The most recommended Mao Zedong books

For many years, American views of the China’s role in World War II were strongly influenced by Barbara Tuchman’s best-selling, Stilwell and the American Experience in China published in 1971. Tuchman painted China’s war effort as brave but costly and ineffective thanks to the incompetence and corruption of Chiang Kai Shek. Portrayed as a kind of Chinese George Washington in the U.S. media, Tuchman saw Chiang as being in fact, far less interested in defeating the Japanese than in ensuring that his regime survived the war in a position to vanquish its domestic rivals, especially Mao Zedong’s Communists 

In contrast, Mittar’s focus is not on policy squabbles or specific military issues but on the overall impact of the war on China and its people. He highlights that country’s remarkable achievement, not in winning battles but in surviving the Japanese onslaught for eight long years despite the early loss of almost… show more.

I loved this 2019 mainly theoretical study because of the ambition it reflected and the major advances it provided. Lawson’s distinctions between revolutionary situations, revolutionary trajectories, and revolutionary outcomes provide an innovative framework for understanding revolutions.

Its analytical methodology, combined with some case studies, constitutes an immensely rich and engaging study of revolution, which helped to clarify much of my own thinking on this subject. This combination of theory and case studies made this a joy to read.

How do you tell stories about the people who don’t show up in history’s official records?

That’s the question Vaness Hua explores in Forbidden City, which was inspired by a couple of lines Hua read about Chairman Mao Zedong’s love of ballroom dancing. Party officials would bring young women to the Forbidden Palace to dance with Mao and his party faithful. 

Any more detail about the lives of these young women is lost to history, but recreated with astonishing insight and beauty by Hua in Forbidden City. The main character, Mei Xiang, has to navigate the dangerous world of politics during the beginnings of the brutal and violent Cultural Revolution in China.

I love the questions this book raises about all the unknown women and girls whose stories of survival have been lost to time.

This is a collection of primary sources from Mao Zedong’s China, and a very curious type of source at that — newspaper stories about people who experienced miracles after reading Mao’s works. Unlike Jesus, who performed his miracles in person, Mao did not even need to be in the vicinity to make wondrous things happen to his followers. The mere act of reciting his words and believing them was enough to cure cancer, save you from drowning or even emerge victorious in in international ping-pong championships. The full extent of the madness that gripped China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution is little understood in the West, so reading Urban’s collection is like opening a portal into another, bizarre world. Urban’s book takes us to the outer limits of propaganda.

Gao Hua was one of China’s best-regarded historians. His tragically early death in 2011 at the age of 57 deprived the world of a meticulous scholar, one who was able to shed light on the early years of the Communist Party before it came to power in 1949. Shedding the influence of the Soviet Union, the increasing power of Mao Zedong is documented in this work, through the rectification campaigns undertaken during the Second World War when the Party was still a marginalised entity that no one expected to ever become important. This book shows why, and how, the Party under Mao disciplined itself, and how it came to have power over the world’s largest population.

I was fortunate to have met Da Chen when he was keynote speaker for our high school’s annual teen writer’s conference. I had read and recommended to my AP World History students his riveting Colors of the Mountain. 

He was warm with students and staff, regaling my class with stories of life in post-Mao China. Da Chen’s interest in people is evident in his engaging Colors of the Mountain. A tale of triumph against all odds, Da Chen’s memoir chronicles how he and his family survived China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Despite the harshness of the times, Da Chen tells his story with uncommon grace and humor. I return to his work time and again, not just for preparation in teaching 20th-century China, but also for personal inspiration.

Don’t be fooled by the title: this is no how-to guide for budding sociopaths who want to force the masses to bend to their every whim. Rather, it is a study of eight dictators with a special emphasis on how each one used his personality cult “to claw his way to power and get rid of his rivals”. Dikotter fits an impressive amount of information into this concise book and does a great job of comparing and contrasting such tyrants as Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Mussolini. But what I especially appreciate are the “deep cuts” — Dikotter includes chapters on dictators you don’t often hear about these days, such the Ethiopian tyrant, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Haiti’s Voodoo-obsessed Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who declared himself the “personification of God” and liked to strut around in top hat and tails.

Oral history as a literary form is relatively new in China. When asked why he wrote the book, Mr. Feng replied that it was because of his guilt as a survivor and as a witness. The Cultural Revolution has devastated and scarred generation after generation in China, yet most people are silent about their personal experiences. Feng conducted numerous interviews with ordinary people who had lived through that period and wrote these intimate stories in the collection. Every voice is different and deeply personal; together, they portray one of the most disturbing and tumultuous times in Chinese history. 

This harrowing account of the most consequential periods of Communist rule in China is part of a series covering the evolution of the Chinese dictatorship.

I would happily recommend all four of the books, but this one in particular, because it sheds considerable new light on a terrifying series of events that the author has unearthed by diligently studying regional archives containing a wealth of material not researched by other historians. Dikotter is an academic, but these books are not at all dry academic studies.