Maoism at the Grassroots

Jeremy Brown is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. Matthew D. Johnson is Assistant Professor of History and Chair of East Asian Studies at Grinnell College. Jacob Eyferth is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Department of History, and the College, University of Chicago. Michael Schoenhals is Professor of Chinese at Chinese Lund University, Sweden.

As a work of cultural history, Maoism at the Grassroots seeks to complicate interpretations of China’s Mao era (1949–1976) through an examination of diverse and shared experiences of everyday life… As in the best edited volumes, each section of this book is nicely linked to the others and the authors make connections across the chapters rather than writing in isolation… This book is a must-read for scholars who work on the People’s Republic of China and will prove rewarding as well to anyone curious about ordinary life under Communist Party rule. Maoism at the Grassroots also makes an important intervention in the larger project of writing modern Chinese history. Until recently, Western books on China were primarily written by white men and the occasional white woman. This volume features scholarship from an impressive array of both Western and Chinese academics, many of the latter being translated into English for the first time. This marks a turning point in the production of historical scholarship on the Mao era, and hopefully is an indication of growing collaboration among scholars in different parts of the West and in China.