"Controversies over the nature and results of the Cultural Revolution will rage for many years to come, and it will be decades before its full history can be written with any reasonable degree of accuracy and understanding. Yet the "decade of catastrophe" obviously cannot be ignored in the interim, nor can the events of the era be conveniently dismissed as "the ten lost years." For not only was the Cultural Revolution the historical culmination of Maoism and the Maoist era, but the experiences of the time continue to dominate the political consciousness of many Chinese in the post-Mao era. An attempt to write even a brief preliminary account is a formidable task not only because of the political passions the Cultural Revolution necessarily arouses but also because of the moral and historical dilemmas it poses. There is no period in China's long history so complex and contradictory or so lacking in historical precedents, no other period where all historical analogies fail. Rarely has any society revealed itself so openly with all its contradictions and scars, and rarely have events unfolded in ways so strange, tortuous, and bizarre. Few episodes in modern history are filled with so many ironies and paradoxes, plagued by such deep incongruities between means and ends, and marred by so large a gulf between intentions and results."