Mao’s Crusade

Description

He also discusses in detail the policy roles and input of other top leaders on whom the improvising Mao relied to feed his imagination and to flesh out his policies. In the chapters on the implementation of the Leap, Dr. Chan explores how the ministries of Metallurgy and Agriculture were transformed from bureaucratic agencies into agents of mobilization, and how impossible targets forced them to keep up appearances by focussing on the rituals of mass mobilization. Similarly, other chapters on Guangdong show the simultaneously fervent, ritualistic, and desperate attempts to implement every hunch and intuition emanating from the centre. Exhaustive research using new material made available in the post-Mao era, as well as archives from the 1950s and 1960s, has yielded novel and original insights into the leader Mao, central decision-making, and policy implementation in the communist hierarchy.
–BOOK JACKET.