Customer Reviews

Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic (Transformation of Modern China)

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As a whole, this an excellent text. Meisner exhibits an incredible knowledge and understanding of the tragic history of the PRC. As he takes the reader on an incredible exploration of the PRC's many vicissitudes,Meisner, despite being a historian by trade, consistenly gives the reader masterful economic and political analysis of the events that swept the "Middle Kingdom" during this last half-century. In addition to this, he dissects with precision the manifold conceptual arguments, theoretical polemics, and numerous speeches Mao offered to the people as to how and why these incredible changes could and should occur. Upon completion of it, I am definitely better versed on the myriad events that have shaped today's PRC. From China's revolutionary heritage all the way up to the rise of Deng, Meisner is consistently clear and captivating. His masterful use of economic, political, sociological, and historical analysis is impressive. He also demonstrates quite a knowledge of Marxist-Leninism and Maoism. However, at times I felt bogged down by it all, and honestly had to wonder how germane it truly is to the events that transpired. Yet, as a whole, I still have to conclude that this book is excellent and should be considered on of the key books for someone investigating contemporary China.

Maurice Meisner, one of the US' foremost Sinologists, did an excellent job writing a popular history of the People's Republic in "Mao's China and After". Starting with the fall of the Empire and the May Fourth movement as well as New Culture, Meisner then skips to the point where the Chinese Communists have won the Civil War. He discusses the Maoist, Liuist, Dengist etc. periods in Chinese history in depth, taking a very large-scale view concentrating in particular on economic and social history, with some commentary on the position of intellectuals thrown in (in particular with the Hundred Flowers movement and the Cultural Revolution).

Meisner gives a solid left-wing perspective on all the relevant issues, focusing in particular on the successes and failures both of Mao's view of socialism, which, as Meisner points out, was itself on the left wing of the Communist Party of China. As some reviewers have noted, at times this does a disservice to his eagle's view of things, as a lot of social history in which Mao plays only a tangential role is ignored: there is no part on the position of women and changes in this, no description of the Civil War itself at all, practically nothing on the war against Japan, and even the Great Leap Forward gets only a summary description. On the other hand, this allows him to focus very strongly on the relation between economic policy and economic structures on the one hand, and the roles and views of the leaders of the Party on the other hand, surely an essential but often missing element of any serious political history.

The book is eminently readable and requires absolutely zero prior knowledge of modern China, and at the same time, after finishing it, a reader will have at least a moderate level of knowledge on modern Chinese political history. This is quite an accomplishment, made possible by Meisner's talent to make complicated political entanglements seem straightforward and obvious, and his constant eye on the economic side of things. There are a lot of things that one could criticize this book on, but since it is meant as a popular introduction, it should be judged on those criteria, and there it succeeds quite well.

Maurice Meisner got on my good side in the introduction to this, the third edition of his history of the People's Republic of China: He admitted and set about correcting errors in earlier editions - specifically, his previous, erroneous view that China's economic opening was a political expedient, not a genuine and astounding policy shift. How often do you come across an author -- or anyone! - admitting he was wrong? So I read on, confident I was in the company of an honest analyst. My rising expectations were rewarded. Meisner's analysis is fair-minded and authoritative. I've read a good bit of modern Chinese history, but almost every page of this book delivered a new insight or deepened my understanding of what I already knew. Among the things that struck me: the extent to which the Chinese revolution originally was a rural phenomenon and the consequences of those origins; how successful the communists were in establishing order and a functioning government in the early years after their victory; the fact that much of the violence of the Cultural Revolution was started not by starry-eyed Maoist zealots but by entrenched bureaucrats diverting attention away from themselves and toward helpless intellectuals and people with "bad class backgrounds.''

The book is sometimes repetitious; Meisner drives home his themes again and again. And I found myself a little frustrated at times by what I took as Meisner's Utopian socialist outlook. He seems sympathetic to the idea that pure socialism - worker ownership of the means of production - would have created some kind of perfect, democratic society in China. Sometimes he measures the success of Mao and his successors not by how well they improved the lot of the people but by how well they moved China along the Marx-ordained path to socialism and on to communism. He sometimes seemed to bend over backwards to explain or minimize Mao's excesses and to expose the dark side of what he calls China's shift to capitalism. He seems to view the words "hire" and "exploit" as synonyms. More importantly, I think his apparent black-white view of socialism vs. capitalism leads him to simplify the economic changes in China; in my view, the country hasn't gone completely capitalist (though it's certainly headed that way) but is caught somewhere between the socialist and capitalist worlds - in some ways adopting the worst of both.

