Books on the Chinese Revolution?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Can anyone recommend any books that are highly informative of the Chinese revolution which brought the communist party into power?

Thanks.

[Princess Luna]

Red star over China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_Over_China) by Edgar Snow

[Return to the Source]

just recently, I picked up a copy of Mobo Gao's The Battle for China's Past: Mao & the Cultural Revolution. I haven't started it yet, but it's widely recommended as a serious academic account of the great leap forward and the cultural revolution that doesn't resort to knee-jerk demonization of Mao and the chinese communist party.

[flobdob]

The classic ones are Hinton's Fanshen and Snow's Red Star over China. Some other decent ones are Han Suyin's The Morning Deluge and Wind in the Tower, Israel Epstein's From Opium War to Liberation and Ho Kan Chih's A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution.

To be honest there is so much written that is very important to read, but most of it deals with specific things. Subsequently I've really only suggested ones that deal with the revolution until about 1949. There's much more great stuff which covers the period afterwards though which I'd be happy to suggest.

[caramelpence]

By far the best single book on the Chinese Revolution is Harold Isaacs' The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, which is available here (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/isaacs/1938/tcr/index.htm), although personally I would go for the recent Haymarket edition, because it's the kind of book that everyone should have in physical form. The book itself only goes up to the late 1930s because that's when it was written. Isaacs was a Trotskyist who was active in China during the 1920s and 30s and Trotsky also wrote an introduction for the book.

If you want a book that's more recent and which covers the entirety of the Chinese Revolution then the standard left-wing text for the post-1949 period is Maurice Meisner's Mao's China and After.


just recently, I picked up a copy of Mobo Gao's The Battle for China's Past: Mao & the Cultural Revolution. I haven't started it yet, but it's widely recommended as a serious academic account of the great leap forward and the cultural revolution that doesn't resort to knee-jerk demonization of Mao and the chinese communist party.

This book is hardly a history of the Chinese Revolution, it's more a discussion of how Mao and the Cultural Revolution are understood in China today through the "e-media" and a set of critiques of other books on Chinese history, such as Mao: The Unknown Story. It's interesting in many respects but I would hardly recommend it as a history book.

[flobdob]

This book is hardly a history of the Chinese Revolution, it's more a discussion of how Mao and the Cultural Revolution are understood in China today through the "e-media" and a set of critiques of other books on Chinese history, such as Mao: The Unknown Story. It's interesting in many respects but I would hardly recommend it as a history book.

Absolutely, but it's an essential read because it challenges the dominant narrative of the revolution that we hear so often. It does go into detail in some areas on the history by proxy (Gao has to to illustrate points), but you are right that, strictly speaking, it's not a history of the revolution.

[Return to the Source]

good to know! from the table of contents, it looks like it goes into a lot of the experiences of certain classes during the GLF and the CR.

[caramelpence]

Absolutely, but it's an essential read because it challenges the dominant narrative of the revolution that we hear so often. It does go into detail in some areas on the history by proxy (Gao has to to illustrate points), but you are right that, strictly speaking, it's not a history of the revolution.

The issue I find with the book is that, yes, it does go some way to establishing a valid counter-narrative to most accounts of the Cultural Revolution but only does so by focusing on certain particular issues and extracting those issues from a broader context. It's useful and important that Mobo Gao tells us that there were important ways in which the Cultural Revolution actually protected Chinese culture and encouraged the development of historical and cultural knowledge, for example, but without those advances and initiatives being situated in a broader context it's difficult to know what to make of them - so when he points out that the Terracotta Warriors were discovered in 1974 before Mao's death and that they weren't destroyed but have since been carefully excavated, what that doesn't tell us is that the mass mobilization phase of the Cultural Revolution had already come to an end in 1968/9 and that the 9th Party Congress had initially been understood as signifying the formal end of the entire movement, before Mao indicated that the Cultural Revolution was, in his mind, still ongoing. The fact that the archeological discovery (I only pick this out because it's the first example that comes to mind and don't have the book on me) took place at this relatively late point in the Cultural Revolution, understood as something that took place over an entire decade, undermines its usefulness as an example of cultural preservation, because China had experienced the restoration of party control by that point, and raises the key question of how the transition from mass mobilization to party authority took place, given that the Cultural Revolution is, in popular consciousness, generally seem as essentially chaotic and spontaneous. In order to really understand what the Cultural Revolution was "about", so to speak, it's not enough to identify particular points as Mobo Gao does, it's necessary to understand what Chinese society was like before the initiation of the movement, and how different interest groups and strata - the military, the cadres, different classes in Chinese society, individuals like Wang Li - came into conflict with one another, and how their conflicts and Mao's decisions shaped the development of the movement. What you need, in basic terms, is history.

