Mao Zedong And China In The Twentieth Century World

Throughout this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong’s life and thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader’s personal experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and territorial sovereignty. Karl begins with Mao’s early life in a small village in Hunan province, documenting his relationships with his parents, passion for education, and political awakening during the fall of the Qing dynasty in late 1911. She traces his transition from liberal to Communist over the course of the next decade, his early critiques of the subjugation of women, and the gathering force of the May 4th movement for reform and radical change. Describing Mao’s rise to power, she delves into the dynamics of Communist organizing in an overwhelmingly agrarian society, and Mao’s confrontations with Chiang Kaishek and other nationalist conservatives. She also considers his marriages and romantic liaisons and their relation to Mao as the revolutionary founder of Communism in China. After analyzing Mao’s stormy tenure as chairman of the People’s Republic of China, Karl concludes by examining his legacy in China from his death in 1976 through the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

In The Magic of Concepts Rebecca E. Karl interrogates "the economic" as concept and practice as it was construed historically in China in the 1930s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Separated by the Chinese Revolution and Mao's socialist experiments, each era witnessed urgent discussions about how to think about economic concepts derived from capitalism in modern China. Both eras were highly cosmopolitan and each faced its own global crisis in economic and historical philosophy: in the 1930s, capitalism's failures suggested that socialism offered a plausible solution, while the abandonment of socialism five decades later provoked a rethinking of the relationship between history and the economic as social practice. Interweaving a critical historiography of modern China with the work of the Marxist-trained economist Wang Yanan, Karl shows how "magical concepts" based on dehistoricized Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of historical activity that purport to exist outside lived experiences have erased much of the critical import of China's twentieth-century history. In this volume, Karl retrieves the economic to argue for a more nuanced and critical account of twentieth-century Chinese and global historical practice.

Whether one views Mao Zedong as a hero or a demon, the "Great Helmsman" was undoubtedly a pivotal figure in the history of 20th-century China. The first part of this volume is an introductory essay that traces the history of 20th-century China, from Mao's early career up to the Chinese Communist Party's victory in 1949, through three decades of revolution, to Mao's death I 1976. The second half offers a selection of Mao's writings - including such seminal pieces as "On the New Democracy" and selections from the "Little Red Book" - and writings about Mao and his legacy by both his contemporaries and modern scholars. Also included are headnotes, a chronology, Questions for Consideration, photographs, a selected bibliography, and index.

In Staging the World Rebecca E. Karl rethinks the production of nationalist discourse in China during the late Qing period, between China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1911. She argues that at this historical moment a growing Chinese identification with what we now call the Third World first made the modern world visible as a totality and that the key components of Chinese nationalist discourse developed in reference to this worldview. The emergence of Chinese nationalism during this period is often portrayed as following from China’s position vis-à-vis Japan and the West. Karl has mined the archives of the late Qing period to discern the foci of Chinese intellectuals from 1895 to 1911 to assert that even though the China/Japan/West triangle was crucial, it alone is an incomplete—and therefore flawed—model of the development of nationalism in China. Although the perceptions and concerns of these thinkers form the basis of Staging the World, Karl begins by examining a 1904 Shanghai production of an opera about a fictional partition of Poland and its modern reincarnation as an ethno-nation. By focusing on the type of dialogue this opera generated in China, Karl elucidates concepts such as race, colonization, globalization, and history. From there, she discusses how Chinese conceptions of nationalism were affected by the “discovery” of Hawai’i as a center of the Pacific, the Philippine revolution against the United States, and the relationship between nationality and ethnicity made apparent by the Boer War in South Africa.

A concise account of how revolutions made modern China and helped shape the modern world China’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a story narrated as the return of China to its “rightful” place at the center of the world. In China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China’s contemporary emergence is best seen not as a “return,” but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today’s capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China’s successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how.

Mao Zedong's political career spanned more than half a century. The ideas he championed transformed China and inspired revolutionary movements across the world. In this book, leading scholars offer a critical evaluation of the life and legacy of China's most famous son.

The twentieth century was a time of great change in China-for its government, economy, culture, and everyday life. It was a period of revolutions, and Twentieth Century China chronicles these uprisings with the words and images of the participants. The manifesto delivered by Sun Yat-sen in 1905, for example, details his plan to oust the Manchus; an editorial in a student journal encourages the activities of the May Fourth Movement in 1919; a 1933 speech by Chiang Kai-shek condemns China's enemies, the Communists and the Japanese; and the lyrics of a Chinese rock star give voice to the student demonstrations at the end of the 1980s. This is the story of the people-leaders and followers-whose decisions propelled modern Chinese history in erratic directions. Mao Zedong's personal physician recalls the phenomenon of the backyard steel furnaces and the changes they brought to the Chinese landscape during Mao's Great Leap Forward, a poem written in 1979 expresses anger toward a general who destroyed a kindergarten to build a mansion on its site, and the box from the Chinese version of Monopoly, introduced in 1987, playfully illustrates the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. Using a wide variety of primary sources, such as official reports and public statements, eyewitness and participant accounts, newspaper articles, political posters, cartoons, poetry, songs, and advertisements, R. Keith Schoppa paints a picture of a society undergoing dramatic changes, both political and social. Taken together, these documents tell a dramatic and often violent tale, alternately soaring with hope and plunging into deep despair, of a country undergoing a thorough transformation-a transformation that affects the world at large. Book jacket.

Mao Zedong was born in a tiny village in China's Hunan Province, and ended up one of the most significant political figures of the twentieth century. Starting his career earnestly as a librarian, Mao rose to the head of China's Communist Party, and eventually changed the course of his nation's history. Much of Mao's life was spent in his struggles for power, as he battled against the Nationalists, the Japanese, and even those in his own party to seize control. When he finally succeeded, he was faced with reconstructing a war-torn and divided China, and leading the massive and populous country into the twentieth century. Combining his own form of Communism, a tireless vision for the future, and a brutal ruthlessness, Mao redefined China and its place in the world, but at the expense of millions of lives. All the while, he remained an elusive, eccentric figure, while building a cult of personality around himself that eventually grew deadly, all while forging a legacy as a fearsome and formidable world leader. Book jacket.