
906 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS
of Mao's writings, especially from his pre-Marxist period, but including also
important items from the years 1921—49. Some of these items are to be found
in internal
{nei-pu)
collections such as I-ta
ch'ien-hou
(Before and after the First
Congress) and Hsin-min
hsueh-hui
t^u-liao
(Materials on the New People's Study
Society). There are, however, many extremely interesting and previously
unknown texts in the collection of Mao's letters published on his 90th birthday,
Mao
Tse-tung shu-hsin hsuan-chi
(Selected letters of Mao Tse-tung), and in other
volumes on particular themes published, or to be published, under the auspices
of the agency responsible for the compilation of the writings of leaders such as
Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-ch'i, Chou En-lai, Chu Te, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, and Ch'en
Yun: the Chung-kung chung-yang wen-hsien yen-chiu-shih (Research Centre on
party literature under the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party).
These circumstances make all the existing works on Mao (including even the
most recent) at least partially out of
date.
Despite the lacunae in the documentation,
however, a number of authors have formulated basic issues in thought-provoking
fashion, and sketched out hypotheses which will be of great value in guiding
future research. The following is a
brief,
selective list of some significant
contributions.
Of the works dealing in systematic fashion with all, or a substantial portion
of, the period down to 1949, the most recent, thoughtful, and balanced is that
of Brantly Womack,
The foundations
of
Mao Zedong's political
thought,
1917-19};.
Although this book stops in 1935, and fails to use some key sources on the years
1917-21,
it is nonetheless the best available introduction to Mao's thought during
his formative years. John Bryan Starr's
Continuing the
revolution:
the
political thought
of
Mao
is marred by the author's tendency to treat everything Mao wrote from
the 1920s to the 1970s as a single corpus, from which quotations can be selected
at random to illustrate various aspects of his thought conceived in largely
a-historical terms. It contains, however, thoughtful comments, and a useful
compilation of materials. Another book covering the whole of Mao's pre-1949
intellectual development, as well as his ideas after 1949, is that of James Chieh
Hsiung,
Ideology
and practice. The
evolution
of
Chinese
communism, an interesting and
original interpretation, even though the view of
ssu-hsiang
or thought (as in Mao
Tse-tung thought) as a type of intellectual activity different in kind from the
systematic doctrines ('isms' or chu-i) common in the West (such as Marxism),
in keeping with traditional Chinese patterns is controversial. (The Chinese, for
their part, insist that Mao's thought
does
constitute a system.) Hsiung's study
is assuredly one of the best in the field. S. Schram's
The political thought
of
Mao
Tse-tung
and
Mao
Zedong:
a
preliminary reassessment
both deal to a substantial extent
with Mao's thought before 1949, but are both somewhat out of date as regards
documentation.
Regarding the earliest years, the best single contribution is Li Jui,
Mao Tse-tung
ti
tsao-ch'i ko-ming huo-tung
(The early revolutionary activities of Mao Tse-tung),
which devotes several chapters to Mao's thoughts from 1915 to
1927.
Other works
are Frederick Wakeman's
History and
will: philosophical
perspectives
of Mao
Tse-tung's
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