Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949. Volume 2, National Revolution and Social Revolution December 1920-June 1927 (review)

528 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996© 1996 fry University ofHawai'i Press Stuart R. Schräm, editor, and Nancy J. Hodes, associate editor. Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949. Volume 2, National Revolution and Social Revolution December 1920-June 1927. New York, Armonk, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. lxii, 544 pp. Hardcover $110.00, isbn 1-56324-430-6. Under Stuart Schram's able editorship, Mao's Road to Power contains the most comprehensive collection to date of Mao Zedong's early writings, making it certainly much more than just a supplement to Beijing's official Selected Works. In addition to the fact that most of the articles here are not included in the Selected Works, the present volume offers a portrait of the young Mao of the 1920s that is much more full and accurate, and thus more vivid, than the revised edition of the Selected Works, which shows more of the post-1949 Mao than the young Mao as he originally was in the 1920s. Moreover, this volume's English translation is so much better than the Selected Works that it is almost as satisfying to read as the original Chinese version. Of course, the important contribution of this volume is its sheer comprehensiveness in terms of the works collected and the careful and thorough research on Mao in that tumultuous period of Chinese history. The scholarship is solid: the works included are assembled with excellent explanatory footnotes to put everything in the proper historical perspective. This enables the reader to understand and appreciate better the development of Mao's mentality and intellect and the historic path that he followed in his early revolutionary life. The book is useful to specialists as well as to others who are interested in Mao, Maoism, and China's revolutionary and modernization struggles in the early Republican period. The collection as a whole presents a vivid portrait of a complex young revolutionary whose ability to combine idealism and pragmatism, to handle theory as well as practice, was already very much in evidence. The early writings are valuable for understanding the young Mao. Many ofthese documents are Mao's own reports (including minutes of meetings) on the activities of social, political, and cultural organizations that he had joined or helped to set up; they include official reports to the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when he was a leading cadre in both during the 1923-1927 united front period. Although they reflect the unique insight and vision of the young Mao concerning revolutionary affairs in China, they reveal more of his capacity to deal with organizational matters than of his revolutionary ideas. Mao's ability to attend to organizational details was just as impressive as his intellectual capacity for handling revolutionary ideology. His comment on the failure of the Paris commune that "there was no united, centralized, and disciplined party to lead it" and that the Reviews 529 revolutionaries' "attitude towards the enemy was too conciliatory and too merciful " (p. 367) sums up well Mao's revolutionary realism. However, in spite ofits comprehensiveness, the collection here does not shed much new light that may have any effect on our long-held views about Mao. Perhaps , as in the case ofMarx, the important thing to note is that the young Mao shown in these works was a different person from the old Mao who ruled China with an iron hand for twenty-seven years. It is nonetheless interesting today to read how Mao and the other young radicals in Hunan talked about "improving the life of the individual and the whole ofthe human race"—the proclaimed goal oftheir New People's Study Society (p. 20)—at the same time declaring that they should not consort with prostitutes . In contrast to what Mao and his comrades accomplished after 1949, this idealism says a great deal about their views on revolution and the new China. Also interesting reading are Mao's personal letters to friends and relatives, which show his emotional as well as his intellectual side. In 1921, when Mao was a schoolteacher, he helped set up the Hunan SelfStudy University, yet his anti...