| Author | Maurice Meisner |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 978-0684856353 |
Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic is a book by Maurice Meisner. It is a revision of Mao's China: A History of the People's Republic (1977).
Meisner often found his work needed fundamental revision. The first edition of his book was finished just a few weeks before Mao’s death in 1976. A second edition, published in 1986 as Mao’s China and After. The book also analyzed the changes that happened with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. A third edition, published in 1999, studied the origins and consequences of Chinese capitalism. [1]
Rebecca Karl wrote "[h]aving taught his Mao’s China and After, I knew that a theoretically coherent and analytically challenging text was possible to use in the classroom." [2]
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Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism.
Maoism, or Mao Zedong Thought, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed for realising a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. The philosophical difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that the peasantry are the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than the proletariat. This updating and adaptation of Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. The claim that Mao Zedong had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions evolved into the idea that he had updated it in a fundamental way applying to the world as a whole.
The time period in China from 1949 to 1976 is commonly known as Maoist China and Red China. The history of the People's Republic of China is often divided distinctly by historians into the Mao era and the post-Mao era. The country's Mao era lasted from the founding of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949 to Deng Xiaoping's consolidation of power and policy reversal at the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress on 22 December 1978. The Mao era focuses on Mao Zedong's social movements from the early 1950s on, including land reform, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung is a book of statements from speeches and writings by Mao Zedong, the former Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, published from 1964 to about 1976 and widely distributed during the Cultural Revolution.
The Hundred Flowers Campaign, also termed the Hundred Flowers Movement, was a period from 1956 to 1957 in the People's Republic of China during which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) encouraged citizens to express openly their opinions of the Communist Party. Following the failure of the campaign, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong conducted an ideological crackdown on those who criticized the party, which continued through 1959. Observers differ as to whether Mao was genuinely surprised by the extent and seriousness of the criticism, or whether The Hundred Flowers Campaign was in fact a premeditated effort to identify, persecute, and silence critics of the party.
Li Dazhao or Li Ta-chao was a Chinese intellectual and revolutionary who participated in the New Cultural Movement in the early years of the Republic of China, established in 1912. He co-founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with Chen Duxiu in July 1921. He helped build a united front between the CCP and Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party (KMT) in early 1924. During the Northern Expedition, Li was arrested and then executed by warlord Zhang Zuolin in Beijing in 1927.
Kang Sheng was a Communist Party of China (CPC) official best known for having overseen the work of the CPC's internal security and intelligence apparatus during the early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of the CPC from the early 1920s, he spent time in Moscow during the early 1930s, where he learned the methods of the NKVD and became a supporter of Wang Ming for leadership of the CPC. After returning to China in the late 1930s, Kang Sheng switched his allegiance to Mao Zedong and became a close associate of Mao during the Anti-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War and after. He remained at or near the pinnacle of power in the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1975. After the death of Chairman Mao and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was accused of sharing responsibility with the Gang for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and in 1980 he was expelled posthumously from the CPC.
Chen Boda, was a Chinese Communist journalist, professor and political theorist who rose to power as the chief interpreter of Maoism in the first 20 years of the People's Republic of China. Chen became a close associate of Mao Zedong in Yan'an, during the late 1930s, drafting speeches and theoretical essays and directing propaganda.
Red Guards was a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized and guided by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 through 1967, during the first phase of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted. According to a Red Guard leader, the movement's aims were as follows:
Chairman Mao has defined our future as an armed revolutionary youth organization.... So if Chairman Mao is our Red-Commander-in-Chief and we are his Red Guards, who can stop us? First we will make China Maoist from inside out and then we will help the working people of other countries make the world red...and then the whole universe.
Gao Gang was a Communist Party of China (CPC) leader during the Chinese Civil War and the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC), before becoming the victim of the first major purge within the CPC since before 1949. The events surrounding Gao's purge, the so-called "Gao Gang Affair", are still the subject of debate: a limited amount of research has been done on the topic, partly due to the relatively small amount of information available.
Red Star Over China is a 1937 book by Edgar Snow. It is an account of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that was written when it was a guerrilla army and still obscure to Westerners.
The Shanghai People's Commune was established in January 1967 during the January Storm, also known as the January Revolution, of China's Cultural Revolution. The Commune was modelled on the Paris Commune. It lasted less than a month before it was replaced.
The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement, often known simply as the Down to the Countryside Movement, was a policy instituted in the People's Republic of China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result of what he perceived to be pro-bourgeois thinking prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong declared certain privileged urban youth would be sent to mountainous areas or farming villages to learn from the workers and farmers there. In total, approximately 17 million youth were sent to rural areas as a result of the movement.
Revolutionary committees were tripartite bodies established during Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China to facilitate government by the three mass organisations in China — the people, the PLA and the Party. They were originally established in the power-seizure movement as a replacement system of government to the old Party apparatus, but quickly became subordinate to it.
The Five Man Group was an informal committee established in the People's Republic of China in early 1965 to explore the potential for a "cultural revolution" in China. The group was led by Peng Zhen, the fifth most senior member of the Politburo.
The Sufan movement was a purge of perceived opponents in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, between 1955 and 1957. The term "sufan" is short for "肅清暗藏的反革命分子", which means a purge of the hidden counterrevolutionaries; similar campaigns had been carried out within the Communist Party of China as early as 1932. Mao directed that 5 percent of counter-revolutionaries were to be eliminated. During the purge, around 214,000 people were arrested and approximately 53,000 died.
Maurice Jerome Meisner was an historian of 20th century China and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His study of the Chinese Revolution and the People's Republic was in conjunction with his strong interest in socialist ideology, Marxism, and Maoism in particular. He authored a number of books including Mao's China: A History of the People's Republic which became a standard academic text in that area.
People's democratic dictatorship is a phrase incorporated into the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (PRC) by Mao Zedong, the then Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The concept, and form of government, is similar to that of people's democracy, which was implemented in a number of Central and Eastern European Communist-controlled states under the guidance of the Soviet Union.
Paul G. Pickowicz. is an American historian of modern China and Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies at University of California at San Diego. He specialises in the history of China in the 20th century.
Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan of March 1927, often called the Hunan Report, is one of Mao Zedong's most famous and influential essays. The Report is based on a several month visit to his home countryside around Changsha, Hunan in early 1927. The Report endorses the violence that had broken out spontaneously in the wake of the Northern Expedition, makes a class analysis of the struggle, and enthusiastically reports the "Fourteen Great Achievements" of the peasant associations.