Through a Glass Darkly: U. S. Views of the Chinese Revolution

Abstract

Intimately familiar with this specific region and with the Chinese countryside and the Maoist agrarian strategy, Hinton sets out to correct the historical record from Friedman et al's "gross distortion of reality" and to recall for us the rationality, if not the necessity, of collectivization, cooperation and the (failed) Maoist attempt at an alternative, anti-Stalinist mode of development (33). [...] yet it must also be said that Hinton's invocation of class in his analysis of the "two-line struggle" within the Party - represented by the Maoists on the one hand, who opposed private enterprise, the market principle and "the capitalist road" and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping on the other, who were essentially Stalinist-economistic in their penchant for market mechanisms yet total Party control - comes off at times as overly reductive and borderline conspiratorial.