Mobo Gao doesn't do this, not because he's a bad scholar, but because this isn't the point of his book. His book is just as much about contemporary China and contemporary perceptions of the Cultural Revolution as it is about history - the "battle" in the title of the book refers to the ongoing struggles about the legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. So by all means, read it, but after having read some other books. There are alternative accounts of the Cultural Revolution that are worth reading - Liu Guokai's A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution is one, albeit dated, and Hong Yung Lee's The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is another. There are also other good texts that aren't historical accounts as such but still provide a different perspective - The Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust is a great edited collection, and Perry's Proletarian Power is, in my mind, one of the best books on post-1949 Chinese history available, and should be of interest to all Marxists, not least because Perry herself was part of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars.

[greenwarbler]

Fairbank offers an interesting -- though often times critical -- viewpoint of the rise of the PRC; the fact that he knows more than all the Marxologists on the subject combined helps the usefulnes of his book vz. other works in other traditions (The Second Chinese Revolution comes to mind as a rather statistically-entrenched, but dense volume on the subject); the old saying "one should never read the view of a sympathetic voice" rings true here as, for instance, applied to Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln)

[flobdob]

The issue I find with the book is that, yes, it does go some way to establishing a valid counter-narrative to most accounts of the Cultural Revolution but only does so by focusing on certain particular issues and extracting those issues from a broader context. It's useful and important that Mobo Gao tells us that there were important ways in which the Cultural Revolution actually protected Chinese culture and encouraged the development of historical and cultural knowledge, for example, but without those advances and initiatives being situated in a broader context it's difficult to know what to make of them - so when he points out that the Terracotta Warriors were discovered in 1974 before Mao's death and that they weren't destroyed but have since been carefully excavated, what that doesn't tell us is that the mass mobilization phase of the Cultural Revolution had already come to an end in 1968/9 and that the 9th Party Congress had initially been understood as signifying the formal end of the entire movement, before Mao indicated that the Cultural Revolution was, in his mind, still ongoing. The fact that the archeological discovery (I only pick this out because it's the first example that comes to mind and don't have the book on me) took place at this relatively late point in the Cultural Revolution, understood as something that took place over an entire decade, undermines its usefulness as an example of cultural preservation, because China had experienced the restoration of party control by that point, and raises the key question of how the transition from mass mobilization to party authority took place, given that the Cultural Revolution is, in popular consciousness, generally seem as essentially chaotic and spontaneous. In order to really understand what the Cultural Revolution was "about", so to speak, it's not enough to identify particular points as Mobo Gao does, it's necessary to understand what Chinese society was like before the initiation of the movement, and how different interest groups and strata - the military, the cadres, different classes in Chinese society, individuals like Wang Li - came into conflict with one another, and how their conflicts and Mao's decisions shaped the development of the movement. What you need, in basic terms, is history.

Mobo Gao doesn't do this, not because he's a bad scholar, but because this isn't the point of his book. His book is just as much about contemporary China and contemporary perceptions of the Cultural Revolution as it is about history - the "battle" in the title of the book refers to the ongoing struggles about the legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. So by all means, read it, but after having read some other books. There are alternative accounts of the Cultural Revolution that are worth reading - Liu Guokai's A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution is one, albeit dated, and Hong Yung Lee's The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is another. There are also other good texts that aren't historical accounts as such but still provide a different perspective - The Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust is a great edited collection, and Perry's Proletarian Power is, in my mind, one of the best books on post-1949 Chinese history available, and should be of interest to all Marxists, not least because Perry herself was part of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars.

Broadly speaking I agree with this. However, I think Gao's book deserves more merit because of the nature of what he is arguing against in the contemporary debates and discussions on the Cultural Revolution. Particularly in this is the discussion on Chang and Halliday's book and also on Li Zhisui's book; in terms of the impact these books have had on a mainstream dialogue I think Gao's book does an effective job of criticism. This criticism facilitates further study, which is where I feel that as you rightly said, history comes and plays a role.

