Books on the Chinese Revolution

[BobKKKindle$]

I would like some book recommendations concerning the Chinese revolution, especially the events which took place before the Communists took control of the whole of China in 1949. I've already read Mobo Gao's 'The Battle for China's Past' and I'm reading Hinton 'Fanshen' and Collier's 'China's Socialist Revolution' at the moment, and all of these books are really good and I would recommend them to anyone who wants to get a more objective picture of what happened in China during the Mao era, but all of them focus on events which took place after or just before liberation. Are there any good books about the liberation struggle itself, preferably starting with the 1920s? I want to learn about the long march, the united anti-imperialist front, that sort of thing/

[Yehuda Stern]

First of all, ex-member of your tendency, Nigel Harris, wrote a very good book on both revolutions, and between and after them as well, titled Mandate of Heaven. A google search will fetch it easily, though you probably read it already. Other than that, Trotsky has many good books on the first Chinese revolution and some on events after that.

Here (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/china/zheng.htm) is also something on the Chinese Trotskyists, which could be helpful (I'm just now starting to read it).

[Sendo]

Wasn't there something like "Red Star over China" be Edgar Snow? What time was that?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

YS, that book you mention, although I agree with you about it, was heavily slated by Maoists here for its alleged serious inaccuracies (when Random Precision tried to recommend it last December):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1044501&postcount=85

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1045763&postcount=100

http://www.revleft.com/vb/maoism-t66462/index5.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/maoism-t66462/index6.html

I must confess that I do not know enough about China to determine whether these Maoists are right or not. Perhaps you do?

[Magdalen]

Red Star over China is a certainly a must. I'd like to recommend Report from Red China by Harrison Forman, but I doubt it's easy to get a copy of this. I managed to get an original 1940s copy of Forman's book out of the library earlier this year and thought it was terrific. As well as Fanshen, I would also recommend Hinton's The Great Reversal. This book is a marvelous critique of China's capitalist-orientated reforms.

[Yehuda Stern]

While I do not intend to defend whatever political mistakes in the book, I can certainly say that other than some rather unfounded claims of misquoting (which might very well be caused by differences in translations between different editions), I find nothing in Maoists' critique which makes Mandate of Heaven less interesting or valuable. And I'll be the first to say that political mistakes are aplenty in there - but that shouldn't stop anyone from reading the book. Perhaps, I should say, on the contrary.