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China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed

Andrew G. Walder, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2015.

China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed »

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

Mao’s China was defined by two institutions established during the first decade of Communist rule: the Party
apparatus, which exercised harsh discipline over members; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet
Union. Although a large national bureaucracy oversaw this authoritarian system, Mao undermined its operatio
at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao’s greatest achievements—victory in the civil war, the creation of China’
first unifed modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life—also generated his worst failures: industrial depression and rural famin
during the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution. Misdiagnosing China’s problems as capital
restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao destroyed much of what he had built and
left China backward and deeply divided.

Harvard University Press

2015
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