In 1957 and 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong led China into two major experiments: the Hundred Flowers policy of encouraging literary and political free expression and the economic Great Leap Forward. Each was a disaster. Repression followed the first when it became clear that intellectuals would criticize the Communist Party itself; famine followed the second.

During two crucial years when the movements were being initiated, however, Mao addressed various Party groups behind closed doors to explain the new policies and exhort compliance. Recorded at the time and collected for limited circulation in the 1960s by his admirers among the Red Guards, the speeches, question-and-answer sessions, and letters here translated have never before been published in China or the West. These new, candid materials revise our understanding of how the policies developed and reveal not only the extent of Mao’s power but the startling flights his untethered thought could take.

Introductory essays by Roderick MacFarquhar, Benjamin Schwartz, Eugene Wu, Merle Goldman, and Timothy Cheek provide a context for evaluating and interpreting the nineteen texts translated in this volume.

In the fall of 1964, sinologist Erik Zürcher travelled to China for the first time, a country he had been studying since 1947. A collection of Zürcher's personal writings from his trip, including letters and diary entries, Three Months in Mao's China offers not only new insights about the great scholar, but also a rich picture of communist China, which was in those days still almost completely inaccessible to Westerners.During a tumultuous time in world politics, as Nikita Khrushchev was deposed, Lyndon Johnson won the US presidential election against Barry Goldwater, and China became a nuclear power, Zürcher experienced the reality of China under Mao Zedong. Only recently discovered, these documents portray, viewed through an expert's eye, a land in the midst of its own massive political, social, and economic change. Both a fascinating account by an informed outsider and a reminder of just how much China and the rest of the world have changed over the last fifty years, this is essential reading for anyone interested in East Asia and Asian history as a whole.