The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution

by Mobo C.F. Gao

Mao and his policies have long been demonised in the West, with the Cultural Revolution considered a fundamental violation of human rights.

As China embraces capitalism, the Mao era is being surgically denigrated by the Chinese political and intellectual elite. This book tackles the extremely negative depiction of China under Mao in recent publications and argues most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefited from Mao's policy of a comprehensive welfare system for the urban and basic health and education provision for the rural, which is being reversed in the current rush towards capitalism.

By a critical analysis of the mainstream account of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution and by revealing what is offered in the unofficial e-media debates this book sets the record straight, making a convincing argument for the positive effects of Mao's policies on the well-being of the Chinese people.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, Economics

281 pages, Paperback

First published February 20, 2008

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good read. It refutes a lot of popular myths about the Cultural Revolution and Mao, dedicating two chapters to deconstruct Chang and Halliday's 'Mao: the Unknown Story', referring to it as an 'academic scandal' which is hard to disagree with.
It also dips into historiography, pointing out that the Cultural Revolution is often denounced by its adversaries (academics and high-ranking state officials, who benefited directly from Deng's reformism). Opinions among the rural villages that Gao studied were generally positive about Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
An important statistic to consider is the death toll for the Cultural Revolution. This is widely due to flooding and famine, particularly in the province of Sichuan. Gao discusses where the most popularly cited figures actually come from; the figure of '10 million', for example, came from a subtraction of the population in 1960 and 1957 in the province of Sichuan. Due to circumstances such as many workers migrating to different provinces due to the famine, this should not be blindly absorbed.
Chang and Halliday's statistic of 25 million is also shown to be flatly overexaggerated. While there were undeniable deaths due to famine, specifically in regions hit hardest by natural disaster, these cannot be linked directly to the policies of the Mao government. Gao also points out the increase in life expectancy through Mao's rule from around 40 to 60 years old and the impactful reforms in healthcare and education.
China suffered at least three major famines throughout the 20th century, notably in the 30's. Gao also compares China to India under British rule in the same time period, which suffered considerably more deaths due to starvation. It is important to consider the Dengist free-market reforms coinciding with the almost immediate official condemnation of the Cultural Revolution by the Chinese government. This aligned with the official Western picture of a power-hungry, evil, Hitleresque picture of Mao. In reality, as shown by Gao, Dengist reforms often hit the rural population the hardest, with a rollback in social housing and investment into education.
Gao ultimately had a dismal outlook on the socialist future of China at the time of the book's writing in the early 2000s. It is interesting to consider how a figure like Xi rose to the top of the party, injecting many socialist reforms and policies back into China.

[Gabriel Avocado · Rating 4 out of 5]

i confess that i only picked this one up because it was already on my kindle and it was the only book with a format that didnt make my blood curdle in frustration and strain my eyes beyond belief. within the first few pages, however, i knew i was going to enjoy this.

the book provides an overview of the cultural revolution, not really delving into the event itself, but focusing instead on the reactions to it. i admit i know painfully little about china but gao provides enough history to get by. my main problem is that i unfortunately didnt know who the major players in the CCP are, and gao just presents them as if theyre household names in the west. then again i suppose he was writing to an audience that is at least superficially aware of chinese history and the mao era. thankfully, he DOES provide a glossary of names, which makes me want to kiss the author.

gao covers an extremely wide range of topics that he expands upon very thoroughly. i thought the chapter on e-media could have been interesting since im totally unfamiliar with chinese social media and internet culture, but ultimately it fell flat for me. the takedown of 'mao, the unknown story' was by far my favorite chapter of the book. here gao barely hides his contempt for the books dishonesty, and it's really quite satisfying to read.

this book eliminated the idea that china was at all an imperialist power. the parts that talk about the post mao reforms are rather sad--all i could think was 'how could this have happened?'

anyway i feel like im rambling a little and i missed a ton of amazing things i liked about this book. check it out, it's baller.

[tara bomp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book and essential for analysis of China. The focus is on historiography rather than history itself so although this involves a lot of historical facts it's sometimes a little confusing if you don't know the context. Good at completely destroying the nonsense stories of things like "Mao: the Unknown Story", showing up Deng as a capitalist, providing evidence for Mao's continued popularity and questioning a lot of accepted wisdom around the Cultural Revolution. It shows up as elitist and disgusting a lot of the stuff said about Mao's policies in this era.

