Perpetrating the tradition established by earlier radical scholars of the Chinese revolutionary leader and his thought, the 14 essays also strive to establish a basis for innovative perspectives that mobilize the theoretical precepts of critical Left and radical theory. The topics include the Woman Question in an age of green politics, orthodoxy, social formation and change, and Stalinism in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Five essays explore Mao's influence in the Andes, India, Vietnam, Japan, and the Philippines. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Wang Fanxi, a leader of the Chinese Trotskyists, wrote this book on Mao more than fifty years ago. He did so while in exile in the then Portuguese colony of Macau, across the water from Hong Kong, where he had been sent in 1949 to represent his comrades in China, soon to disappear for decades into Mao’s jails. The book is an analytical study whose strength lies less in describing Mao’s life than in explaining Maoism and setting out a radical view on it as a political movement and a current of thought within the Marxist tradition to which both Wang and Mao belonged. With its clear and provoking thesis, it has, since its writing, stood the test of time far better than the hundreds of descriptive studies that have in the meantime come and gone.

Mao Zedong's political career spanned more than half a century. The ideas he championed transformed one of the largest nations on earth and inspired revolutionary movements across the world. Even today Mao lives on in China, where he is regarded by many as a near-mythical figure, and in the West, where a burgeoning literature continues to debate his memory. In this book, leading scholars from different generations and around the world offer a critical evaluation of the life and legacy of China's most famous - some would say infamous - son. The book brings the scholarship on Mao up to date, and its alternative perspectives equip readers to assess for themselves the nature of this mercurial figure and his significance in modern Chinese history.

Representing a lifetime of research and writing by noted historian Arif Dirlik, the essays collected here explore developments in Chinese socialism and the issues that have occupied historians of the Chinese revolution for the past three decades. Dirlik engages Chinese socialism critically but with sympathy for the aspirations of revolutionaries who found the hope of social, political, and cultural liberation in Communist alternatives to capitalism and the intellectual inspiration to realize their hopes in Marxist theory. The book's historical approach to Marxist theory emphasizes its global relevance while avoiding dogmatic and Eurocentric limitations. These incisive essays range from the origins of socialism in the early twentieth century, through the victory of the Communists in mid-century, to the virtual abandonment by century's end of any pretense to a socialist revolutionary project by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. All that remains of the revolution in historical hindsight are memories of its failures and misdeeds, but Dirlik retains a critical perspective not just toward the past but also toward the ideological hegemonies of the present. Taken together, his writings reaffirm the centrality of the revolution to modern Chinese history. They also illuminate the fundamental importance of Marxism to grasping the flaws of capitalist modernity, despite the fact that in the end the socialist response was unable to transcend the social and ideological horizons of capitalism.

Offers a different perspective on Mao Zedong, the major architect of the Chinese Revolution and leader of the People's Republic of China until his death in 1976. Utilizing a number of documents written by Mao, here, the author 'rethinks' Mao by subjecting a number his controversial themes to fresh scrutiny.

An examination of the relationship between Marxism as a European historical experience and its international unfolding with the globalization of capitalism. It sets Mao's thought in the context of Marxist tradition and Third World revolutionary discourse.

A special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this volume of essays examines modernity from transnational and transcultural perspectives, holding that within different cultures, there are different starting points of the transition to modernity that lead to differen

The first documented, systematic study of a truly revolutionary subject, this 1937 text remains the definitive guide to guerrilla warfare. It concisely explains unorthodox strategies that transform disadvantages into benefits.

The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic 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. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine that recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People's Republic of China. "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful mesghing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikötter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.