TOO CUTE! Japan has been invaded by aliens–but this is no ordinary assault. These extraterrestrials are cute and extremely dangerous. Their mind-blowing powers are way too much for the military. Enter Mao-chan, the daughter of a great general, and her charming best friends–Japan’s only hope against this massive attack of the adorables!

During 1957 and 1958 Mao was seized by a vision that the Chinese economy could develop rapidly in leaps and bounds by relying on intuition and mass spontaneity. As a consequence, he single-handedly launched a colossal mobilization campaign called the Great Leap Forward, which featured many radical policy innovations, including the people's communes. This book is the first in-depth and original study of policy formulation and implementation during the Leap to link the roles of Mao, the central leaders, the ministries, and the province of Guangdong. Rejecting the theory that the Leap was an outcome of bureaucratic politics and competition, the study establishes beyond doubt the supreme and dominant position of Mao in initiating and commanding the Leap. Alfred L. Chan goes further than propounding a Mao-dominant model by documenting the strategic and tactical moves made by Mao in order to neutralize all opposition and to carry the day. He also discusses in detail the policy roles and input of other top leaders on whom the improvising Mao relied to feed his imagination and to flesh out his policies. In the chapters on the implementation of the Leap, Dr Chan explores how the ministries of Metallurgy and Agriculture were transformed from bureaucratic agencies into agents of mobilization, and how impossible targets forced them to keep up appearances by focussing on the rituals of mass mobilization. Similarly, other chapters on Guangdong show the simultaneously fervent, ritualistic, and desperate attempts to implement every hunch and intuition emanating from the centre. Exhaustive research using new material made available in the post-Mao era, as well as archives from the 1950s and 1960s, has yielded novel and original insights into the leader Mao, central decision-making, and policy implementation in the communist hierarchy.

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 story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact. Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao. This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.

Reveals the historical impact of dream rhetoric on Chinese modernity and nation-building Realism and the rhetoric of dreams intersected in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The Edge of Knowing investigates this relationship, showing how writers’ attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People’s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing will appeal to readers seeking to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.

“The most revealing book ever published on Mao, perhaps on any dictator in history.”—Professor Andrew J. Nathan, Columbia University From 1954 until Mao Zedong's death twenty-two years later, Dr. Li Zhisui was the Chinese ruler's personal physician, which put him in daily—and increasingly intimate—contact with Mao and his inner circle. in The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Dr. Li vividly reconstructs his extraordinary experience at the center of Mao's decadent imperial court. Dr. Li clarifies numerous long-standing puzzles, such as the true nature of Mao's feelings toward the United States and the Soviet Union. He describes Mao's deliberate rudeness toward Khrushchev and reveals the actual catalyst of Nixon's historic visit. Here are also surprising details of Mao's personal depravity (we see him dependent on barbiturates and refusing to wash, dress, or brush his teeth) and the sexual politics of his court. To millions of Chinese, Mao was more god than man, but for Dr. Li, he was all too human. Dr. Li's intimate account of this lecherous, paranoid tyrant, callously indifferent to the suffering of his people, will forever alter our view of Chairman Mao and of China under his rule. Praise for The Private Life of Chairman Mao “From now one no one will be able to pretend to understand Chairman Mao's place in history without reference to this revealing account.”—Professor Lucian Pye, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Dr. Li does for Mao what the physician Lord Moran's memoir did for Winston Churchill—turns him into a human being. Here is Mao unveiled: eccentric, demanding, suspicious, unregretful, lascivious, and unfailingly fascinating. Our view of Mao will never be the same again.”—Ross Terrill, author of China in Our Time “An extraordinarily intimate portrait of Mao. [Dr. Li] portrays [Mao's imperial court] as a place of boundless decadence, licentiousness, selfishness, relentless toadying and cutthroat political intrigue.”—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times “One of the most provocative books on Mao to appear since the publication of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China.”—Paul G. Pickowicz, The Wall Street Journal

This major biography of Mao draws on never before seen documents to reveal surprising details about Mao's rise to power and leadership in China. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

In the 1960s and 1970s, around 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to rural villages and China's frontiers. Bin Xu tells the story of how this 'sent-down' generation have come to terms with their difficult past. Exploring representations of memory including personal life stories, literature, museum exhibits, and acts of commemoration, he argues that these representations are defined by a struggle to reconcile worthiness with the political upheavals of the Mao years. These memories, however, are used by the state to construct an official narrative that weaves this generation's experiences into an upbeat story of the 'China dream'. This marginalizes those still suffering and obscures voices of self-reflection on their moral-political responsibility for their actions. Xu provides careful analysis of this generation of 'Chairman Mao's children', caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.