Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China's Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation's capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement's crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure.

Most accounts of the movement have portrayed a struggle among Red Guards as a social conflict that pitted privileged "conservative" students against socially marginalized "radicals" who sought to change an oppressive social and political system. Walder employs newly available documentary evidence and the recent memoirs of former Red Guard leaders and members to demonstrate that on both sides of the bitter conflict were students from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, who shared similar-largely defensive-motivations. The intensity of the conflict and the depth of the divisions were an expression of authoritarian political structures that continued to exert an irresistible pull on student motives and actions, even in the midst of their rebellion.

Walder's nuanced account challenges the main themes of an entire generation of scholarship about the social conflicts of China's Cultural Revolution, shedding light on the most tragic and poorly understood period of recent Chinese history.

Praise for Fractured Rebellion

An impressive and important work of scholarship which will join a small set of major books on the Cultural Revolution.
- Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine

An analysis that will alter the view of one of the seminal events in the history of the People's Republic of China.
- Frederick C. Teiwes, the University of Sydney

A truly extraordinary scholarly achievement. Never has the immensely important puzzle of the Red Guard Movement ever been rendered in such rich, clarifying empirical detail as Walder gives us here.
- Doug McAdam, Stanford University

Better than anything else I have read, Andrew Walder's Fractured Rebellion explains how and why the Beijing students in the first two years of the Cultural Revolution became so sharply, bitterly, and fatally divided. An absorbing work of research and synthesis.
-Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for a Modern China

One prominent feature of Japanese automobile manufacturing in the postwar period was a system of sourcing parts from closely affiliated smaller firms in long-term, stable relations.
Changes in the global automobile industry have made that system too expensive. Increasing competitive pressures resulting from global excess capacity in the early 2000s and have forced a transformation in the business model of the automotive industry. Modulization and a switch to "global best sourcing" for standard parts have turned the previous logic of  Japanese subcontracting on its head, as first-tier suppliers become even closer partners of large assemblers, while small firms become replaceable. Mergers and joint ventures have changed the structure of Japan's auto part industry, resulting in larger firms that compete globally. Undergoing a transformation toward cost-cutting and increased technological capabilities in the late 1990s and early 2000s has afforded these firms a fortuitous head start in preparing for the global auto crisis of 2008/09, which is threatening to wipe out smaller parts markers around the globe.