Book
Mao Zedong
First published 1999
Mao Zedong is a concise political biography of the revolutionary who became the dominant leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the founding chairman of the People’s Republic of China. Spence follows Mao from his Hunan upbringing and early radicalism through guerrilla war, the Long March, victory in the civil war and the consolidation of Communist rule.
The later chapters examine the campaigns through which Mao repeatedly disrupted the state and society he had created, including collectivisation, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Letters, poems and political decisions are used to reveal a leader whose strategic imagination, personal authority and willingness to impose mass upheaval reshaped twentieth-century China.
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