Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History by Rebecca E. Karl (review)

Mao Zedong may no longer be the sublime object of desire in China, but in recent decades his image has been continuously invoked and consumed in countless guises–both familiar and new–ranging from pop art portraits to the ubiquitous face of Chinese banknotes, from Cultural Revolution kitsch to the ObaMao souvenirs currently found in tourist traps around China. The reproduction of Mao in his various postmodern manifestations suggests a loss of meaning and depoliticization; at the same time, however, the deep-seated clash between sentimental and polemical cultural representations also makes clear that there is still much at stake in the question of his significance. In particular, following Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician (1994), biographies have become the preferred medium amongst English-language publications for depicting Mao's life and worldviews. Li set in motion a flood of research into the leader's private life and a broad shift away from the revolutionary presented in Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1938) and toward the monster portrayed in Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's controversial Mao: The Unknown Story (2005). Followers of the cult of personality were well-known during the Cultural Revolution for religious performances of love for their savior, but detractors have been no less willing to get intimate with Mao–though they have inverted the values of hagiography to feature spectacular tales of infidelity, cruelty, and misrule. This spotlight on the deficiencies of Mao's character seems complicit with the naturalization of private self-interest in postsocialist China.

In Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World (Duke University Press, 2010), Rebecca Karl provokes both China scholars and the general public to reassess the Chairman once again. Karl's book departs from the tendencies to either depoliticize Mao or sensationalize his private life for popular consumption by recentering contemporary discussions around his public role in making revolution. She attempts "to reattach Mao to a historical moment of crisis demanding critique and action" (p. x). Even though Karl does not leave Mao's private life untouched, she explicitly distinguishes her approach from the biographical genre, characterizing it instead as a history modeled after Georg Lukács's Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought (1924). Lukács wrote his commemoration shortly after Lenin's death and sought to set his subject's thought within a historical framework. Similarly, Karl skillfully weaves together Mao's ideas and the historical milieu that made possible their conceptualization in a well-written, balanced and grounded narrative accessible to non-specialists and suitable for use in undergraduate courses.

The book is divided into ten chapters, most of which span about a decade each, and covers the early Mao and the late Mao with equal attention. Rather than documenting life-long expressions of an a priori essence, Karl considers Mao's formative experiences, arguing that his early views and actions "did not indicate the political theorist that he was later to become" (p. 8). Her book begins with Mao's introduction to Western learning and anti-dynastic thought amidst the Qing dynasty's humiliating defeats at the hands of Western and Japanese powers. She then traces the major turning points in the development of Mao's understanding and practice of revolution. In 1918, Mao first became acquainted with Marxism in reading groups at Beijing University sponsored by Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, but his writings from that year do not indicate a momentous impact (p. 14). It was after exchanging letters with his former classmate Cai Hesen, who was writing from France, that Mao declared his support for Bolshevist Communism in the early 1920s. Later, his work at the Peasant Movement Training Institute in 1925 convinced him of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. The Nationalists' white terror in Shanghai on April 1927 initiated a period of...