On the negative side, it sometimes makes important claims but doesn't talk about them or reference them (it says it's an undoubtable fact that certain things have got better with the post-Mao reforms for example), or just claims which are a bit weird and seem to demand further explanation. It also doesn't really talk about issues like the death toll in the various famines as much as you might expect - obviously not a serious problem but I thought it was a bit weird not to look at the historiography surrounding one of the most talked about parts of Chinese history in depth.

[Chet]

Any critique of this book launched during the Xi era should keep in mind when it was written. The author despairs about the state of contemporary China, worrying that it is inevitably sliding into capitalism. He holds out little hope for reform from within. So if we do critique the book, we could legitimately ask what leads Gao (and everyone else btw at the time this book was written) to miss the possibility for the rise of a figure like Xi within the ranks of the CPC, an organization that at the time this book was written seemed so hopelessly lost and corrupt. I know of only one English-language book pre-Xi that pinpointed and understood China's unwavering commitment to Marxism Leninism. It's called Sweet and Sour Capitalism and interestingly it was written by a right-wing liberterian think tank out of DC in the 1980s. It was written to warn Washington policy makers that while China's government *seemed* to be tilting toward capitalist reform, this was merely a tool to strengthen its internal system for the long term haul toward a communist future. These authors wouldn't have blinked an eye at the rise of a figure like Xi. Though ideological opponents they understood Marxism-Leninism's twists and turns quite thoroughly (and more than most self-proclaimed Marxists for that matter). But back to the book at hand, Battle for China's Past nonetheless provides a compelling reading of contemporary China that emphasizes convincingly how popular the Mao legacy truly is. And this in turn helps us understand today's China as Xi's admin invokes the Mao legacy to great acclaim within the mainland. Don't miss this book if your curious about the contemporary dynamics of Chinese society.

[Nickglais · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just finished reading this book and strongly recommend anyone with an interest in Mao Zedong to buy it and read it.

Understanding Mobo Gao's Mao Zedong will help people better understand why the Nepalese and People all over the world hold Mao Zedong in such high regard as one of the 20th Century's great leaders and thinkers.

Mao and Maoism have got a bad press in the West as result of Jung Chang and Li Zhisui. This book is a definitive refutation of the "Unknown Mao" and has an excellent chapter on the doctoring of history by Li Zhisui and hence kills two enemies with one sword.

Apart from new information on the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that will help clear up distortions of Mao's position on these events. There are two chapters on the Electronic Media and the Information on Chinese Bloggers and Chinese Websites that have become vehicles for a vigourous defence of Mao Zedong by participants in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural revolution whose memories while erased from "official history" have surfaced on the internet.

Truth is a process and that process has began on the Chinese Web - buy this book and make sure people in the West have access to the new information Mobo Gao has painstakingly unearthed.

It deserves to be read by millions has an antidote to Jung Chang and Li Zhisui but it will not be promoted by the BBC or Al Jazeera and the US government has Jung Changs Book was - just by honest readers who place a premium on the truth.

REPLY TO COMRADE FROM PARISAR FOR DETAILS OF BOOK AND SITES IN CHINA THAT SUPPORT MAO

The Battle for China's Past - Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Mobo Gao is published by Pluto Press - they have a site at

http://www.plutobooks.com/

ISBN Number of the paperback version of the book is 978 0 7453 2780 8 and can be ordered through any bookshop with this number.


The Web sites in China that support Mao are :

http://www.zgysj.com/
http://www.maoflag.net/
http://www.wyzxwyzx.com/
http://www.snzg.net/

These are just a few sites has they change all the time. If you do not read or write Chinese remember you can use Google Translate to get some understanding of the discussions and debates on Mao.

For an interesting debate translated by an Australian Comrade on Socialism in China go to :
http://mike-servethepeople.blogspot.c...

For another more detailed review of book go to :
http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress....

[Mirza Sultan-Galiev · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting criticism of post "reform" elite discourse on the Cultural Revolution is marred by the author's own wishy washy positions, ( on the future of the PRC, the colonial relationship with Tibet etc).
His conclusion (that China should experience some sort of gradual reform away from capitalism),is hard to take seriously.

