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China Under Mao
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HISTORY: Asia: China
PAPERBACK
HISTORY: Modern: 20th Century About Exam Copies
$29.95 • £23.95 • €27.00
HISTORY: Social History
ISBN 9780674975491
Publication Date: 03/20/2017 POLITICAL SCIENCE: Political
x Text Ideologies: Communism, Post-
Communism & Socialism
440 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches Google Search Inside Go
19 halftones, 14 graphs, 6 tables
World

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About This Book About the Author(s) Reviews Table of Contents

Via the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, watch Andrew Walder
discuss the lessons of Mao’s leadership and how they help us to understand the China of today:

China Under Mao

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by
full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and
fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and
disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

Mao’s China, Andrew Walder argues, was defined by two distinctive institutions established during
the first decade of Communist Party rule: a Party apparatus that exercised firm (sometimes harsh)
discipline over its members and cadres; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union.
Although a large national bureaucracy had oversight of this authoritarian system, Mao intervened
strongly at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao’s greatest
achievements—victory in the civil war, the creation of China’s first unified modern state, a historic
transformation of urban and rural life—also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and
rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural
Revolution.

Misdiagnosing China’s problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle
against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable
alternative. At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided.

RELATED LINKS

Read conversations with Andrew Walder at the New York Times blog Sinosphere and at the Asia
Society’s Asia Blog
Listen to a conversation with Walder about China Under Mao on the New Books in East Asian
Studies podcast
Watch an Asia Society panel discussion of China Under Mao featuring Walder, historian Roderick
MacFarquhar, former U.S. State Department official Susan Shirk, and Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross
Director of Asia Society's Center on US-China Relations
Browse a selection of HUP works on the history and politics of China

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