Mao Zedong And The Chinese Revolution

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.

Comprehensively indexed and with an introduction newly written by the editor, a leading expert in the field,Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolutionis sure to be recognized as a vital reference resource for all serious Mao scholars.

Comprehensively indexed and with an introduction newly written by the editor, a leading expert in the field,Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolutionis sure to be recognized as a vital reference resource for all serious Mao scholars.

Whether one views Mao Zedong as a hero or a villain, the ‘Great Helmsman’ was, undoubtedly, a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century China, a man whose life and writings provide a fascinating window on the Chinese experience from the 1920s onward. Part Mao biography, part historical overview of the turbulent story of China’s Communist revolutions, the introductory essay traces the history of twentieth-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 in 1976. The second half of the volume offers a selection of Mao’s writings — including such seminal pieces as "On New Democracy" and selections from the Little Red Book — and writings about Mao and his legacy by both his contemporaries and modern scholars.

Through first-person accounts, informational text, and photos, students will learn about Chairman Mao’s theories, military strategies, and political policies known as Maoism, which forever changed the culture of China and communication between the East and the West.

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the revolution was just beginning. Andrew Walder narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing' , this is the final volume of 'The People's Trilogy', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture. Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the marked and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao's regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikotter casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light. Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikotter's extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking 'People's Trilogy' is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People's Republic of China.