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Rebecca Karl established her scholarly reputation with an influential study of Chinese intellectual history and nationalism around 1900, located in its global and local context. In this interesting book on Mao Zedong's life and thought, she is similarly concerned with establishing a dialectic between Chinese and world history and to understand Mao in his historical moment, at a time when Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's spectacular monsterizing of him (in Mao: The Unknown Story, Jonathan Cape, 2005) has encouraged a disregard for the complex ways in which he and China reflected on one another. She writes his life not as conventional biography but as a chronological narrative of 20th-century China, modelled on Georg Lukács's 1924 account of Lenin and the "actuality of revolution" (set in the framework of decades of Russian and European history).
This study presents Mao in a largely sympathetic light, arguing that the setting that produced his project generally justified it, but she balances her defence of him with unrelenting criticism of his imperfections and excesses, both before and after 1949, including his bloody purges and personality cult. The chapters on...