The depiction of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Western media and academic writings has so far been dominated by accounts of the fate of urban intellectuals. These narratives commonly include reminiscences of violence and destruction handed out by youthful Red Guards in the early stages of the movement against their teachers and parents, as well as illustrations of the seemingly irrational leader worship surrounding the “Great Helmsman” Mao Zedong. The development of the Cultural Revolution in the countryside, on the other hand, has by and large been neglected by scholarship, leading to claims that the movement should exclusively be regarded as an urban phenomenon. These claims may be traced to two major reasons: On the one hand, most victims of Red Guard violence belonged to privileged, well-cultured strata, who later were able to retell their version of history. The fate of China’s peasants, on the other hand, especially in remote regions, left few traces in official writings, and only a handful of writers of so-called reportage literature (baogao wenxue) tried to reconstruct the events in rural settings.

In this important book, Yang Su forcefully shatters the claim that China’s countryside remained largely unaffected by the development of the Cultural Revolution. He convincingly demonstrates that casualties were highest in regions far removed from the urban centers and that the largest part of the approximately 1,728 million people killed during the Cultural Revolution, an estimate leaked by an official source, were killed in the countryside as part of what Su calls “collective killings,” massacres conducted by local militia against supposed class enemies, especially the so-called Four Types (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements).

The book is organized into eight chapters. The first two set the stage and position the research in the wider field of genocide studies. Su denies the applicability of state-policy models in explaining the killings in China’s countryside and posits instead a “community model,” which he characterizes as displaying three major foci of analysis: emergent local situations; the indirect role played by the state in these killings; and finally the importance of subnational units of analysis, such as local communities, to explain cross-unit variations. The author further comments on his sources, which, in addition to some 30 interviews with victims of the movement, include a few previously unknown party documents and a large number of local gazetteers.

Chapters 3 to 7 are devoted to an explication of this theoretical model by way of two parallel case studies of Guangdong province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, both located in southern China and characterized by a high number of casualties during the Cultural Revolution. The reasons for his choice of case studies could have been justified in more detail, since other border provinces, such as Inner Mongolia, experienced high numbers of killings as well. Conducting them there, however, might have unsettled some of the book’s findings, for example, that killings took place mostly in Han-Chinese dominated counties, as opposed to conflicts between Han and so-called ethnic minorities. Each of the five chapters is devoted to a specific factor that contributed to the murderous outcome.

In Chapter 3, the author attempts to show that the conflict was shaped by older group identities, especially clan and lineage relations, which intersected with categories applied by the communist government. The following chapter details how the concept of at least four types of “class enemies” was rooted in the institutional logic of the Maoist mobilization regime, which constantly needed inner or outer enemies as a means of negative integration. By the late 1960s, when the killings took place, the class labels had become hereditary, and many of the so-called landlords or rich peasants had never owned land at all and presented no threat to the communist rulers. In the subsequent chapters, the author hints at the importance of the discursive dimension of warfare rhetoric (Chapter 7). Party leaders framed current events in martial phrases, yet without intending actual killings of the supposed class enemies. Here, Su posits that a cumulative radicalization took place at lower levels in order to outshine other local leaders in anticipating the will of the central authorities. A further major component was the demobilization of the judiciary and of codified law after the late 1950s (Chapter 6).

Chapter 5 is of crucial importance. It is devoted to understanding the strategic motives of organizers, enablers, and killers. These were predominantly local state actors below the county level, especially militia members and local officials. Su emphasizes two strategic reasons for their joining in the “collective killings”: first, the risk of personal demotion if they displayed insufficient “tactical innovations” (p. 154) during a mass campaign, leading to a radicalization unintended by higher authorities; and second, a rise in personal reputation locally, an argument pertaining mainly to the killers, some of whom received social and financial capital as a result of their actions. Still, the killers, according to Su, were not “ordinary men” in Christopher Browning’s sense of the term, but were shaped by their belief in Maoist ideology and psychological aberrations. These findings are in dire need of further exploration, especially since among the author’s interview partners were no perpetrators, and the literary evidence drawn upon is sketchy. Chapter 8 details patterns of killing based on statistical data from the local gazetteers and shows that the remoteness and poverty of a region, as well as the absence of “ethnic minorities,” are positively correlated with the occurrence of collective killings. Summing up his argument, Su concludes that the killings were mostly evidenced in places where the reach of the state was particularly weak (p. 241) and local actors could make their choices without attaining an immediate response from the center. The final chapter returns to general findings on mass killings in other parts of the world and calls for a greater focus on local dynamics and actors.

There can be no doubt that Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution has filled a major lacuna in current research by shifting attention to the fate of the Four Types in remote regions of China. However, the role and motives of the perpetrators in particular will have to be analyzed in greater detail in the future, although this is admittedly a very difficult subject. Factual inconsistencies, such as the role played by the judiciary and especially the courts, which in many regions of the country were reopened in the early 1970s and not post-1978, modify minor parts of the argument. The book would further have profited from stricter editorial guidance since there are many redundancies, both in terms of argument and even with regard to single sentences (the same footnote on the role of Jiangxi Province appears in slightly different spellings at least three times throughout the work). Generally speaking, however, this is an important and very commendable contribution, which should be read by anyone interested in the history of the Cultural Revolution or in the comparative study of mass killings.