Mao: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #348

by Delia Davin

A giant of 20th century history, Mao Zedong played many roles: peasant revolutionary, patriotic leader against the Japanese occupation, Marxist theoretician, modernizer, and visionary despot. This Very Short Introduction chronicles Mao's journey from peasant child to ruler of the most populous nation on Earth. Delia Davin provides an invaluable portrait of Mao, showing him in all his complexity--ruthless, brutal, and ambitious, a man of enormous talent and perception, yet a leader who is still detested by some and venerated by others. She shows how he helped found both the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army, and how for many years he fought on two fronts, for control of the Party and in an armed struggle for the Party's control of the country. His revolution unified China and began its rise to world power status. He was the architect of the Great Leap Forward that he hoped would make China both prosperous and egalitarian, but instead ended in economic disaster resulting in millions of deaths. It was Mao's growing suspicion of his fellow leaders that led him to launch the Cultural Revolution, and his last years were dogged by ill-health and his despairing attempts to find a successor. Davis also looks at the years of his death, when the reform leadership abandoned Mao's revolutionary goals and embraced the market.
About the Series:
Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

Genres: History, China, Biography, Nonfiction, Politics, Ebooks, Philosophy

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2013

Reviews

[Timor · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's very short

[Ben Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrible bloke but had some great quotes
“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun”
“Women hold up half the sky”
“A revolution is not a dinner party”
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[Yupa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Premetto che non ho le competenze per valutare la bontà del libro come contenuti, visto che l'ho letto, assieme ad altri in questo periodo sullo stesso argomento, proprio per apprendere qualcosa.
Valutato quindi dalla distanza del profano, sembra un libro che fa comunque il suo mestiere d'introduzione, fornendo i giusti dati e dando un quadro d'insieme abbastanza completo, questo specie considerando le sue dimensioni inevitabilmente ridotte. Resta comunque un libro abbastanza anonimo e privo di quella capacità di ragionare e fornire più prospettive che esigerebbe l'argomento, ovvero nientemeno che "il cinese più noto del XX secolo", come dice il libro stesso.

[Ilinca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting, I definitely believe that we should study this in schools, at least briefly.

Mao had a vision that he applied well, at first, and then it took a horrible turn once he went for the Great Leap.

He did ultimately reach his goal of China becoming a well-developed economic power.

[Azaghedi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is nearly impossible to write a sufficiently informing life of Mao Zedong in 100 or so pages. I give the author credit for trying. It is no slight on her that a lot was sacrificed in the name of space--I understand that is just the way it (often) goes when dealing with Very Short Introductions. But just so others know what to expect, let me add a few thoughts as to what I thought was lacking.

First, most of us are built to connote space with importance. What I mean is, something that the author explains in 10 pages is probably less important than something that is explained in 100 pages. When you have a book that is probably about 110-115 pages of actual content, it is very difficult to emphasize the relative importance between various events. Relatively minor events (or were they?) are given roughly the same amount of press as epochal ones, like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. Since Davin was, I am sure, commissioned to write a life of Mao, and not just a political analysis based on his most significant years, this was bound to happen.

Another problem with a book this tiny dealing with a subject so massive is that people, places, and events tend to pop up out of nowhere and follow each other very quickly. You might have three new people, all involved in significant intrigues and worthy of serious discussion, introduced within a sentence or two of each other. Keeping things straight can be a challenge at times.

Related to this is the fact that this book is heavy on description, not so much on analysis. It is essentially a descriptive timeline. That is fine, and pretty obviously all you are going to get in a slim volume like this, but some analysis would be nice. Often there is very little background information given, and worse yet, pretty much no psychological insight. If you just read this book, the Great Leap Forward would not seem like a big deal, and you would probably think Mao was struck down by mental illness by the time of the Cultural Revolution. The man in the pages preceding the section on the Cultural Revolution seems quite distinct from the one during and after them. Sure, he feared looming obsolescence, but really, the change seemed like such a violent one that a deeper analysis of his motivations would have been appreciated. But hey, depth must be sacrificed for breadth in a book like this.

The writing was a bit dry, too, though that is not too important. It would be much more so if it was longer, as it would be harder to get through.

