In 1958, Mao had thought up a new policy -- the Great Leap Forward -- a grandiose plan to transform China into a rich world power. Mao's method was a more extreme version of Stalin's brutal collectivization of the 1930s. People were told to produce steel in backyard furnaces. Crops were left to rot. Scientific knowledge and common sense were ignored. No one dared to tell the truth for fear of arrest -- or worse. Peasants' food was taken from them to make up bogus quotas. The result was one of the worst man-made disasters in history. More than 30 million people starved to death.

By 1966, haunted by the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was fighting to maintain his domination in China. He launched the Great Cultural Revolution. Millions of young people were recruited into Mao's Red Guards. Their idealism was exploited to create mayhem and destroy every vestige of the past. The upheaval of the Cultural Revolution coincided with escalating tensions between China and the U.S.S.R. -- including a series of military clashes along the Chinese-Soviet border.
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