A Thesis with Many Holes

Mao Zedong was the most dominant and towering actor in the long drama of the Chinese Revolution. His ability to interface the universals of Marxism­-Leninism with the particularities of China created a profound organic rela­tionship between the man and the event which he himself acknowledged. In March 1964 he remarked: ‘The Selected Works of Mao, how much of it is mine? It is a work of blood … These things in Selected Works of Mao were taught to us by the masses and paid for with blood sacrifice.’