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.

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.

Introduction: The Early People's Republic of China Between Theory and Practice, Jennifer Altehenger and Aaron William MoorePart 1: Society and Political Economy1. Making a 'New Changsha': Reconstructing China's Devastated City, 1945-1959, Toby Lincoln2. Mediating Disputes, Making Minzu: Minoritization on an Ethnocultural Frontier of Early Maoist China, Benno Weiner3. The Political Economy of the Everyday: Theory and Praxis in the Urban Commune, Fabio Lanza4. Seeing Like the Maoist State: Peasant Resistance in 1950s Court Documents, Wenyu Jing and Felix WemheuerPart 2: The Revolutionary Self5. The Final Revolution Is in Our Hearts: Work and Study in Personal Diaries of the Early People's Republic of China, Aaron William Moore6. Brainwashing and World Revolution, Aminda M. Smith7. Constructing the Maoist Sexual Subject: 1950s Hygiene Guides and the Production of Sexual Knowledge, Sarah Mellors RodriguezPart 3: Material Culture and Everyday Life8. How to Standardize Life in 'New China': The Case of Furniture, Jennifer Altehenger9. Mass Muralism and Mass Creativity in the Early People's Republic of China, Christine I. Ho10. An Unlikely Moment of Revival? The Return of Gods in Early 1960s, Zhejiang Xiaoxuan WangPart 4: Expertise and Revolutionary Epistemology11. How Geography Won the Battle and Geographers Lost the War, Shellen Xiao Wu12. Marvelling at a World so Changed': The Three Gorges Project in Mao's China, Covell Meyskens13. 'Knowledge is Power': Defining Knowledge and Creating Organic Intellectuals, 1961- 1965, Robert CulpPart 5: Socialist Internationalism at Home14. Plagues from the Skies: Bacteriological Expertise in the 1952 Germ Warfare Allegations, Mary Augusta Brazelton15. Soviet Books in Socialist China: Epoch Press and the Making of the Maoist State, 1940-1960, Nicolai Volland16. The Japanese and Korean Roots of Maoist Dance Education, 1951-52, Emily WilcoxCoda17. Point Counterpoint: Temporal Interplay in the Soviet and Chinese Revolutions, Juliane Fürst and Jochen Hellbeck