Books Review and Comparison

Introduction

Meisner is uniquely qualified by political commitment, professional experience, and scholarly talent to produce this important new biography of Mao. He offers a reasoned, indeed regretful, Marxist analysis of Mao's role in the Chinese revolution, acknowledging his successes but particularly seeking to understand the roots of Maos dictatorship and the many tragedies befell China under his sway. Buchanan's work is a broad synthesis that would work well as a textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary European history. Crisply and lucidly written, it does an admirable job of incorporating the latest historiographical insights on a diverse array of countries and issues. This paper presents books reviews mentioned in the works cited list and compares each other in a concise and comprehensive way.

Books Review and Comparison

First of all discussing the political career of Mao Zedong, Meisner (pp. 34-89) mentions that Meo Zedong started his political activities when China, oppressed by imperialist powers and devastated by continuous civil wars fought by warlords' armies, fell into deep national crisis. As the revolution of 1911 did not bring the expected results, and the October revolution of 1917 in Russia inspired progressive Chinese intellectuals and stimulated their interest in Marxism—Leninism, Mao was convinced that this new theoretical weapon was the means to save China.

Central to Mao Zedong's political thought was the application of Marxism—Leninism to the situation of Chinese society. The revolution in China should be accomplished in two stages: the democratic stage aiming at smashing the old state machine and replacing it by the proletarian dictatorship; and the socialist stage, aiming at building the socialist society to ensure its transition to communism through the dictatorship of the proletariat (Meisner, pp. 34-89). But, within this framework of Marxist—Leninist revolutionary development, Mao's contributions in the Chinese context (mostly in the first stage) had their own specific content which, by 1943, had come to be called Mao Zedong thought.

In the stage of democratic revolution, Mao's political thinking and practice were mainly concerned with the seizure of state power. Five main features can be discerned, as follows: (1) on the basis of a class analysis of Chinese society, sorting out the enemies to strike and isolate and friends to unite in different periods of the revolution; (2) developing

armed struggle, which relied mainly on the peasantry through the setting up of revolutionary bases in the countryside which would encircle the urban centres; (3) upholding the absolute leadership of the Communist Party in all spheres, giving attention to policy tactics, political propaganda and organizational work; (4) relying on the masses, to win over their wholehearted support; and (5) always being confident of winning the class struggle by looking down on the enemy as a paper tiger in the long term while treating him as a dangerous opponent during the actual course of the struggle (Meisner, pp. 34-89).

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Mao's revolutionary base area strategy had been carried out with relative success but was interrupted by the interference of the Comintern, whose ...