Book excerpt: Between 500,000 to 2 million people died in the Cultural Revolution. Yet a silence remains as to why. Over eleven years in Mao’s China, an all-out assault on ‘class enemies’ took place. Teenagers smashed their teachers’ skulls. Doctors were tortured in jail as foreign spies. Ordinary people condemned ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to execution – and then went home and ate their dinner. This was less than fifty years ago. But the victims are being forgotten already. Wang Youqin unmasks the true brutality of the Cultural Revolution. Documenting the deaths of over six hundred individuals, Victims of the Cultural Revolution calls on us to remember the evil ideological fanaticism wreaks and pays tribute to all those who suffered.