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. She writes his life not as conventional biography but as a chronological narrative of 20th-century China, modelled on Georg Lukács's 1924 account of Lenin and the “actuality of revolution” (set in the framework of decades of Russian and European history).

This study presents Mao in a largely sympathetic light, arguing that the setting that produced his project generally justified it, but she balances her defence of him with unrelenting criticism of his imperfections and excesses, both before and after 1949, including his bloody purges and personality cult. The chapters on his years in power in Beijing expertly summarize the debates and arguments in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on policy and strategy. Although she approves of Mao's rejection of gradualism and his promotion of the communes, which she explains as a scheme to transfer decision making to local levels, she concludes that in practice the Great Leap Forward ended in disaster. (Curiously, she sees communes as a culminating economic stage in “Marxist” theory, although before Mao the term was used only for political bodies like the Paris Commune and Russia's archaic mir.) She describes the Cultural Revolution as unpredictable, spontaneous and far more complex than a mere struggle to seize power, as some see it. Stirring and liberating for millions, it was not one movement but many, and not just Chinese but global in its repercussions, for it appealed to radical students, women and anti-colonial forces everywhere. However, it degenerated into terrible violence and factional intrigue, ending in failure and betrayal. Karl argues that in the Cultural Revolution Mao allied with the people against the CCP and identified with the army, which Lin Biao had insulated from the bureaucracy that infected the former. But she also recognizes that the army killed thousands of rebels and ultimately restored the CCP to power.

Her discussion of Mao's “massification” of culture – a rare lapse into jargon in an otherwise well-written book – is less critical and convincing. Many will question her praise of the eight “model operas” vetted or engineered by Jiang Qing (she herself concedes that the “creative spaces” supposedly opened by the Cultural Revolution were defined and policed by the leaders). Also questionable is her talk of “decades” of feminism under Mao, the factory-floor democracy and “non-hierarchical” relations he supposedly sponsored, and the idea that he favoured “self-mobilization of the masses” (p. 58), for as she herself recognizes, the CCP monopolized the definition of correctness.

Regarding the relationship between Mao and Moscow, she gives a clear and insightful account of Mao's rejection of Stalin's “mechanical” view of the relationship between history and ideology, and Mao's belief that in poor countries relations of production can determine forces of production, an inversion of Marx's formula. But she exaggerates his ideological differences with Stalin and understates the Soviet influence on the CCP under him. She says nothing about the Comintern's role in the CCP's transition to the Second United Front, a remarkable omission, and claims, contentiously, that Mao declared his independence of Stalin at Zunyi in 1935. Her suggestion that Moscow failed to see China's war against Japan as part of the global struggle against fascism is puzzling, for this link featured in Comintern thinking. As for the conduct of the war, many will see her contrast between Mao's steadfastness and Chiang Kai-shek's “waffling” as an oversimplification. (It is also untrue that the Communists' New Fourth Army organized revolution in the late 1930s.)

These comments in part concern differences of emphasis and judgment, inevitable between reviewer and author of a book as compact yet wide-ranging as this. They do not detract from its exceptional contribution as a radical but balanced life of Mao and its skilful contextualizing of him, which raises it above works that dwell excessively on his temperament and faults. Lively and provocative, it is an ideal resource for classroom use and independent study and, in the present ascendancy of revisionist thinking about the great revolutions, a welcome antidote to the postmodern celebration of the death of utopia.