Customer Reviews

Before Mao: The Untold Story of Li Lisan and the Creation of Communist China

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Renewed interest in Pre-communist china ahs brought this wonderful book to us along with other reads on Chang-Kai Shek among others. This is a needed contribution to the scholarship. Li Lisan was co-founder of the Communist party and went on to study in France and then settle in Russia. Although this book focuses on his love affair with Elizabeth Kushkin, it also tells a weaving fascinating story of the links between international communism and cracks within it. Excellent portraits are given of the mercurial Stalin, who jailed Lisan along with many international communists who didn't toe the party line. In the end Lisan returned to China, saw the civil war to communist victory and then was finally killed in 1967 in the cultural revolution, just prior to the large scale military skirmishes on the China-Russia border that showed the final split between Moscow and Beijing.

A wonderful book. A must read for any Chinese or communist enthusiast. This book brings back to life the heady days of warlords, Sun Yet Sun and the birth of communism in China during the chaos of the early 20th century.

Seth J. Frantzman

I thank the author, a Frenchman for taking pains to assemble a story about the life of an early Chinese communist leader largely forgotten by us Chinese. But the novelization and the author's penchant for melodramatics made it such a drag that I had to force myself again and again to pick it up and finish it. At times it seems that the author can't tell rumors from facts. For example, where the hell did he get the idea that Mao occasionally slept with young men? Care to disclose the source?

Chinese history in the last couple centuries has been dramatic enough that neither literary flourish is needed nor will it help in telling its variegated stories.