Building the New Cambodia: Educational Destruction and Construction under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979

On 17 April 1975, the communist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and established Democratic Kampuchea. Declaring an end to “over two thousand years of Cambodian history,” Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot announced a new beginning, referred to metaphorically by scholars of the period as the “Year Zero.” The “new Cambodia” lasted exactly three years, eight months, and twenty days, during which time the people of Cambodia were subjected to a cataclysmic social experiment as part of what one historian has termed “the world's most radical … revolution.”