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Mao: A Reinterpretation by Lee Feigon

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Mao: A Reinterpretation Lee Feigon
Language: English
Page: 240
Format: pdf
ISBN: 1566635225, 9781566635226
Publisher:

From Library Journal

In recent years, with newly released official documents and insights from those who knew Mao Zedong personally, China scholars have written biographies of Mao for general consumption. Two such books are Jonathan Spence's Mao Zedong and Philip Short's Mao: A Life. In the present biography, Feigon (China Rising) presents what most China scholars undoubtedly will consider an incorrect portrait of Mao-as a man who cared deeply about his family, tried to implant Stalin's ideas in the Chinese mind, and, upon realizing his mistake in doing that, led the nation into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which Feigon asserts was truly responsible for carving the current path toward economic advancement in China. He posits that Mao, not Deng Xiaoping, was open to establishing a relationship with the United States. Though Feigon's interpretation is wrong, he develops innovative ideas about how to understand the man's life. For example, scholars generally agree that Mao was committed to education-but how does that play out in practice against political struggles in China? Although Feigon constantly points out that Mao was "different from" Stalin, he does not follow through with convincing analysis. Perhaps a review of both leaders' activities within their respective cultures and bureaucracies (see Klaus Mehnert's classic study, Peking and Moscow) would provide a starting point. An optional purchase.
Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Library of Congress
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From

When alive, Mao had no shortage of admirers among Western intellectuals, from Edgar Snow in the 1930s to French existentialists in the 1960s; in death, Mao may count China scholar Feigon among his friends. Positive adjectives about Mao ("prescient," "levelheaded") recur in Feigon's biographical narrative, whose thesis is that Mao bloomed late as a Marxist theoretician; established the People's Republic of China along Stalinist lines; and ruing that, tried to dismantle Stalinist bureaucracies. Noting the Stalin-style establishment of the PRC in the early 1950s, in which more than five million Chinese may have been executed, Feigon is less censorious about the death tolls of Mao's movements, such as the Great Leap Forward (about 30 million) and the Cultural Revolution (about a half million). That's because he's impressed with the educational, cultural, and even economic achievements he argues occurred during these times. Readers less inclined to take a detour around mass murder may not be so impressed with the provocative arguments Feigon advances. A controversial biography that may generate requests at the circulation desk. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.