Frank Dikötter charts all this devastation in his new volume, “The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976,” which completes a trilogy of titles detailing the history of Chinese Communist Party rule up to the death of Mao. Mr. Dikötter relies mainly on the Party’s own records. Temporarily declassified letters of complaint, secret police reports, statistics, surveys and other archived papers document China’s repeated disemboweling at the hands of its rulers.

...

The constant reversals of fortune were bewildering. “People roamed the capital, scanning the walls of the most important government units for new information about the direction of the campaign,” writes Mr. Dikötter. One day’s dead counter-revolutionaries could turn out to be the next day’s revolutionary martyrs.

One 19-year-old student shrewdly saw parallels between Mao’s Tiananmen Square reviews of 12 million adoring young Red Guards and Hitler’s rallies at Nuremberg. Rather less shrewdly, she wrote to tell him so: “The Cultural Revolution is not a mass movement. It is one man with a gun manipulating the people.” She spent the next 13 years in prison.

Mr. Dikötter skillfully makes his story intimate with details of such personal disasters. An occasionally repetitious use of more impersonal statistics reinforces the towering scale of the tragedy.

His account is also well-seasoned with the bizarre. By 1968 the production of Mao badges had reached 50 million per month and there were 600,000 Mao statues in Shanghai alone, many shoddily made and a danger to pedestrians.

The Cultural Revolution led to widespread disillusionment with the Party. Endless campaigns produced widespread resistance even among Party members themselves. Private plots, black markets, the renting of land and underground factories all proliferated without permission. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were in large part an acceptance of what was already happening.

Deng actually resisted decollectivization, but, as Mr. Dikötter writes, “had neither the will nor the ability to fight the natural trend towards private enterprise and a market-led economy.” When the communes were finally disbanded it was merely recognition that the farmers had made collective farms irrelevant.

For those who have swallowed the poisonous claim that the Communist Party deserves some credit for China’s current patchy prosperity, Mr. Dikötter provides the antidote. The Party’s own documents show how it repeatedly drove the country into poverty.