History & Area Studies / Chinese History / Contemporary China (1949-present)

Turmoil on the Frontier-Professor Andrew G. Walder’s work is based on 18 volumes of confidential

Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China’s Southern Periphery

Andrew G. Walder

Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China’s Southern Periphery (by Andrew G. Walder). Professor Andrew G. Walder’s work is based on 18 volumes of confidential archives from the early 1980s regarding the Chinese government’s "handling of leftover issues" from the Cultural Revolution, conducting an in-depth empirical study of the large-scale violence and civil war in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region during that period. Through rigorous statistical analysis and narrative reconstruction, the book reveals that this disaster was not merely spontaneous civil conflict, but was systematically driven by local military forces and administrative systems during the process of reconstructing power institutions. The author details the urban armed struggles in Nanning and Guilin, the brutal suppression and massacres targeting the "four categories of targets" in rural areas, and even extremely horrific acts such as cannibalism, profoundly analyzing how political turmoil evolved into a human tragedy. The core argument holds that Guangxi’s mortality rate, far exceeding the national average, was closely related to geopolitical pressure, Wei Guoqing’s leadership, and the high penetration of the party-state apparatus into grassroots society, rather than ethnic diversity or geographical remoteness. This research not only supplements historical details but also, through a scientific negative binomial regression model, clarifies the astonishing destructive power that a highly centralized system may unleash when facing internal division and power restructuring.