For the first time ever, Bill Taylor shares his story of escape as a prisoner of war during World War II. This biography details Taylor’s astonishing experiences as a prisoner of war, an escapee, a wanderer through a strange land, and his eventual meeting with the famous Communist leader, Mao Zedong. This fascinating and engaging story shares the life of a war hero who was the only World War II prisoner of war to successfully escape, inspiring readers by revealing the personal strength and courageous adventures of a lone survivor.

Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Revolution, rescued China from years of corrupt rule, foreign domination, and civil war. Through Mao's tactics of guerilla warfare and peasant support, China became a Communist nation in 1949. Mao unified China under a central government, yet the legacy of his achievements -- and mistakes -- still lingers. By isolating China for over two decades, Mao let it lag behind the progress made in other countries. In The Chinese Revolution and Mao Zedong in World History, author Ann Malaspina relates the history of the Chinese Communist party and the People's Republic of China during the time of Mao Zedong. Key events include the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao's helping China emerge from isolation by reaching out to the United States. Book jacket.

The staggering story of the most important Chinese political dissident of the Mao era, a devout Christian who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the regime Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissent in her Christian faith -- and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets. Miraculously, Lin Zhao's prison writings survived, though they have only recently come to light. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with her friends, her classmates, and other former political prisoners, Lian Xi paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the face of unrelenting evil.

"Originally published in a different version in 2007 in Russian by Molodaia Gvardiia as Mao Tzedun"--Title page verso.

When Kent Wong was a young boy, his father, a patriotic Chinese official in the customs office in Hong Kong, joined an insurrection at work and returned with the family to the newly established People’s Republic of China. Hailed as heroes, they settled in the southern city of Canton. But Mao’s China was dangerous and unstable, with landlords executed en-masse and millions dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward.

*** WINNER OF THE 2019 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NAYEF AL-RODHAN PRIZE FOR GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING SHORTLISTED FOR DEUTSCHER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING*** 'Revelatory and instructive… [a] beautifully written and accessible book’ The Times For decades, the West has dismissed Maoism as an outdated historical and political phenomenon. Since the 1980s, China seems to have abandoned the utopian turmoil of Mao’s revolution in favour of authoritarian capitalism. But Mao and his ideas remain central to the People’s Republic and the legitimacy of its Communist government. With disagreements and conflicts between China and the West on the rise, the need to understand the political legacy of Mao is urgent and growing. The power and appeal of Maoism have extended far beyond China. Maoism was a crucial motor of the Cold War: it shaped the course of the Vietnam War (and the international youth rebellions that conflict triggered) and brought to power the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; it aided, and sometimes handed victory to, anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa; it inspired terrorism in Germany and Italy, and wars and insurgencies in Peru, India and Nepal, some of which are still with us today – more than forty years after the death of Mao. In this new history, Julia Lovell re-evaluates Maoism as both a Chinese and an international force, linking its evolution in China with its global legacy. It is a story that takes us from the tea plantations of north India to the sierras of the Andes, from Paris’s fifth arrondissement to the fields of Tanzania, from the rice paddies of Cambodia to the terraces of Brixton. Starting with the birth of Mao’s revolution in northwest China in the 1930s and concluding with its violent afterlives in South Asia and resurgence in the People’s Republic today, this is a landmark history of global Maoism.

The most authoritative life of the Chinese leader every written, Mao: The Unknown Story is based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of Mao’s close circle in China who have never talked before — and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relationship with Stalin went back to the 1920s, ultimately bringing him to power; he welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China; and he schemed, poisoned, and blackmailed to get his way. After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing this dream he caused the deaths of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history. In all, well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao’s rule — in peacetime.

In the midst of the Cultural Revolution a Rebel Red Guard anonymously circulated an essay condemning the Chinese Party elite as a decadent, exploitative 'new red capitalist class'. The subversive yet truthful nature of the message stung the top Communist leadership in Beijing. Incredibly, the writer, Yang Xiguang, was only nineteen years old, a star high school pupil and the son of high-ranking Hunan officials. Denounced as a 'counterrevolutionary' by Chairman Mao himself, Yang was hunted down, arrested in 1968, and sentenced to ten years in prison. Captive Spirits is his remarkable story of life in the Chinese gulag during one of the most tumultuous periods of modern Chinese history.

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.

FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY A brilliant second collection by Sally Wen Mao on the violence of the spectacle—starring the film legend Anna May Wong In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.