| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Lee Feigon. Mao: A Reinterpretation. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2002. Pp. 229. $24.95.
Lee Feigon, the author of influential books on the early Chinese revolutionary Chen Duxiu and the 1989 protest movement in Beijing, is known for plain speaking and a readiness to stick his neck out. In this interpretative study of the life of Mao Zedong, he sets out to clear away two supposed myths: that Mao was an innovative and independent thinker up to 1949, and that he became a Stalinist tyrant thereafter. Instead, he argues the reverse: Mao followed and relied on Joseph Stalin in the early period but became increasingly original and creative in the late 1950s and the 1960s, when he set China on the road to fundamental change.	1
Feigon's assertion that it is still commonplace to see Mao as an inspired leader who went his own way before 1949 and persisted with his revolution in the teeth of Stalin's opposition is seemingly contradicted by his own extensive citation from recent scholarship, which suggests that this view is now widely discredited. Nevertheless, his battle to rehabilitate the older Mao can rightly claim to be contentious. Even radical scholars who hailed Mao as a liberationist in the 1960s and the early 1970s came to view him as a tyrant after his death in 1976. Feigon's real challenge to the consensus therefore lies not in downsizing the younger Mao but in upholding the legend of the older Mao as a genuine revolutionary who broke the mold of foreign dogmas.	. . .

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