China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed

Thursday, May 7, 2015
4:15 PM - 5:30 PM
(Pacific)
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker: 
  • Thomas P. Bernstein

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china under mao cover
Perspicacious scholarship by the preeminent American historical sociologist working on the People’s Republic of China. A balanced, critical account of events of baffling complexity, and a sophisticated analysis of uniquely solid empirical data. If reading is indeed the basics for all learning, then this is the book to read in order to learn why Mao in the end accomplished so little of what he had hoped to achieve after 1949 and why his legacy remains so controversial.”
—Michael Schoenhals, Lund University

 

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

Mao’s China, Andrew Walder argues, was defined by two distinctive institutions established during the first decade of Communist Party rule: a Party apparatus that exercised firm (sometimes harsh) discipline over its members and cadres; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Although a large national bureaucracy had oversight of this authoritarian system, Mao intervened strongly at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao’s greatest achievements—victory in the civil war, the creation of China’s first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life—also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution.

Misdiagnosing China’s problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative. At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided.

Books will be available for purchase at the event

Andrew G. Walder, Author, has long specialized on the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His publications on China have ranged from the political and economic organization of the Mao era to changing patterns of stratification, social mobility, and political conflict in the post-Mao era. Another focus of his research has been on the political economy of Soviet-type economies and their subsequent reform and restructuring. His current research focuses on popular political mobilization in late-1960s China and the subsequent collapse and rebuilding of the Chinese party-state.

Walder joined the Stanford faculty the fall of 1997. He received his PhD in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981 and taught at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 1987. As a professor of sociology, he served as chair of Harvard's MA Program on Regional Studies-East Asia for several years. From 1995 to 1997, he headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From 1996 to 2006, as a member of the Hong Kong Government's Research Grants Council, he chaired its Panel on the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Business Studies.

Thomas P. Bernstein, Discussant, earned his PhD from Columbia University, 1970. He joined the faculty of the Department of Political Science and of the East Asian Institute in 1975, having previously taught at Yale and Indiana Universities. He retired in December 2007.  He is a specialist on comparative politics, with a focus on China as well as on communist systems generally. He has written on the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union and China and on the two famines that each country experienced in the l930's and late l950's. Publications on China include a book on Chinese youth (Yale University Press, 1977), which was translated into China in 1993, as well as articles and  book chapters on the Mao era, China’s growth without political liberalization, prospects for democratization, and on education. His recent writings have focused on various aspects of state-peasant relations in China’s reform period. Together with Professor Xiaobo Lu, he co-authored Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2003). In recent years, he has resumed work on Sino-Soviet relations and comparisons. In 2010, he published a co-edited book with Hua-yu Li, China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (Lexington Book). And he has written on reform and authoritarian rule in contemporary China and Russia. Prior to retirement, he served on various editorial boards, including Comparative Politics and China Quarterly.  He has held various fellowships, including a Guggenheim. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1986-l989 and again from 1991 to l994.