Summary

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung is a pocket-sized anthology of 427 brief passages drawn from Mao's speeches, essays, and letters between 1929 and 1964, organized into 33 thematic chapters. Commissioned by PLA Marshal Lin Biao in 1961 as a political-study tool for soldiers, it was first circulated internally in May 1964. Mass printing began with the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and by 1976 an estimated 900 million to over a billion copies had been printed. The book's chapters cover the Communist Party, class struggle, people's war, contradictions, the mass line, women, youth, and study. It is not a work of theory but a curated selection of slogans designed for memorization, chanting, and group recitation.

Why It Matters

The Little Red Book is the most widely distributed political text of the twentieth century and one of the most consequential. Its billion-copy print run, integrated ritual function in Chinese public life during the Cultural Revolution, and global export to revolutionary movements made it a centra...

Themes & Motifs

Diction & Style

Historical Context

Cold War China — late Mao era and Cultural Revolution (1961-1976): The book is a product of the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution's ideological atmosphere. The split required China to differentiate Maoism from Soviet Marxism-Leninism as a distinct doct...

Key Characters

Talking Points

1. The Little Red Book was not a book Mao wrote; it was compiled by Lin Biao's PLA General Political Department. How does this compilation history affect our reading of the text? Is it a 'Mao' text in the same sense that 'On Contradiction' or 'On Practice' are?
2. 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun' is the book's most famous passage — but in its original context, Mao immediately adds 'the Party commands the gun.' What is the effect of extracting the first sentence from its dialectical continuation?
3. The book's chapter 'Women' is often cited for the 'Women hold up half the sky' line. What does the book actually say about women, and how does Mao's discussion compare with other socialist and feminist thought of the period?
4. Approximately one billion copies of the Little Red Book were printed 1966-1976. How does this distribution scale compare with other political texts in history? What does scale alone do to a text's political function?
5. Red Guards cited Little Red Book quotations at struggle sessions to justify violence against teachers, intellectuals, and officials. What responsibility, if any, does the text bear for the violence? Can a compiled anthology of quotations be 'responsible' for acts performed in its name?

Notable Quotes

Why Read This

The Little Red Book is one of the twentieth century's most historically significant documents — a text that shaped the political experience of one in every four or five people on earth at its peak. Reading it gives students direct access to the ap...