Table of Contents

1: Formative years
2: Marxist Labour organizer to Peasant Revolutionary
3: Achieving pre-eminence 1934-1949
4: The revolution institutionalized: first years of the People's Republic
5: The Great Leap Forward and its Aftershocks
6: The Cultural Revolution
7: Decline and death
8: Assessments and legacies
References and further reading

About the Author

Delia Davin taught at Leeds University from 1988 until her retirement in 2004, where she is now emeritus professor of Chinese Studies. Her research interests were focussed on women and gender issues in China and she is the author of Womanwork, Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (OUP, 1976). She wrote some of the earliest studies of the single child policy in China and with other colleagues she translated and edited Chinese Lives, an oral
history of contemporary China (Penguin, 1989). Her abiding interest in Mao Zedong and the history of Maoist China was inspired by her experience of living in Beijing.

Reviews

[A] tautly argued, plainly told, luminous story that does full justice to all sides of the argument
*The China Journal*