Ishikawa, Yoshihiro, The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) (new research by a senior Japanese scholar on the international origins of the CCP)Google Scholar

Landsberger, Stephan, Chinese Propaganda Posters, www.iisg.nl/~landsberger (an excellent website including posters and commentary on Party policies, etc.)Google Scholar

Saich, Tony, Finding Allies and Making Revolution: The Early Years of the Chinese Communist Party (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2020) (a vivid retelling of the origins of the Party drawing from Comintern archives)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Averill, Stephen J., Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) (explains the shift from city to rural revolution in rich ethnographic context)Google Scholar

Shuyun, Sun, The Long March (London: Harper Perennial, 2007) (a contemporary journalist retraces the Long March and talks to survivors)Google Scholar

Apter, David and Saich, Tony, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) (an analysis of why many believed in the Yan’an rectification movement)Google Scholar

Gao, Hua, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018) (seminal and critical study of Mao and the Party by a Chinese historian writing in China)Google Scholar

Pepper, Suzanne, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) (a classic study of the Communist–Nationalist struggle for minds and territory)Google Scholar

Altehenger, Jennifer, Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) (shows the Party’s efforts to rule their new nation with a focus on the 1950s)Google Scholar

Brown, Jeremy and Pickowicz, Paul G., eds., The Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) (a well-edited collection that gives the social history of the Party’s national victory)Google Scholar

Chen, Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) (uses newly released materials to create a fresh interpretation of Mao’s role in the Korean War and the Cold War more broadly)Google Scholar

Frank, Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (London: Bloomsbury, 2010) (detailed and critical history of the Party’s Great Leap Forward and its disastrous outcomes)Google Scholar

Brown, Jeremy and Johnson, Matthew D., eds., Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) (shows life under Party rule during Mao’s ascendency, mid-1950s to mid-1970s)Google Scholar

MacFarquhar, Roderick and Schoenhals, Michael, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008) (the best narrative history of the Cultural Revolution decade, 1966–1976)Google Scholar

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Butterfield, Fox, Alive in the Bitter Sea, enlarged edition (New York: Times Books, 1990) (award-winning journalist’s account of life in the early reform period after 1978)Google Scholar

Lovell, Julia, Maoism: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2019) (a vivid narrative of the impact of Maoism around the world, 1960s to today)Google Scholar

Baum, Richard, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) (still one of the best accounts of the clash of ideas and values between the old generation of revolutionaries of the Maoist era and their younger, more pragmatic successors in the 1980s)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Vogel, Ezra F., Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013) (magisterial biography that focuses on Deng’s reform of the Party from the late 1970s)Google Scholar

Ziyang, Zhao, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009) (Zhao’s posthumous autobiography, which he secretly recorded on a tape recorder while under house arrest)Google Scholar

Fewsmith, Joseph, China since Tiananmen: From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) (readable and reliable account of Party reform in the 1990s, updated to the mid-2000s)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Wang, Chaohua, One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003) (Chinese voices from the 1990s on the Party, reform, and new challenges)Google Scholar

Fewsmith, Joseph, The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) (engaging case studies of why Party rural administrations resist reform)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Shambaugh, David, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) (a clear and comprehensive political-science assessment of the Party in the 2000s)Google Scholar

Brown, Kerry, China’s Dream: The Culture of Chinese Communism and the Secret of Its Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018) (a serious assessment of what Party leaders under Xi Jinping believe and why)Google Scholar

deLisle, Jacques, Goldstein, Avery, and Yang, Guobin, The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) (studies of Internet populism, stressing citizen resistance to Party abuses)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Tang, Wenfang, Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) (a challenging analysis of why so many Chinese support the Party’s authoritarian regime)Google Scholar