Best books on Mao Zedong, as well as the Great Leap Forward?

Mao has a GOAT aesthetic. He was this supersmart chink philosopher-emperor who was also a guerrilla fighter and master strategist. He got millions of people to literally worship him as a god. and didn't give a fuck about human life. Mao said that he wasnt afraid about nuclear war because communism would eventually develop on other planets and win out in the end He was also a based patrician who wrote poetry and treaties. Maybe he wasn't crazy and had next level wisdom.

do not read books on Chairman Mao. only read approved literature of Peking Press by Chairman Mao, comrade.

the content of those critiques might be extreme tankie but has china not demonstrably become a global capitalist juggernaut

here. Mao really did care about human life, it's just he had a super-dry Hunanese peasant's sense of humour (which is always willfully taken out of context by western writers) and liked to make dark jokes. Taking him seriously from those quotes is like taking Ronald Reagan's "we begin bombing in five minutes" seriously. But he did get genuinely cosmic in his thinking near the end of his life, speculating a great deal about what might develop from communism when that too proved itself as redundant as capitalism, and this nihilistic strand in his thinking is what led to the GPCR and is the only part of today's "Mao Zedong Thought" that the Party completely ignores.

It has. But this transition has not happened due to "corrupt overlords of capitalist accumulation". In many respects China post-Mao is much more orthodox in its Marxism (for example, its strict adherence to the notion of base determining superstructure flies in the face of much of Stalin and Mao's theory). Demonising the Party's post-Mao theorists and leaders leads to missing the point of today's China, which is that much more has happened than just a Russia-style return to capitalism.

>has china not demonstrably become a global capitalist juggernaut

Some contradictions are to be expected during the socialist stage of development. China is actually further along in the road to Full communism than the USSR ever got.

Which is why they aren't to be dismissed.
>mfw "tankie"

Soon.

>Demonising the Party's post-Mao theorists and leaders leads to missing the point of today's China, which is that much more has happened than just a Russia-style return to capitalism.

very interested in this. studying dialectics history of the left and marxist economics lol. any sauce my man?

Basically this. His nonfiction writings are very dry in translation, but he wrote to document information and to inform peasants of ideology, most farmers were just rising up to overthrow their evil landlords and had no clue about the inherent struggles in left to right wing ideology in the Kuomingtang and Gongchangdang, as well as the ebb and flow of Communism worldwide.

And Mao wrote like a madman, few revolutions in history have been documented and analyzed so well by a single person who was also at the same time a figurehead of the said revolution. And in terms of the west's criticism and the defense of him at least in this thread I can agree on. After his revolution, he didn't go out and expand the territory like an Imperialist, hell, he didn't even go to invade Taiwan to finish the job or involve the people in another war against the Japanese

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I know you can get 'selected works' from Deng to Xi Dada in English, but most non-Chinese writing on the Chinese economy is too left or too right, always trying to prove something. Red Capitalism by Walter and Howie is a good summary of the myriad ways China remains non-capitalist, although again. Pinch of salt.

I would read this if it was YA

Is it?

Seconding this, seems like it'd be a very interesting subject to write about.

Good translations and editions for Mao's works?

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Is there an Ebook of this?

very bad book, almost universally panned by actual scholars and historians.

it's a bit unbalanced but not without merit

"a bit unbalanced" is an understatement

i mean sure it has "merit," but the amount of merit it has can be condensed to 10 pages or so, and the remaining 700 pages is just an emotionally charged diatribe/character assassination that has pretty much zero basis in historical research or "fact"

and yes i have read the whole thing. i wouldn't say i consider the time spent wasted, but it certainly wasn't historically informative. it's a bad blend of pop-history and fanfiction.

10 yuán have been deposited to your account. 反抗是有道理的!

谢谢领导!毛主席万岁!

Best way to learn Chinese?
Rosetta Stone, or what?

I enjoyed this one.

>Mao was a good boy, he dindu nuffin!

>But he did get genuinely cosmic in his thinking near the end of his life, speculating a great deal about what might develop from communism when that too proved itself as redundant as capitalism
That sounds interesting, you wouldn't have a link to something relating to that would you?

be born in china

no one said that senpai, but mao the unknown story is actually just poor scholarship. both mao "Defenders" (if they can be really be called that; more just moderates) and mao's detractors have spoken about how poor mao: the unknown story is as a book of biography

造反有理 you uncultured plebeian

1. Go to China
2. Acquire a Chinese gf/bf
3. Insist that you speak Chinese at least half the time

Yang Jisheng, Tombstone

Best solo, home alternative?