[Chris Tempel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostly reviews the popular Cold War stuff coming out of China and why it's wrong

[Julesreads]

Not the book I was looking for, so I won’t rate it. I wanted a leftist look at the Cultural Revolution and Mao — this book attacks the historiography around the Cultural Revolution, questioning the collective memory of Mao that China adopted (from an elitist perspective) in the 1980s. While I don’t know enough about the Cultural Revolution to follow everything being talked about here, I do know enough to not trust the “history of the winners” as the definitive recollection of events in most any historical context. So what this book is preaching I’m down with, but the conversation it is having is maybe too niche for what I was after.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book should not be considered as a serious study. The author tried to challenge the "traditional" concept of the Cultural Revolution but all he emphasized was that there was no written proof of the miserables, so all the suicides during the Cultural Revolution was out of assumption. That is totally not a serious academic way to examine the history. I have also found this book very offensive because the author tried to downplay this part of Chinese history.

[Stephen S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid debunking of the anti-Mao myth&fake memoir that was published in the West & under Deng Xiaoping after Mao's death.

Much of the book has to do with historiography (which is interesting + necessary to refute Chang+Halliday et. al and all their lies of Mao's smells & misogyny & sociopathy & fabricated death counts). Serves as great beginning to a true counterhistory of the Western account of the GPCR, & has beginnings of a concrete investigation into the class struggle post-Mao.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's a cool book if you want to hear about how reactionary histories of the cultural revolution are stupid

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

While containing some interesting information, it is outdated most of the time.

[dănuț]

wow, western media manipulates reality to feed their imperialist narrative! who would have thought?

[Publius Decius Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the book Gao seeks to examine the prevailing orthodoxy regarding the Mao-era from the viewpoint of ordinary farmers and workers. Gao argues that a too black-and-white view of the era hides the stories of the millions that were worse off after the post-Mao reform years, ignores the fact that the Mao-era was a precursor for later development, and that this ultimately functions as a barrier to understanding, and imagining other forms of human organization. The author argues that the neoliberal hegemony of the global intelligentsia, and status-oriented suffering of the Chinese elite paved way for a bastardized (akin to Chinese historiography, being framed by the present. As well as being anti-Maoist and anti-revolutionary) portrayal of both Mao and the cultural revolution. However, referencing death toll estimates of 200,000 about the GLF from an "e-media participant" in the introduction did not instill me with confidence regarding his counter-narrative. Nevertheless, I persisted:

Overall, the theme of the book is clear. A rigorous examination of a multitude of issue portraying China via the Cold War lens. The book jumps around from topic to topic quite a lot, making it hard to synthesize any main themes coherently. In essence, however, it is about the ideological selection bias of "Scar" literature occurring in the publication and market-penetration process in the West. For example, as of writing this review, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China has been rated around 118.000 times on Goodreads. In contrast, this book has around 200 ratings. Chang, the author of Wild Swans, was not only the privileged child of a high-ranking party member, earning her a scholarship abroad in the UK, but she has also been on record saying she feels much more home in the West. Similarly, Shuyu Kong, professor at Simon Fraser University states "Chang has altered her story to suit the wishes of hindsight and her market audience". Furthermore, Gao, convincingly argues and shows that experiences vary widely due to various factors such as class, religion, or whether one resided in the hinterland or in a more urban area. The similar stance from the CCP, Gao argues, can mainly be attributed to these very factors. Deng Xiaoping, for example, had been on record saying that he couldn't find anything positive about the revolution due to him personally having suffered gravely.

A whole chapter is also dedicated to synthesizing the critique around the book Mao: The Unknown Story where some of the critiques were compelling and rigorous whereas others were comparatively weak. The following chapter also cites some interesting data about life expectancy rising from 35 in 1949 to 63 in 1975. Furthermore, as documented by Mark Selden, professor at Cornell, and coauthors, notable progress was made in promoting women in society, as well as in improving literacy. Lastly, there was another quote in the book attributed to Nobel economist Amartya Sen: "This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958–61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame." from the book Hunger and Public Action, p.215. As to Gao's wider point, maybe there is an imbalance between how and to what extent misery in the respective countries have been reported?