One big thing this book has in its favor is it is balanced. Mao is treated very fairly. He does not come across as some psychopathic killer, nor a saint. Mao himself said he would be satisfied if his achievements were remembered as 70% merit, 30% error. While I don`t know if this Very Short Introduction achieves that exact ratio, I think that Mao, who comes across as a pretty practical man in this book, would have been okay with how he was portrayed.

[Erez Davidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third book I read recently in the "Very Short Introduction" series. Until now, I was somewhat disappointed. The books in the series tend to deliver on content, but in my opinion, fail stylistically making for a fairly dry read. "Mao: A Very Short Introduction", however, achieves success in both aspects. It sufficiently covers the main events of Mao's life and it does so in an engaging way.

Since Mao was and still is a controversial figure, it is not an easy task to write his biography, especially not in 120 pages. I have read biographies, which have painted Mao's as an angel. Others have painted him as a devil. The truth, as usual, is probably somewhere in the middle. In this short introduction, Devin does him justice. She approaches Mao without any apparent bias, knowing when to give him credit and, on the other hand, to criticize his actions, such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Since Mao's life is, in a sense, the story of Modern China, a lot can be learned about China just by reading his life story. "Mao: A Very Short Introduction" is a fascinating book on a fascinating person.

[Dawn Peers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a curiosity with all things Eastern culture and history, and not enough time to read full tomes on the topics that take my interest. I picked up this book on Mao for more of an insight in to the history of the man, and it didn't disappoint.

It's an accessible read for the majority of casual non-fiction readers. There is a fair smattering of political vernacular, and you need to have a good basic grasp of this to keep up with the text, Mao's own person political evolution, and the general goings on.

It is well written and edited. I wouldn't recommend it for those that find small text challenging; the "Very Short..." books pack a lot of text in to a very small space and, in the words of my Nan who tried to read it, "it's giving me a headache..."

This small (for me) fault aside, I found it well-rounded, and as already mentioned, nicely accessible.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”

This book is a good “crash course” into the life and works of Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976). As with all of the Oxford Very Short Introductions, it acts as primer for further study into a topic. Author Delia Davin is limited to less than 150 pages and a life as momentous as Mao’s simply cannot be gone into with any particular depth. I do feel better informed about 20th century Chinese history, and how Mao helped take “a weak, disunited country” (p. 1) and turn into one of the world’s great powers. And like all Communist dictators, he caused great suffering along the way. I was most impressed by Mao’s influence upon language. Before editing, he was a very lively and compelling writer.

Some quotes:

Under Mao’s leadership China was transformed from a weak, disunited country to a power on the world stage. However, his vision for China’s social transformation failed. He did not find a way to make China both egalitarian and prosperous and his efforts to do so visited enormous suffering on his people. (p. 1).

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows the power of another. (p. 21).

Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations . . . We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yan’an has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. (p. 24).

Another lively essay argues in Mao’s earthy style that shit is more useful than dogma: ‘A dog’s shit can fertilise the fields and a man’s can feed the dog. And dogmas? They can neither fertilise the field nor feed the dog. Of what use are they?’ (p. 37).

Many educated Chinese greatly admired the United States, conscious of its wealth and power but also seeing it as the home of freedom and democracy. Many also felt negative about the USSR because the Soviet Red Army had pillaged north-east China of its industrial equipment when it liberated the territory from the Japanese at the end of the war. (p. 50).

“The Russians were horrified by Mao’s bravado when he insisted that a nuclear war would not be a total disaster” (p. 66).

The Great Leap was characterized by an extreme anti-expert bias. It was better to be ‘red’ than ‘expert’, and engineers who protested that production targets were impractical or mentioned the technical limitations of machinery could find themselves accused of counter-revolutionary behaviour. (p. 68).

“…the horrors of the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976] remain better known than those of the Great Leap Forward [1958-1962] and are often made more of in critiques of Mao’s record, yet if the two are compared, the Leap with its incomparably higher death toll was the greater human catastrophe. The difference is that the majority of those who died in the famine were peasants and quickly forgotten in the world outside their villages. The victims of the Cultural Revolution by contrast were educated people, intellectuals, officials, and Party leaders. Their sufferings were more visible. (p. 95).

After the violent years of the Cultural Revolution, the idealism that had motivated many Chinese to work hard and to accept privations for the sake of the revolution and the progress it would bring was replaced in many cases by cynical or fearful compliance. (p. 96).

