hitler's rise has been told in books covering larger portions of his life, no previous work has focused solely on his eight-year climb to rule: 1925-1933.
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The best account of Hitler’s rise to power.
- By Deal W. Hudson on 08-26-20
By: Peter Ross Range
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Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
- By: Herbert P. Bix
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 29 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose 63-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix describes what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status.
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Not what I bargained for
- By Alexander Crowell on 08-21-20
By: Herbert P. Bix
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Tombstone
- The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962
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