Similarly, on p.109 Gao brings up the policy direction of Mao in the 60s bringing about the barefoot doctor system improving healthcare for tens of millions of rural residents. This has been praised by institutions such as the WHO, UN, and the recognition stems from studies published in tier 3 medical journals such as Lancet and NEJM. See e.g., The Barefoot Doctors of the People's Republic of China published in The New England Journal of Medicine, 1972. For a paper examining the disaster when this system was privatized and dismantled in the Deng-era see Blumenthal and Hsiao's short paper "Privatization and Its Discontents — The Evolving Chinese Health Care System in the NEJM. However many cumulative rural "excess deaths" occurred as a result of this policy is seldom talked about. Are deaths during privatizations or market-reforms less important? Is there an equivalence? Should there be one?

Despite some dubious sources, do not dismiss the totality of this book. Gao not only frequently cites respected scholars (many of whom are far from sympathetic towards Mao) behind the book Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story" but also other prominent academics such as Thomas Bernstein and Frederick Teiwes. I am yet to read that book, but I see this book attempting to do the same, i.e., not to defend Mao, but instead maintaining scholarly integrity when choosing to do so. Paradoxically, the author oftentimes repeats the errors for which he criticizes others, e.g., Chang and Halliday. Due to the somewhat frequent use of shoddy sources, I cannot in good faith give this book more than 3*. If one chooses to read this book, pay extra attention to each source as some might be opinion articles from blogs which are inaccessible today (especially chapter 7 & 8). Though I am yet to read it, I presume Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story" provides a more succinct and scholarly critique (one of the chapters have been written by Gao) with some overlap in topics void of questionable citations. The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution should still be read - some parts are excellent, truly insightful and contains good and well-sourced critiques. Commentaries about the rural-urban divide (chapter 9) and on the economy and industrial output (chapter 10) are somewhat outdated as they reflect China in the early 2000s. Overall, still a good book. Scrutinizing the sources is a requirement if one intends to read the book. Maybe this was Gao's ultimate goal - I certainly had to do more extracurricular reading than I normally have to do, learning more in the process.

[Alifib · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mobo Gao lived through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but only mentions in passing his experience of two weeks under house arrest. Instead of pimping out his trauma he focuses on alternative perspectives from the many common people who benefited from the GPCR and the objective facts and statistics concerning the big picture of Chinese society at the time and in the Mao era more generally, plus the role these factors play in what notable improvements in China *have* taken place in the post-Mao era.

He looks at the negative and positive lessons to be taken from the initial chaotic and violent stage of 1966-1968 and the later “constructive period” of the GPCR in the 70s where incredible experiments in socialist democracy, culture, and production took place in what he takes after Badiou in calling Mao’s attempt at starting a movement to create a new subjectivity, something along the lines of “The New Soviet Man”, but better. Bourgeois ruled society created a new subjectivity with its own tastes and affectations and priorities and values, and a society ruled by proletarians and peasants would have to as well in order to stick.

This is a much needed and even-handed correction to the proliferation of hysterical and cynical pop history accounts promoted by both the west and the post-Mao predominantly capitalist PRC government, and is backed by over 40 pages of references. Where others resort to psychological speculation, libel, exaggeration and dramatizing, the author provides socioeconomic explanations that effortlessly connect in an explanatory manner the different layers of what was happening—from the countryside to the offices of the CCP to the relations of China with their immediate neighbors and then the world overall, past and present and future.

Mobo Gao is continuing the important work of assessing socialist history as actual history to be drawn on for empirical lessons by all progressive-minded people, and not as perverse fairy tales to be dictated in rote to us by the enemies of humanity and received without question.

“Knowledge begins with practice, and theoretical knowledge is acquired through practice and must then return to practice.”
— Mao Zedong

[Joe Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love underdog stories (who doesn't?) and this is a great one. Instead of being authored by one of China's 1% (who did suffer during the Cultural Revolution), it's written by one of the 99%, who benefited. If you enjoy hearing both sides of an argument before you make up your mind, you'll enjoy this fine book, which is simultaneously scholarly (the author is a professor of history who teaches in the USA) and first hand. Quite wonderful.

[meow · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5.

Read this after being fed up with my Culture and Political Economy of China class. Gao turns the common understand of post-Mao reform on its head by viewing the liberalization through the eyes of the peasantry and workers rather than the intelligentsia and elites. I'm certain that Gao was inspired to write this after reading Jung Chang's biography of Mao and seeing every error and lie in it.

[Zoë · Rating 4 out of 5]

While much of the discussion of the present day is obviously quite dated and the writing can often feel less academic than desired, this contains some of the best records and accounts of reassessments of the cultural revolution I have found in English.

