Felix Wemheuer's A Social History of Maoist China is a masterfully written tour de force by a leading historian of the People's Republic of China. It is an informative and engaging study of Chinese society during the Mao years that will appeal to students of Chinese history, whether beginners or seasoned scholars.

The book focuses on Mao's years in power (1949–76), but though Wemheuer often quotes the Chairman and other party leaders, his attention is devoted to social groups defined according to conceptions of class, gender, ethnicity, and the all-important category of urban and rural residency (which Wemheuer calls the “foundational divide” of Maoist society). The book takes classification or labeling, whether political (“rightist” or “red”) or socioeconomic (“worker” or “peasant”), as a source of social change and conflict, emphasizing how arbitrary and consequential these labels were for families and individuals. Wemheuer reveals the intense conflicts that arose between the party-state and various social groups—farmers, workers, ethnic minorities, even the party's own cadres—as China's leaders pursued social and economic transformation.

The book is organized into eight chapters, including an introduction explaining the analytical framework and a concluding chapter on the consequences and legacies of the Mao era. The other six chapters cover specific periods from a social historical perspective, providing new insights into topics that earlier scholars have neglected. Chapter 5, for example, covers the period of recovery and reform following the Great Leap Forward famine (1959–61), years of conflict with significant consequences for what came after. The book also devotes two chapters to the Cultural Revolution, dividing this decade into early (1966–71) and later (1972–76) periods to highlight important changes and conflicts.

Each chapter includes two or three pages of historical background, which are impressively comprehensive considering their brevity. The more detailed periodization and background provided in the later chapters are especially helpful given the complexity and chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Wemheuer furthermore draws upon his impressive knowledge of European and Soviet history to highlight influences on Chinese policy (such as agricultural collectivization or the “blooming and contending” of 1957) or to compare the Chinese experience with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and other socialist countries. Wemheuer introduces historical scholarship on the PRC with similar clarity and brevity. Chapters often discuss competing theories concerning, for example, the Anti-Rightist Campaign or the causes of the Great Leap famine, presented by scholars over the past sixty years including the most up-to-date research.

The book is based on Wemheuer's lifetime of study and introduces an impressive body of source material. The book not only cites documents created by Mao and party leaders such as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Bo Yibo, it also utilizes archives of all kinds, including personal files, interviews, police documents, articles from Neibu Cankao (Internal Reference), and more. Each chapter concludes with one or more representative documents that illustrate the chapter's main points. These are usually by or about people on the margins, including cadres’ “confessions,” police statements about the behavior of “hooligans,” and similar evidence of turbulent social conflict. One example is an internal report of violence by farmers against party officials in 1957 due to excessive state grain requisitions and looming hunger in the countryside—a taste of what was to come during the horrific famine of 1959–61.

Agricultural collectivization, grain requisition and rationing, and the famine are topics that Wemheuer has studied intensively,Footnote ¹ and the book devotes a great deal of attention to rural society. Other topics receive short shrift, however. With a broad and complex social history like this, any specialist will feel that that their favorite subject receives insufficient attention. As a historian of labor and industry, I hoped for more discussion of urban workers and capitalists, especially in the 1950s. There is decent coverage of the role of the unions and the struggles of contract and temporary workers during the 1960s. But there is little attention to changes in labor relations, factory management, and the shift from private to state administration in industry. The book only mentions the “socialist high tide” in the context of agricultural collectivization, reflecting the author's expertise and interests.

Similarly, although the introduction gives gender as one of the book's main axes of analysis, this, too, falls by the wayside, with only occasional attention to Chinese women in the context of marriage reform and birth planning. Readers interested in women and gender as social history should read Gail Hershatter's Women and China's Revolutions.Footnote ²

Nonetheless, A Social History of Maoist China directs our attention to important but neglected groups on the margins of Maoist society. Some of the book's chapters include extensive treatment of China's “minority nationalities,” especially Tibetans and Uighurs. This is a valuable inclusion as most textbooks focus exclusively on “China proper” and do not include ethnicity as an axis of analysis.Footnote ³ Wemheuer's comparisons of Tibet and Xinjiang illuminate both the Chinese Communist Party's capacity to adapt “United Front” policy to different conditions and the varied consequences of state policy for different parts of the country.

Wemheuer's Social History of Maoist China is an insightful and engaging book that analyses and explains the complex conflicts and transformations of Chinese society during the Mao years. The book is wonderfully readable, articulate, and intelligent. It is a worthy addition to the existing literature on Mao's China, a book that will no doubt take its place among the classic studies of this era.