This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 29th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Cultural Revolution came immediately after Chairman Mao's great leap forward,

a brutal episode of famine that claimed the lives

of tens of millions of Chinese people. But the Cultural Revolution was no less mad in its

execution. In his book, The Cultural Revolution, a people's history. Frank

to Cotter details some of the lesser known aspects of Mao's ideological purges and what

they meant for average people. We spoke this week. The last book of

yours that I read was the tragedy of liberation which details some of the

fights between Mao and Shanghai Shek

and sort of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party

as a force.

And this, the cultural revolution, a people's history, picks up after a fairly large and incredibly

significant gap in Chinese history.

So at the moment you begin in 1961 and 62,

what did the world look like to the average person in China?

It would have been pretty awful.

So remember that the very first book in the trilogy was called Maus Famine and it's about the period that

comes in between these two books 1958 to 1962. So in that book,

Mal's Great Famine I showed how at least 45 million people were neglected, beaten, starved to death.

An extraordinary catastrophe, probably one of the greatest crimes against

humanity in the 20th century.

...