The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution

Interesting book and essential for analysis of China. The focus is on historiography rather than history itself so although this involves a lot of historical facts it's sometimes a little confusing if you don't know the context. Good at completely destroying the nonsense stories of things like "Mao: the Unknown Story", showing up Deng as a capitalist, providing evidence for Mao's continued popularity and questioning a lot of accepted wisdom around the Cultural Revolution. It shows up as elitist and disgusting a lot of the stuff said about Mao's policies in this era.

On the negative side, it sometimes makes important claims but doesn't talk about them or reference them (it says it's an undoubtable fact that certain things have got better show more with the post-Mao reforms for example), or just claims which are a bit weird and seem to demand further explanation. It also doesn't really talk about issues like the death toll in the various famines as much as you might expect - obviously not a serious problem but I thought it was a bit weird not to look at the historiography surrounding one of the most talked about parts of Chinese history in depth. show less