In the first years of the war, Mao’s writings show a politician and thinker in the process of change. Mao took advantage of his relative isolation in Yan’an by reading extensively in Marxist literature. He had always been a voracious reader, but not being on the run allowed him space for the first time, perhaps since the heady days of the May Fourth Movement, to immerse himself in the ideology that he had embraced as a young man. Unlike Wang Ming and his followers, who had been able to learn at the hands of Stalin in Moscow, or the various urban sophisticates in the party, such as Zhou Enlai,
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