What Mao did in secret may not be possible to know fully.
But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?
>But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?
It wasn't a free society by any stretch, but the students' radicalism was in line with the prevailing zeitgeist... they denounced university officials as intellectual elites, corrupted by bourgeois notions that threatened the success of the revolution. Meanwhile, Mao faced ongoing struggles to maintain and consolidate power, so he found endorsing their ideas useful. But the movement itself rapidly spun beyond his direct control.
Mao leveraged the movement to try and get himself back in the driver's seat, after he had been sidelined following the Great Leap Forward. He amplified them greatly for his own selfish reasons, which is also happening in our current moment, in different ways. They wound up being, surprise, unpredictable and destructive.
(A note, I read that book too, it's good but needs discounting for bias. Anybody who writes Beijing as 'Peking', or Zhou Enlai as "Chou En-lai" in the 21st century has clearly got a KMT-flavored axe to grind. But it also has some great original research.)
This is not just a factual historical account. It also takes a lot of opportunities to point out how awful a person Mao was, and makes claims about his motives, which don't always seem knowable.
Of course, when writing about one of the worst rulers in human history, being a bit judgemental is understandable. But it does make me want to check other sources.
On the fact level, there seems to be an enormous amount of work behind the book.
What Mao did in secret may not be possible to know fully.
But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?