Nick Knight, Rethinking Mao. Good non-partisan view of his ideological development.

I'll check it out, thanks.

>Mao defenders are just moderates
Up is just down and left is just right.

>Some contradictions are to be expected during the socialist stage of development. China is actually further along in the road to Full communism than the USSR ever got.
Too much exposure to the internet has left me completely incapable of discerning whether or not this is satire.

Watch the Ip Man movies over and over again. Though you won't learn shit of the alphabet

the guy seems like he could barely afford walking let alone a great leap forward

Any other endorsements for this one?

It's pretty good. You have to understand that all writing on Mao by non-Chinese operates within the dichotomy of the Cold War, even stuff written after the fact; but that one isn't a bad account all things considered, and its focus on Soviet archive material gives it at least some authority.

well you're not far off, the dude was basically hauled everywhere by his petty slaves. more like 'the long carriage ride'

apparently a pretty good swimmer though

>taking anything from Chang and Halliday seriously

damn the red guards are in full force today

Actually, after having studied the Chinese Revolution from a relatively unbiased perspective, its not super communist to disregard Chang and Halliday; Chang in particular has a massive bias given her upbringing against Mao. That's pretty much against what an historian should be. I am not a Maoist, btw. His Great Leap Forward was one of the biggest man made catastrophes in human history (although, given the other options like Chiang Kai-Shek, China would have been screwed regardless).

Sounds like it's worth checking out. Thanks

Looks like the dumb monkey brigade lost one of its loyal subjects.

>dumb monkey brigade

Thoughts on Philip Short's book? I read his book on Pol Pot.

Was the Pol Pot book any good?

>Defending post-Mao China

Jesus Christ

Best one I read was a Chinese book roughly translated as 'How the Red Sun Rose: the Course of the Yan'an Rectification Campaign' (紅太陽是怎樣升起的). While it is not a biography of Mao per se it goes quite deeply into Mao's beliefs and methods, which gives a good reflection of who Mao is as a person and as a politician. Also this book used only sources that are publicly available in Chinese archives but still got banned in China so take that what you will

>There are actually Dengists in this thread

"The Cultural Revolution at the Margins" corresponds to somewhat what a critical leftist perspective of Mao's actions during the GPCR without being dengist at all

Also come to /leftypol/ for similar discussion on this topic

>implying Veeky Forums doesn't unironically lean to the left already

I enjoyed it and got something out of it, but it's the only book I've read about Pol Pot and that period of Cambodian history, so I can't attest to it's accuracy.

i enjoyed this a whole lot, i know it's pop history but it was a fun read

Fair enough, thanks for the rec.
Any other suggestions for Pol Pot and Cambodia?

a .

But this is wrong you fucking troll. China is a capitalist juggernaut under totalitarian government control. Communism calls for a stateless society with no monetary system and no censorship, China censors money, uses currency, exploits its workers and allows foreign nations to do the same, etc.

fucking

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>current year
>using 'totalitarianism' as if it's still a real word
>implying China claims to be communist instead of just working towards communism via the use of capitalist tools in a capitalist-dominated world
>he doesn't know about bird cage theory
>he doesn't believe in the development of the productive forces
>he doesn't know about the economic base determining the superstructure
>he's an ultra-left shill who seriously thinks you can bypass the capitalist mode of production instead of it being intrinsic to the creation of an alternate socialist mode of production
>he doesn't understand that capitalism depends upon the assertion of market dependence and that 70% of China's economy, being still controlled directly or indirectly by the Party, is in the final analysis sensitive to but independent of the power of the market, instead being beholden to the Party, which while beset by corruption and containing members of the business elite amongst its highest ranks does not possess a class character but for that of the statis bureaucracy, and so cannot be said to be one and the same with the capitalist class, which it attempts to manage for the good of the population rather than for the narrow interests of that capitalist class itself
>he probably sleeps with a picture of Hua Guofeng under his pillow

you're good until you say the party somehow transcends or escapes class. vanguardism is just bourgeoisity draped in red.

Xi is confirmed our guy.

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We don't use those pronouns around here

teh fug