[Johan Persson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mobo Gaos bok om kulturrevolutionens arv är läsärd men rörig, den vill nästan säga för mycket. Bäst är de historiografiska diskussionerna om hur minnen skapas och vilka som tillåts uttala sig.

[Jayden gonzalez]

they had like domestically produced furniture that said "never forget class struggle" etc on them lol cool

[Jakob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read!

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decisively dynamites most of the main myths about Mao and the Cultural Revolution, albeit in a slightly too conciliatory way

[Jared Quigg · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mao's political experiment, the Cultural Revolution, like all other social revolutions before it, claimed many victims. It did however, again like other social revolutions, have some positive outcomes. It encouraged grassroots participation in management and it also inspired the idea of popular democracy. The mass criticism practiced in the era of Mao in general and during the Cultural Revolution in particular, though ritualized and mobilized from the top, did provide a rich repertoire of protest techniques. Members of the Red Guards were not just passive followers of a charismatic leader, but agents actively involved in a variety of ideological disputes and contests for power. The Chinese were not the brainless masses manipulated by a ruthless dictator so often portrayed in the Western media. They must be seen as agents of history and subjects of their own lives like any other people. Anyone who seriously believes in the inherent value of individualism, in the self-evident truth of the human pursuit of happiness, or the universal value of human rights and democracy should be sympathetic with this position."
--Mobo Gao, "The Battle for China's Past"

Gao's book is a wonderful little antidote to anticommunism. He proves with overwhelming evidence that Mao and the Chinese Communist Party improved the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese from 1949-1976, that the Cultural Revolution produced some outcomes that should be applauded and replicated, and that since the death of Mao, China has embarked on the capitalist road, the very thing Mao was trying to prevent when he launched the Cultural Revolution.

Gao never once diminishes the fact that things like the Great Leap Forward were grave policy errors that cost many lives, or that many people did suffer as a result of the Cultural Revolution. These things must be soberly admitted by all, even the most passionate communists. But the point of this book is that those mistakes are not the whole story.

Alongside those facts exists other, equally relevant facts. Among them are: 1. China's rapid development after Mao's death would not have been possible without the massive economic gains made during the Mao era; 2. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese benefitted immensely from Mao-era polices during the Cultural Revolution, and have largely not experienced the same development as the urban workers in the post-Mao era; 3. The Mao era was far more egalitarian than modern China, and hundreds of millions of people were educated, received healthcare and enjoyed the arts for the first time in history; 4. And perhaps most importantly, China is a big country, full of many Chinese. Mao was not an all-powerful leader, mistakes made were not his alone, and neither were positive outcomes, many of which were spearheaded by the masses themselves. The Cultural Revolution, despite popular belief in the Western media, was a radically democratic period of Chinese history.

That last point really leads into Gao's main thesis, in that the past is often evaluated through the value systems of the present. Relevant for this work, many in the West and in elite circles in China itself view the Mao era negatively because their values differ from those of the 1949-1976 period. For them, Mao is to be criticized because China's GDP was not as high as it could have been, or because not everyone had material luxuries, etc. But these were not the yardsticks the communists used to measure success. To say communist China was a failure is to ignore the fact that lifespans increased dramatically, education expanded to hundreds of millions of peasants, scientific breakthroughs revolutionized production, the country itself broke free of imperialist coercion -- the list goes on. In other words, the communists have different ideas of what success looks like than capitalists. For communists, the capitalist road China retreated down after 1978 looks a whole lot like failure.

[Della D · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is definitely an ideologically motivated work, but undeniably thought-provoking. This book focuses more on the historiography of Cultural Revolution rather the event itself.

Gao with his passion and perspective from "grassroots" strongly criticised the one-sided intellectual narratives of the Cultural Revolution——which is also a reflection of the ideology propensity in the post-mao Reform.

From the political perspective, the post-mao government support the idea of denouncing the Mao era especially the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, on the one hand, to obscure the responsibility of those leaders of reform after Mao era, i.e. Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand through comparing the poor condition under Maoism to emphasis the success of reform. At the cultural level, those who dominated the main discourse of social culture is those who suffer most under Maoism, i.e. the intellectual group, in this case, there is no doubt that their memory and experience is about suffering.
Gao pointed out the discourse hegemony in the Cultural Revolution, and through which criticised the neoliberalism that undermined grassroots and rural era's suffering or took those suffering for granted in the development of the urban area. The grassroots nostalgia of Mao-era though not prevailing in the mainstream media is still a reflection of the vast inequality in present China.