As the nature of what the OP asked for wasn't quite so clear on whether he wanted Cultural Revolution stuff I didn't include any, but because some have been suggested I'll add my 2 cents. I'd really recommend Jack Chen's Inside the Cultural Revolution for a quite personal and readable account of the Cultural Revolution as experienced by a man in Peking involved at the time. Similarly I'd suggest Hinton's Hundred Day War - The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University, Wheelwright and McFarlane's The Chinese Road to Socialism (I highly recommend this one) and Macciocchi's Daily Life in Revolutionary China. Combined these should give a multifaceted view of what happened, what went on, and how to understand it all.

[milk]

A useful book to get hold of, if you can, and which focuses on the class/social background dynamics of Red Guard groups in one area of China during the Cultural Revolution, is Stanley Rosen's Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Canton). Published in the early 1980s, it might be a little outdated, but is still an important, albeit specific and narrow book.

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/7793/factionalism.png

Some of the research that went into it can found here (http://ips.cap.anu.edu.au/psc/ccc/publications/papers/ACSRJU_Students.pdf) (PDF warning), in a paper he authored with two others.

By the way, has anyone read the recently-published Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew G. Walder?

[milk]

Also this (http://www.danwei.org/scholarship_and_education/beijings_bloody_august_by_gere.php) interesting piece by Geremie R. Barme, published back in 2006 on the Danwei site, translates two first-person accounts of Red Guard activity. It's interesting when it comes to the class/social background, motivations and viewpoints etc, regarding the two former participants.


I was in my third year of junior high school when the Cultural Revolution got going. It was No.27 High School, a real dump. I don’t care what other people say about why they got involved; I know I became a Red Guard just for the hell of it, to have a chance to lash out and rebel. Up till then alley-kids like me were always treated like dirt. But, fuck, when the Cultural Revolution came along, I was suddenly one of the five red categories, a child of the workers and peasants who had been oppressed by the revisionist line in education. Under revisionism I’d been forced to learn my lessons off by heart; ten long years and they still wouldn’t let me pass. Now that I had the chance I was going to get out there and fuck with them, wasn’t I?


Society’s never fair. Even in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards were divided into different classes. Look at the kids in ‘United Action’. They were from 1 August High School, all privileged kids; they wore real army uniforms; they had black leather shoes, all shining, that’s if they weren’t wearing snow white sandshoes. They all sped around on brand new ‘Forever’ brand pushbikes, too. When a pack of them went riding past it was like the Praetorian Guard. They really were in your face. They were all from high-level cadre families, or army brats. How could alley-scum like me compete with that? In the Cultural Revolution they were still the ruling class. Our rebellion was a joke; sure it felt good, but we were only the shitkickers for those people. You’ve got to face the facts.

[caramelpence]

Broadly speaking I agree with this. However, I think Gao's book deserves more merit because of the nature of what he is arguing against in the contemporary debates and discussions on the Cultural Revolution. Particularly in this is the discussion on Chang and Halliday's book and also on Li Zhisui's book; in terms of the impact these books have had on a mainstream dialogue I think Gao's book does an effective job of criticism. This criticism facilitates further study, which is where I feel that as you rightly said, history comes and plays a role.

I agree with everything you say. I wasn't trying to have a go at you or "refute" anything, in case that's what you thought I was doing.

I also agree with the recommendation of Macciocchi's book, not only because it's an interesting account of what daily life was like in China in the early 1970s, but also because, given that it was based on a visit by the author, it's an interesting source for those who are interested in why Communists in the West were attracted to China and which policies and features of Chinese society they found particularly attractive - Macciocchi's book in particular gives an insight into the relationship between China and feminism and also gives some indication of the disagreements that China created within the Italian Communist Party. If anyone's interested more generally in the perceptions of Western activists and visitors to China, then they should check out the 1972 book China! Inside the People's Republic by the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars.

I also have a PDF version of Macciocchi's book. Private message me if you're interested.

[Olentzero]

I found Charlie Hore's The Road to Tiananmen Square an informative read about the nature of the 1949 Revolution and an analysis of Chinese society afterwards. Seems to be out of print, however; you may have to dig around to find it. Also have to second Isaacs' Tragedy - my copy is sitting on my nightstand waiting for me to get through the rest of the stack.