"Remembering a bitter past": the Trauma of China's Labor Camps, 1949-1978.

The span of time between the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64)--a radical, Christian-inspired politico-religious upheaval that ravaged seventeen provinces and took an estimated twenty million lives--and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76)--a violent move launched by Mao Zedong during his last decade in power to re-establish the spirit of the Chinese revolution--may well be characterized as the bloodiest hundred in Chinese history. This period witnessed the collapse of the imperial state and the emerging see the verb of a new order in a series of drawn out destructive shock waves. Civil