The ideological Mao would surely have condemned the way China has developed. Yet there was also a nationalist Mao who from the time of the May Fourth Movement had longed to see China rich, powerful, and respected among nations. This Mao would perhaps have applauded China’s success, been gladdened by its phenomenal economic growth, and gratified by the spectacle of developed countries vying for its investment funds. (p. 120).

Title: Mao
Author: Delia Davin
Series: Oxford Very Short Introductions
Year: 2013
Genre: Nonfiction - Biography, history, & politics
Page count: 142 pages (ebook)
Date(s) read: 7/16/23-7/17/23
Reading journal entry #135 in 2023

[Mihai · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe because of the page limit, maybe because I have read extensively about Mao's life and works, this book is one of the worst I found until now on the subject. I thought that maybe the author tried to offer some balanced view on what Mao and his doctrines actually were, on which case I could accept that maybe I am biased. But when looking over the end bibliography and references I was struck by the lack of authorized or critical books on the subject.

Most of the references were either state press and collected works, the famous, highly edited and overquoted Edgar Snow interviews, or some minor biographies. The only critical book on Mao that she accepted, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang - and one of the best written so far from that side, comes with an immediate comment about it's bad reviews and detractors. This does not seem very academic.

A disappointing read.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mao is of course a major figure in the history of the 20th century. He was the dictator of the most populous country in the world, taking it down a distinct path. So how do you give him a very short introduction? I think this is probably the best way of doing it. We see Mao's ideological, political, and personal life and how they relate. As others have said, this book feels balanced between a man who started the modernisation of China but is also notorious for his major mistakes in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I do think there is a large cast of characters, with some of the names being confusing, some of the personalities underdeveloped. But this is a sign of an author wrestling with a man with a massive legacy, trying to explain some of his decisions which too often glibly explained at the extremes, and trying to show the man behind Mao.

[Adi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before reading this book, I didn't know much about Mao Zedong; now I know multiple things about Mao Zedong. I really like this Very Short Introduction series: in the course of a couple hours, I can gain a basic understanding of a topic that I had no understanding of before. This book was interesting and informative. Four stars.

[Jon Heatherly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent beginner read to delve into the Forefather of Chinese Communism. I found it interesting how the socialist progression in China differed from that of Russia. You can definitely see how today breaks from the Revolution in that a good portion of of the modern Chinese economy is a hybridized market economy. This was my first taste in learning about the rise of Chairman Mao.

[Marya S · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear and accessible introduction to Mao's life and politics for someone with no prior knowledge and background. Particularly enjoyed the passages which discussed Mao's fondness for Chinese classical literature, and how this was used to appeal to a large, rural audience. Essentially, the book says exactly what it does.

[Bramobin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book, learnt a lot in 120 pages. That author brought good nuance about Mao while showing his mistakes. I do have to say though that I got kinda confused with all the people coming in and out of the story at such a fast pace, but that was bound to happen considering the small scale of the book. I recommend.

[Dinghao Luo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very superficial introduction. Given my lack of knowledge about Mao, at first I was inclined to accept the author’s analysis—but after discovering that she had even muddled basic facts like ‘the US opposing the PRC’s admission to the UN’.

[Dom Nuno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most books of this series, it is a short but good introduction to a theme, in this case one of the XX century (and history)'s greatest leaders and monsters.

[Orestes · Rating 5 out of 5]

很简单易懂的大家小书。观点很持平。史料也很扎实。近代史难得这样的作品了。

[Jude Martyński · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, I know much about Mao now.

[MG · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very consise and good for revision. New perspectives and facts which are facinating also appear.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

school..

[saman · Rating 4 out of 5]

mao was indeed extraordinary

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Một bất ngờ thú vị: Mao là người rất hiểu biết.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A genuinely fascinating and interesting look at probably the worst understood men in history. This book is balanced, showing his good and bad nature. While in China he is seen as an incredible man, this book also shows how he was callous, manipulative, and bent on power to achieve his will through any cost.

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leisure read — felt that I didn't know enough about Mao to engage in even the shallowest conversation — so I moved to rectify the fact. I wonder just how accurately you can illuminate the reader on this huge topic in just 120 pages, but I'm grateful to the author for at least giving it their best. I'll have to read a longer biography on Mao later.

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, lively and fascinating biography of a man who championed the cause of the proletariat but who, as time progressed, became increasingly autocratic.