Mao and the Chinese Revolution

The Chinese Revolution was a massive shift in social, political, cultural, and economic thinking and in the institutions of Chinese society. The Revolution was led by Mao Tse-Tung and his followers and took place in stages, putting certain Marxist and Leninist conceptions into practice in China and involving both a violent overthrow of the existing government and the long process of transforming Chinese society into a socialist enterprise. Different writers have examined these changes and the role of Mao in effecting them. Stuart Schram in Mao Tse-Tung (1966) examines the issue in terms of the man - his life, his education, his thinking, and how his view of the world was formed and would motivate his actions. Jerome Ch'n in Mao and the Chinese revolution (1965) also considers the Revolution in terms of Mao and the development of his thinking, but he gives much more emphasis to the intellectual life of Mao, including presenting selections of Mao's poetry.

Stuart R. Schram was born in Minnesota in 1924 and attended the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate before receiving his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1954. He has since carried out research at the Centre d'+tude des Relations Internationales of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris.

Jerome Ch'n at the time of his writing of this book was a lecturer in Asian history at the University of Leeds. He had earlier written several articles on aspects of Chinese history in

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tten some years before, and there had been many developments since these books first were published. Schram believes that he has a different perspective than does Ch'n and that his book will offer a different, and he believes better, interpretation of certain events. It is also a more comprehensive book in many respects, covering Mao's life in a more ambitious manner. Both writers offer scholarly works with good documentation. The works differ on certain facts and on the way the authors interpret those facts. In the main, though, they agree on the ideology of the man and on the role ideology has played in his thinking and his actions. Ch'n's book was given considerable critical attention and was well-received as the first truly scholarly book about Mao, while Schram's was seen as a more popularly written work in spite of its own scholarly base. The reviewers found that Ch'n's book was directed specifically toward the Maoist pattern of revolution, how it developed, and how it was applied by the man in practical situations. The Economist of London felt that Ch'n's book had not achieved its purpose. The reviewer finds that Ch'n himself had stated that his book was no more than a stated proposition, a thesis that the au

Category: Foreign - M