1. Wilson, Dick (ed.), Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

2. Schram, S., Mao Zedong. A Preliminary Reassessment (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1983).Google Scholar Lectures delivered in April 1982.

3. For the passages in Mao's writings of 1912, 1917, 1918 and 1919 referred to here, see Mao Zedong zaoqi wengao (Draft Writings by Mao Zedong for the Early Period) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi; and Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1990), and the translations in Schram, S. (ed)., Mao's Road to Power. Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949. Volume I: The Pre-Marxist Period, 1912–1920 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 5–6Google Scholar, 132,232,250, 329. An overview of Mao's intellectual itinerary from 1912 to 1920 can be found in my introduction to this volume.

4. For the Chinese text, see Xinmin xuehui ziliao (Materials on the New People's Study Society) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980), pp. 15–41, especially p. 18. A translation of the full record of this meeting will appear in Volume II of Mao's Road to Power.

5. See, in particular, his article of 1 December 1919, “The work of the students,” in Schram, Mao's Road to Power, Vol. I, p. 454.

6. Conversation of 19 May 1989 with Hu Qiaomu.

7. For a brief statement as to how and when this slogan, previously thought to date from 1938, was formulated by Mao in 1927, see Schram, S., The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The full text of the relevant materials will appear in Volume II of Mao's Road to Power.

8. On this theme, see Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, pp. 54–57.

9. Session of 29 January 1924. A translation of Mao's various interventions at the congress will be included in Volume II of Mao's Road to Power.

10. See the extract from his essay of 30 June 1949, “On the people's democratic dictatorship,” in Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 91. (This discussion of terminology has been simply left out in the official English translation which appears in the Selected Works, Vol. IV.) The “people's democratic dictatorship” was, of course, in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat in another guise.

11. See, for example, his report of April 1945 to the Seventh Party Congress, quoted in Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 110; and his speech of 9 October 1957, at the Third Plenum of the Central Committee, translated in Leung, John K. and Kau, Michael Y. M. (eds.), The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, Volume II (January 1956-December 1957) (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 703.Google Scholar

12. Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1957), pp. 159–160.

13. Letter from Gong Yuzhi and Pang Xianzhi of the Department for Research on Party Literature, dated 21 March 1988, cited in Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 72. A translation of the relevant paragraph of Mao's 1938 text appears on p. 70.

14. “Chairman Mao's talk to music workers,” 24 August 1956, in Schram, S. (ed.), Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 86.Google Scholar

15. See Xianzhi, Pang, “Guji xinjie, gu wei jin yong” (“A new understanding of ancient works; making the old serve the new”), in Mao Zedong de dushu shenghuo (Mao Zedong's Reading Life) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1986), pp. 215–16.Google Scholar

16. Weiming, Tu, “Introduction,” in “China in transformation,” Daedalus, Vol. 122, No. 2 (Spring 1993), p. xvi.Google Scholar

17. Wansui (1969), p. 245, and Wansui (1967), p. 15.

18. Conversation of 19 May 1989 with Hu Qiaomu.

19. Wansui (1969), p. 27.

20. For the source of these passages, see Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, pp. 129–130. A complete translation of Mao's interventions at Beidaihe can be found in Macfarquhar, Roderick, Cheek, Timothy and Wu, Eugene (eds.), The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 397–441.Google Scholar See especially his remarks of 21 and 30 August, pp. 411–441.

21. Schram, Mao's Road to Power, Vol. I, p. 577.

22. Ibid. p. 318.

23. As late as May 1926 in his report (as acting head of the Propaganda Department) to the Second Plenum of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee, Mao included in the table of contents of a projected series of pamphlets on the “national movement” a survey to be entitled: “From the free citizens [ziyou shimin] of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution.” (The text of Mao's report will appear in Volume II of Mao's Road to Power.)

24. Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 363.

25. It was my judgment at the time, in May 1989, that the posters in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere were appealing simply to the inhabitants of Beijing to come to the aid of the students, rather than evoking an abstract category.

26. Quoted in Sheng, Hu (ed.), Zhongguo gongchandang de qishi nian (Seventy Years of the Chinese Communist Party) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1991), p. 486.Google Scholar

27. See Schram, S., “The limits of cataclysmic change: reflections on the place of the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ in the political development of the People's Republic of China,” The China Quarterly, No. 108 (December 1986), pp. 613–624.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 195.

29. Not surprisingly, Mao's military thought is ranked very high by experts in that domain, who regard him as superior to Sunzi or Clausewitz (conversation of 7 November 1991 with General Jiang Siyi, Vice-President of the Academy of Military Science of the Chinese People's Liberation Army). More striking is the fact that one eminent philosopher considers On Protracted War to be Mao's very best work from a philosophical point of view as well as in every other respect (conversation of 21 April 1986 with Xing Bensi, currently Vice-President of the Central Party School). Needless to say, neither of those cited here would accept as negative a verdict on Mao after 1949 as that which I have formulated in this article.

30. See his preface to Jiirgen Domes, Vertagte Revolution (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969), pp. vii–xiii.

31. See the reference in his talk of 18 August 1964, translated in Schram, Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, p. 220.

32. Anisimov, Evgenii V., The Reforms of Peter the Great (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 296Google Scholar, 298.

33. One might, in particular, draw a parallel between the dependence of Chinese workers and peasants on the danwei or “work unit” under Mao, and the system of passports established by Peter. See ibid. pp. 180–83, 233–35.

34. On the concept of a “parti-ordre,” see Duverger, Maurice, Les partis politiques, 3rd ed. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1958), pp. 149–158.Google Scholar

35. This conception was summed up as early as 1953 in the slogan “Great power is monopolized, Small power is dispersed.” For a discussion of this dimension of Mao's thought, see Schram, S., “Decentralization in a unitary state: theory and practice, 1940–1984,” in Schram, S. (ed.), The Scope of State Power in China (London: SOAS; and Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1985), pp. 81–125.Google Scholar

36. For the clearest and most striking elaboration of this idea by Mao, see his speech of January 1962, in Schram, Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, p. 164.

37. See Marx, Karl, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, quoted in Schram, S. and D'encausse, H. Carrère, Marxism and Asia (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 122–23.Google Scholar By 1852, Marx concluded, the peasant smallholding had ceased to be viable and the peasants were ready to join the proletariat in making revolution against the bourgeois state edifice built upon it. The long-term political and economic impact of family farms in China remains to be seen.

38. See, in particular, the “Talk on questions of philosophy” of 18 August 1964, in Schram, Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, p. 225.

39. See Friedman, Edward, “A failed Chinese modernity,” in Daedalus, Vol. 122, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 1–17.Google Scholar

40. For a brief summary and updating of the argument originally put forward in his book Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun (An Historical Discussion of Contemporary Chinese Thought) (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1987), see his paper “Qimengde zouxiang — tigang” (“The trend of enlightenment — outline”) presented to the conference held in Beijing in 1989, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement.

41. See Anisimov, Peter the Great, pp. 6,224,295. Shcherbatov's judgment was published some 60 years after Peter's death.

42. Speech of 6 April 1958 at Wuhan, Wansui (1969), p. 185.

43. Der reizt, und wirkt, und muss, als Teufel, schaffen. The line is from the Prologue in Heaven. Many of the numerous English translations shift words and ideas from one place to another to suit the metre and the rhyme, and thus do not contain this formulation.

44. See Anisimov, Peter the Great, p. 4. The Governing Senate, created by Peter in 1711, was liquidated only in December 1917, after the Bolshevik revolution.