This book searches for the historical origins of the unprecedented personal tragedies of the Cultural Revolution. When Mao Zedong began to ascend as an artificial “red sun” in the 1940s, his blaze had already cast a shadow in its wake; when the sun reached its zenith at noon in 1945, the shadow was still there, but it could not be detected because of the fierceness of the sun. This book emphasizes the unification of the intellectual tradition and the centralization of state power, which together formed two political policies that brought disaster to society, and the book criticizes Chinese Communist tactics of employing rectification campaigns and eliminating counterrevolutionaries, while clarifying the issue of whether or not the Chinese Communist so-called “party line” of rectification and anti-rightist campaigns indeed respected the masses.