Even so, Meisner's vision is easily broad and humane enough to compensate for what I saw as a pro-socialist tilt. My objections are actually less complaints than responses to Meisner's provocative analysis. Bottom line: Any serious student of communist China should own this book.

I am very glad I read this book (which Howard Zinn recommended to me). I feel I have a firm grasp of the basics of 20th Century Chinese history now. Meisner really takes an independent line: he doesn't just parrot Chinese or US propaganda. I feel he makes reasonable surmises about motivations and actions which are still unclear, given the secretive nature of the Chinese government. In all, one of the best history books I have ever read.

This is THE book to read for those looking for a one-volume overview of China since the revolution. Meisner presents a clear, cogent, thorough, and sympathetic but not dogmatic overview of Communist China and Mao's struggles to wrest China away from the road to bureacratic capitalism. He presents the failures of Chinese Communism as well as its successes, and is equally at ease with economic, intellectual, political, and social history.

For those looking for a history of the Chinese Revolution itself, I recommend Lucien Bianco's "Origins of the Chinese Revolution". For a great eyewitness account of the struggles of the Red Army in the 1930s, see Edgar Snow's "Red Star Over China". For a masterful depiction of the struggles for socialism at the level of a single village, see William Hinton's "Fanshen" and it's sequel "Shenfan".

I bought this book largely on the recommendations of previous readers and because I was looking for an intelligent, thought-provoking history of Modern China. On the whole, the book is all these things, but it left me unsatisfied. It's a particular kind of historical review which in the final analysis I found wanting because it delivers very broad-stroke judgements based on evidence gleaned from a very small grouping of sources. Mr. Meisner analyses modern Chinese history largely through the readings and actions of one man: Mao Zedong. Fair enough, given the title of the book. But it's almost as if no one else matters or had any impact whatsoever on what happened. The Chinese people are completely absent from this history, which is largely a history of Mao's shifting theoretical viewpoints. It may be true that the history of modern China is the history of one man's thought, but it wasn't until I got to the section dealing with Deng Xiaoping that I began to feel that I was reading a history of a people with a multitude of viewpoints and opinions. It may be an impossibility to know what actually went on in China from 1946 up to 1976 and that therefore all we have is Mao Zedong Thought, which may only be another way of saying that a history of Modern China has yet to be written.

Author tried to free Mao from his responsibility for disasters, chaos and famine in China. The discussion is excellent, though sometimes it is contradicted. To me, the weakness of the boos is lack of historical facts, or detailed description of events. For example, "backyard steel" campaign is only briefly mentioned in several sentences. However, it is very important and representative event in Great Leap Forward. Another event "Exaggerating Wind", that local cadres claimed ridiculous high yield of grain output, its result is catastrophic, and only mentioned in one paragraph in whole book. I have read through half of the book, it is a little disappointed to me. However, it is open a new view of the history for me, and worthy to read.

a little bit more:
Looks like, author preferred "anti-bureaucracy" no matter whatever the historical conditions were. In early 60s, the "bureaucracy" worked well to stabilize the whole China from collapsing, however, author blamed such operation increased the "inequality". From my view, increasing of income for more efficient workers is not a bad thing, socialism is "to each according to one's work". Maoists called a revolution to bury bureaucracy class, whatever their purposes were, it is favorable in the book.

Author's inclination of Maoists is obvious. For example, in the section about debates on dialectics, Mao insisted that "one divides into two", then author used phrase "oversimplified" to describe opposite view "two combine into one". Frankly, I can not tell why sentence "two combine into one" is "oversimplified", and "one divides into two" is not. My conclusion is that "one divides into two" said by Mao, and author likes it.

The main idea of the book is: there are two opposite sides, Maoists and Part Bureaucracy. It is no doubt that author likes Maoists because they were "anti-bureaucracy" and fighting for "equity". Author defined that the opposite side of Maoists is "Party Bureaucracy", he didn't care about or (not pay enough attention to) if there are cadres among "Party bureaucrats" doing right thing in that historical period.

Now, I can understand how this book could be translated in Chinese and published in China recently.

If there is an aspect in which author Maurice Meisner exceeds, is in expressing his understanding of China and the CCP.

If there is an aspect in which Meisner falls short is research. The book lacks sources and citations. This makes the book tedious.