Ho Bee Research Seminar: Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971

In the first five years after the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, one of the largest political upheavals of the 20th century paralyzed a powerfully centralized party state, leading to a harsh regime of military control. Despite a wave of post-Mao revelations in the 1980s, knowledge about the nationwide impact of this insurgency and its suppression remains selective and impressionistic, based primarily on scattered local accounts. A dataset drawn from historical narratives published in 2,213 county and city annals (99 percent of all local jurisdictions), permits us to map the temporal and geographic spread of a mass insurgency, its evolution through time, and the repression through which militarized state structures were rebuilt. Statistical models designed to compensate for sample selection bias yield estimates for deaths and political casualties from various causes. The vast majority of casualties were due to organised repression by authorities, not the actions of insurgents in the course of rebellion. Despite the large aggregate death toll, on a per capita basis the Cultural Revolution was considerably less intense than other well-known cases of politically-induced mortality.