China under Mao

"China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976. Andrew G. Walder argues that Mao's China was defined by two distinctive institutions: a Party apparatus that exercised firm discipline over its members; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Although a large bureaucracy had oversight of this authoritarian system, Mao intervened at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao's greatest achievements--victory in the civil war, the creation of China's first modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life--also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution. Misdiagnosing China's problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies, Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative"--Provided by publisher.