Rebecca Karl established her scholarly reputation with an influential study of Chinese intellectual history and nationalism around 1900, located in its global and local context. In this interesting book on Mao Zedong's life and thought, she is similarly concerned with establishing a dialectic between Chinese and world history and to understand Mao in his historical moment, at a time when Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's spectacular monsterizing of him (in Mao: The Unknown Story, Jonathan Cape, 2005) has encouraged a disregard for the complex ways in which he and China reflected on one another.
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