The entire period of Mao Zedong’s leadership is now portrayed as a disaster, one long killing-spree, and any scrupulous efforts at questioning this version of events have been largely ignored by the international mass media.

What is interesting is that the efforts of death toll-inflating academics and media appear to have had little impact on the working people of China. Indeed anti-Communists find the resilience of Mao’s popularity baffling and frustrating. The common people are simply ruled out as rational actors. Media accounts do occasionally quote the views of ordinary Chinese, but these, of course, are not cited as evidence of consciousness of their class interests. Rather, they are portrayed as confused moral nostalgia for ‘simpler days’, a fetishistic mania for Mao memorabilia, a morbid religious reverence for his embalmed body, and so on.

Swimming against the current of the academic industry and the international mass media, the contributors to this book have begun the task of recording the views and experiences of the common Chinese people regarding the period of socialist China, as a vital source of historical truth.