Historian's new Mao book turns acclaim to censure

Beijing

IT seemed that China's censors had finally muzzled Yang Jisheng, the famed chronicler of the Mao era. Last year, he had finished writing a widely anticipated history of the Cultural Revolution. But officials warned him against publishing it and barred him from travelling to the United States, he has said, and he stayed muted through the 50th anniversary of the start of that bloody upheaval.

Now Yang has broken that silence with the publication of his history of the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, a sequel to Tombstone, his landmark study of the famine spawned by Mao's policies in the late 1950s. The 1,151-page book is the latest shot fired in China's war over remembering, or forgetting, the dark side of its Communist past, a struggle that has widened under the hard-line president, Xi Jinping.