Mao Tse-Tung : with 29 plates / Stuart Schram.

Contains list of 29 plates (page 7-8) including black and white illustrations and portraits of Mao Tse-Tung with various international dignitaries (Krushchev, Voroshilov, Ho Chi Minh), assorted family members and illustrations of various infrastructural projects (Ming Tombs Dam among others).

Includes bibliographical references within "Notes" at the end of each chapter and includes index.

Contains 3 maps of China including a political map and routes of The Long March (October 1934 - October 1936).

1. The world of Mao's Boyhood -- 2. Student days in Changsha -- 3. Mao Tse-Tung at the time of the May 4th Movement -- 4. The beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party -- 5.Collaboration with the Kuomintang -- 6. The years in the wilderness -- 7. From Kiangsi to Yenan -- 8. The struggle on two fronts -- 9. The foundation of the Chinese People's Republic -- 10. In search of a Chinese way.

"Throughout his political career, Mao Tse-Tung has taken as his goal the radical transformation of Chinese society in order to liberate the energies of its citizens, and he has been guided in this enterprise by ideas of Western origin, first nineteenth-century liberalism and then Leninist collectivism. But at the same time he has been determined that this 'new China', this 'people's China', should resume her rightful place among the nations - the first place. The high value which the Chinese place on their own culture has been a subject of exasperation and puzzlement to Europeans ever since they began their efforts, a century or so ago, to 'civilize' the Middle Kingdom by a judicious combination of gunboats, trade and missionaries... More significant and more distinctive, is the traditional Chinese attitude according to which theirs has been the only genuine civilization, and the Chinese empire co-extensive with the civilized world. These conceptions were the natural by-product of a three-thousand year history during which China as we know it today had been sometimes unified and sometimes divided, occasionally conquered from the outside, but almost never brought into contact with a civilization equally advanced, still less superior... Apart from the fact that it had developed largely in isolation, Chinese tradition possessed two factors which set it radically apart from the traditions of South and South-East Asia: a sense of history, and a concern for politics as an essential dimension of human activity. To be sure, the traditional Chinese view of history envisaged a cyclical process of dynastic construction and decay, not a unilinear advance toward progress and/or redemption, while the Confucian view of politics was, as already suggested, hierarchical and largely undemocratic. China's encounter with the modern world was therefore fated to shake the tradition to its foundations. But at the same time by directing the attention of the Chinese to the historical and political dimensions of existence, this tradition prepared them exceptionally well to survive in the modern world. And that same sense of history and political destiny was to make it both easy and inevitable for Mao and his colleagues to reaffirm the opportunity of today's China with that of empire of the Hans, despite the transformations occasioned by one of the most radical social upheavals in world history. But if today's China, as it emerges from a half a century of revolution which Mao Tse-Tung himself has materially shaped both as a theorist and as a man of action, appears to be moving toward a fusion of Communist and traditional elements, this tendency toward synthesis follows a long period in which Chinese and Western patterns and ideas struggled with one another in utter confusion. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become obvious that China must learn from the Europeans' in order to acquire the strength to resist their incursions. At the same time the feeling of humiliation occasioned by this necessity was in direct proportion to the massive sentiment of superiority which the Chinese had always entertained towards the barbarians. It is into this world of anguish over China's future, and uncertainty as to what could or should be salvaged of her past, that Mao Tse-Tung was born." -- From the introduction