Yang Jisheng’s newly translated history could be a cautionary tale or a sign of things to come.
…The World Turned Upside Down picks up roughly where Tombstone left off, in 1966, with Chairman Mao Zedong seeking to eradicate the remaining conservative and pragmatic leftist forces in his country by declaring a wenhua geming, a “cultural revolution” that would mobilize “the broad masses from the bottom up to expose these sinister phenomena.” Mao, contemptuous of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs) and eager to establish the “Four News” (new ideas, new culture, new habits, new customs), was under no illusion that the process would be straightforward; indeed, he declared that it was only “great disorder under heaven” that could create “great order under heaven.”