Though make an excellent point of the relationship between present and historiography in the Cultural Revolution and show sympathy to grassroots and critical thinking about China's neoliberalism reform, Gao's work still has its flaw. Most obviously is the discussion of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution itself. He shows his strong ideological motivation in this perspective, in his narrative, the disaster of the Cultural Revolution was "created for stigmatised Mao by intellectual" rather than really existing. And even there were a small part of intellectual had suffered, more grassroots or farmers gained compliment from the Cultural Revolution——the CR itself is an experiment to narrow down the vast gap between rural and urban era.
However, he completely ignored Mao's role to create the exploiting system in a rural area to support the urban development, he also ignored Mao's role in creating the violence atmosphere in the party and society to prevent the dissent making suggestion. (There had been consistently 20 years of different campaigns to arrest, torture and stigmatise the dissents) The most prominent paradox the "Cultural Revolution" is that the instigator of revolution against the CCP system himself, i.e. Mao, is the biggest beneficiary of the system. For defending Mao's era to criticised present China's inequality, Gao made a selective and one-sided argument in the Maoism and Cultural Revolution.

With his passion and fighting will, Gao wrote a readable and thought-provoking book to consider the relationship between history and memory. But we should still maintain critique for those one-sided arguments in his emotional and moving writing.

[Carina · Rating 3 out of 5]

For most of the book, Gao's stance is unclear and feels wishy washy as he references and quotes sources from both sides of the debate as though he was writing a university essay. The section where he challenged Jung Chang's book was interesting, as well as examples of dodgy tactics used by writers and publishers whose sole aim was to paint Mao as a cardboard villain.

Gao finally seems to get going in the later chapters of the book where he is clearly critical of Deng and modern China and describes many instances of corruption. He paints a grim picture of China's future as an ongoing factory of cheap products for the rest of the world and nothing more. Of course, this was published in 2008...and the China of today is almost unrecognisable. It is 2021 and Xi has clamped down on corruption, prioritised socialism over shareholders, and is focusing on wealth distribution (taking from the rich and giving to the poor - funds from big tech will be focused on areas like increasing incomes for the poor, improving medical assistance, promoting rural economic efficiency and subsidizing education programs.)
Furthermore China is designing and building its own electric vehicles and even sending humans up to the moon.

Deng's policies may have wavered from Mao's but, the way I see it, they both contributed to the China of today.

All in all, I did manage to learn a lot about the CPC as well as build a more 3-dimensional view of Mao, which was what I hoped to do.

[strategian]

Broad but very informative and well grounded discussion of contemporary China and the legacy of its predecessor. It's not easy reading: on the one hand because it's quite densely cited which can make reading fairly tedious at times, but more importantly because the author does an excellent job of highlighting a historiographical injustice both academically and morally.

[Lalsaalam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat scattered but still informative - the debunkings of Li Zhisui and Chang & Halliday are helpful, while the overview of Chinese Internet debates on the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution provide a window into some interestimg material that is otherwise unavailable to English-speakers.

[Jeff McLeod · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cogent and compelling defense of the policies of the Mao era and the legacy of the Chinese revolution, with convincing refutations of prominent anti-Communist works of both Western and Chinese commentators.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably the most essential book on contemporary China a westerner can read

[Rhi Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Battle For China's Past by Mobo Gao is a well researched and deeply useful interrogation of both western and Chinese official positions towards Mao and the Cultural Revolution. It was spurred on by Gao's feeling of disconnect between the "consensus" that the radical aspects of the Mao-Era were unmitigated disasters, and the memories of rural Chinese people that it was quite the opposite.

The book follows statistics, memoirs, and journalism from the period to break down many pervasive myths about the era, many of which are explicitly anti-Chinese and anti-Mao but still support the core argument of the book. Without straying into apologia, counter-arguments are given to the centrality of Mao to the failures of the the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and finds evidence to where now commonly accepted stories about them were either inflated or invented to further the careers of politicians, journalists, and writers.

Based on how this book has been recommended I was hoping for a more general history of the period, but it is incredibly specific historiography and academic score-settling. It also has a lot of information about the state of China in 2008 that may be quite out of date by this point. It's certainly not for everyone, but if you already have a grasp of the period this may round out your understanding of China's modern history.