JSnufkin

Very enlightening. Makes me excited to delve into the Xi Jinping era to see how accurate some of the conclusions of the author were.

I am happy with this book. Great account of the political life and measures taken by Deng Xiaoping and their associates after the 70s and, although I am not trained to assess that, I believe it is made in a really scholarly made. The academic consensus seems to agree with this.

My concern, and the reason why it has 4 stars, is that some of the claims regarding the popular support of the reforms are, from my point of view, not justified. I understand that it is beyond the scope of the book, but I don't think all of them were supported by any sources.

I really enjoyed it as a good account of all the intrigues happening at the highest political level of the PRC during the Cultural Revolution. Nonetheless, the omission of anything happening below this level bothers me, as I think it comes from some bias of the authors wanting to reduce the GRCP as palace intrigues.

Additionally, basing the whole psychology and personality of Mao Zedong on only one account who, moreover, as far as I know is a bit polemical, seems far from ideal. Especially considering that the personality of the Chairman is used to push some thesis.

Despite this, it was a really valuable and insightful reading to me.

I will start by saying that as a primer history to the CPC (and to the PRC, actually) it's a 5/5. If someone asked me for a single book to get a sense of the history of either of them this would definitely be my choice. It's short and not difficult to read (as in, it does not really assume any prerequisite knowledge, not written having specialists in mind).

On the other hand, for me it would be a 4/5 because I found it to be lacking on details. The chapters on the earliest history of the CPC (pre-Long March) and the latest (post Jiang Zemin) were very enlightening, as I knew almost nothing about that period. But it taught me nothing new for the periods I knew something about.

I was not expecting extra insights on periods where I read the nowadays considered the “core” (e.g. “Mao's Last Revolution” for elite politics the Cultural Revolution), taking into account that this book has to be more limited in scope for each specific topic. But even for affairs where I knew nothing about (e.g. Gao Gan's affair) this book was not particularly helpful in throwing more light into it.

To sum up, read it if you know nothing about the CPC, the PRC or nothing about a specific period of those. If for a certain period you have engaged with the existing literature and you are not looking for a good summary, then you could safely skip the related chapter in this book.

Muy interesante.