In 2018, Jennifer Altehenger and Aaron William Moore convened what they accurately call a “dream team” of scholars working on the history of the People’s Republic of China. Full disclosure: they invited me but I was unable to attend. Having missed the chance to contribute during the journey from conference to book, I now feel uncomfortable offering critiques from the sidelines, but here goes. The volume features eighteen short chapters showcasing research that benefited from the pre-pandemic period of relatively open access to archival, grassroots, and library sources. The editors’ introduction highlights the concept of “making,” arguing that people’s efforts to build a better China after 1949 should take center stage. The volume’s focus on “building and making” is an attempt to decenter narratives of violence, repression, and political labeling.

“Making” makes sense as a corrective framework to counter PRC history lenses that overemphasize revolutionary destruction. The term, however, is too broad and slippery to hold the book together. Some chapter authors relate their case studies to the idea of “making” Maoism. Altehenger’s chapter about furniture building does this successfully, arguing that Maoist experimentation remained central to processes of standardization. Other authors, however, ignore the concept entirely or awkwardly mention “making” in their introductions and conclusions.

The book’s most successful chapters present surprising and insightful findings about the first sixteen years of the PRC and show that “building and making” during the 1950s and 1960s had more to do with sexual education, popular religion, food, and dance than with Mao Zedong or Maoism. Highlights include Sarah Mellors Rodriguez’s chapter on sexual education manuals in the 1950s, which aimed to prepare women for marriage and shape sexual morality by providing detailed descriptions of intercourse and graphs about how properly timed penetration could result in simultaneous orgasm and a “harmonious sex life.” Mellors Rodriguez shows that in 1956, when the Knowledge About Sex manual was published, sexual education in China emphasized female pleasure as an important part of marital stability.

Xiaoxuan Wang’s must-read chapter about a revival of popular religion in early 1960s Zhejiang is full of surprises and counterintuitive analysis. Wang’s study centers on two fascinating individuals, Abbot Kefang and Abbess Liu Peihua, who respectively restored and expanded a Buddhist and Daoist temple. In the aftermath of the Great Famine, they earned income by providing ritual services, with quiet backing from local officials. Wang draws on local archives to reveal how destabilizing attacks on popular religion during the 1950s created space for new ritual patterns and a period of vibrancy and expansion starting in 1961. Wang’s work provides striking new findings about the Mao era, even though it is more about community resilience in the aftermath of Maoist crackdowns than about Maoist building or making.

A strong and engaging chapter by Emily Wilcox about the Japanese and Korean roots of dance education in 1951 and 1952 convincingly links the pre-1949 transnational origins of PRC dance instruction with what Wilcox calls “the heart of Maoist method: it is a process of accumulating knowledge through engaged practice using the best resources at hand at any given time” (329). Wilcox focuses on Wu Xiaobang, a Chinese man educated in Japan, and Choe Seung-hui, a woman who was born in Japan-occupied Korea in 1911 and who moved to Japan in 1926, where she became a famous professional dancer. After 1949, Wu and Choe served as key teachers at the Central Academy of Drama. Wilcox, who interviewed alumni of Wu and Choe’s classes, shows how their lasting influence stemmed from transnational flows that shaped PRC culture. The Soviet Union was not the sole source of foreign knowledge in China in the 1950s.

One weakness of How Maoism Was Made is how its disparate parts deal with different time periods and historical contexts. Several chapters roam far beyond the 1949–1965 period specified in the book’s subtitle, focusing heavily on the 1940s (Toby Lincoln on urban construction in Changsha and Nicolai Volland on Soviet publishing) or even straying into the 1970s (Covell Meyskens’s highly readable account of debates around building the Three Gorges Dam—which is incidentally the only chapter in the book in which Mao Zedong himself features prominently as a historical actor). These are wise authorial choices in the context of each chapter, but overall, the book misses the opportunity to explain how Mao-era approaches to “making and building” changed over time and differed widely depending on specific historical moments. For example, the remarkable Japanese and Korean-inflected dance instruction of 1951 described by Wilcox was contingent on factors specific to that year; Knowledge About Sex could only have been published in 1956; the bustling rituals in mountainside temples in Zhejiang in 1961 occurred in an entirely different place and time.

The book raises significant questions about methods and sources that will provide valuable fodder for discussions in graduate seminars. Aside from Xiaoxuan Wang’s stellar archive-heavy chapter, most of the book’s strongest chapters mostly rely not on archival or grassroots documents, but on published books and periodicals. Altehenger’s chapter deftly combines archival sources with architectural journal articles; Mellors Rodriguez’s study features sexual education manuals that are held in libraries in Europe and North America; Meyskens draws on openly published collections of documents related to dam building. This is good news for PRC history specialists hoping to make new contributions in the current era of limited access. Official archives and grassroots sources are fantastic but excellent research can also emerge from more easily accessible libraries and repositories, not to mention oral history subjects like the former dance students Wilcox interviewed.

Two other chapters stand out because of the methodological questions they spark. Jing Wenyu and Felix Wemheuer’s co-authored piece paints a devastating picture of how hungry farmers’ survival strategies were criminalized, leading to long prison sentences in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Jing and Wemheuer chapter is a welcome outlier in the book because it shows the value of uncovering repression and resistance, especially in a rural setting. It is based on sources from the “Y County Archive” in Shandong Province; the authors explain: “We decide to anonymise the name of the county to protect providers of sources” (75). They then name many individuals who became targeted in investigations related to grain and land, but do not indicate whether these are pseudonyms or the original names as they appear in the sources. They also provide archival reference numbers in the footnotes for sources that no other scholar can use because readers do not know the name of the county and have no way to consult the archival documents.

The inability of future scholars to check Jing and Wemheuer’s sources conflicts with the American Historical Association’s “Statement of Standards of Professional Conduct” (2023), which emphasizes “leaving a clear trail for subsequent historians to follow” so that they can “retrace the steps in an argument to make sure those steps are justified by the sources.”Footnote ¹ Protecting colleagues in China is clearly the highest professional standard to prioritize in this case. It is more important than providing geographic context about a specific place. The chapter’s contributions are valuable even if readers do not know what location it describes. But how should PRC historians cite sources that nobody can check? This conundrum was caused by Xi Jinping, not by Jing and Wemheuer, who made a reasonable choice in the face of multiple bad options.

Aaron William Moore’s chapter, which is based on six unique diaries written in the 1950s and includes the amazing story of a man who explains why he confessed to a theft that he did not commit, raises a similar question: where are the diaries held and how can researchers follow Moore’s tracks to build on or contest his findings? He does not say. And his decision to wait until the very end of the chapter to provide biographies of the diarists and to mention that he invented pseudonyms for them made for a confusing reading experience—I wanted to know at the outset who the writers were and whether their names were real. If you want to read Moore’s interesting chapter—I recommend it—begin by learning key information on pages 110 and 111 and only then go to page 95.

That is an easy fix. The problem of how to allow future scholars to follow Moore’s tracks could also be addressed fairly easily by uploading scans of the diaries (redacted if necessary) to an existing online repository such as the Maoist Legacy Database, China Unofficial Archives, the Grassroots Chinese History Archive, or even the Internet Archive (archive.org). Or hard copies of the diaries could be deposited in a university library’s special collections. The dilemma posed by Jing and Wemheuer’s “Y County Archive” is thornier because republishing sources held in a state archive is not permissible and could endanger colleagues in China. There is no easy answer in the short term. Hopefully, a day will come when it will be safe to disclose the real name of “Y County” and when any scholar can consult its rich archives. Altehenger and Moore should be commended for putting together a volume of impressive chapters whose approaches prompt such important questions.