Mao Tse-tung: Ruler of Red China

Mao Tse-tung: Ruler of Red China by Robert Payne, Schuman, 1950 This book was published shortly after Mao came to power. Fifteen years before the Cultural Revolution, he anticipated Mao's wider interests: Though lacking some of the documents and details we have now, the book has some interesting details on party history, including its foundation. In chapter three, he explains how Pravda in 1920 had wrongly reported the formation of a Communist P... more

Mao Tse-tung: Ruler of Red China by Robert Payne, Schuman, 1950 This book was published shortly after Mao came to power. Fifteen years before the Cultural Revolution, he anticipated Mao's wider interests: Though lacking some of the documents and details we have now, the book has some interesting details on party history, including its foundation. In chapter three, he explains how Pravda in 1920 had wrongly reported the formation of a Communist Party of China. This was actually a conference consisting of a mixed bag of anarchists and non-Leninist socialists which “ended in a fiasco”. A revised and updated edition was published in 1961 as Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung less