How Maoism Was Made: Reconstructing China, 1949-1965

How Maoism Was Made focuses on the history of the early years in China after 1949, featuring new scholarship by academics across Europe and North America. The field of early PRC history has been transformed by the unprecedented accessibility of archives from the 1990s to the early 2010s. Sixteen contributors show how the revolutionary system was built and maintained by the efforts of non-elite actors, including scientists, farmers, designers, artists, cadres, and ordinary citizens. By abandoning the Cold War political work of vilifying or celebrating Chinese communism, How Maoism Was Made aims to render the history of the Maoist system comprehensible to specialists and non-specialists alike, by viewing it through the lens of people who made it. Chinese communism is revealed to be a set of beliefs and practices that inspired millions of people to (re-)build their country and find a new life within it, at times with tragic consequences.

Aaron William Moore, Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations, University of Edinburgh, Jennifer Altehenger, Associate Professor of Chinese History, Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History, Merton College, Oxford

Aaron William Moore is the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of two books: Writing War (2013), which analysed over 200 combat soldiers’ diaries from China, Japan, and the United States, and Bombing the City (2018), which compared the air raid experiences of civilians in British and Japanese regional cities. In addition to the history of early East Asian science fiction, he is currently working on a book about the global experiences of wartime youth. In 2014 he was awarded the Leverhulme Prize for his work on transnational and comparative history.

Jennifer Altehenger is associate professor of Chinese History and Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at the University of Oxford and Merton College. Her research focuses on the history of modern China, especially the history of industrial design, materiality, and everyday life. She is the author of Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1989 (2018) and together with Denise Y. Ho of Material Contradictions in Mao’s China (2022). She is also the editor of the online resource ＂The Mao Era in Objects＂ and is currently working on a book titled Designing Socialism: Furniture and Mass Production in China.