The Little Red Book was commissioned by Marshal Lin Biao shortly after he replaced the purged Peng Dehuai as Minister of Defense in September 1959. In 1961, Lin directed the PLA's General Political Department to produce a compact political-education tool suitable for soldiers with limited literacy. The PLA Daily serialized what would become the book's contents beginning in May 1964; the first bound edition appeared the same month. A revised edition in 1965 added Lin Biao's calligraphic foreword, which would be removed after Lin's death in 1971.

The book is organized into 33 chapters, each on a political topic: The Communist Party; Classes and Class Struggle; Socialism and Communism; The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People; War and Peace; Imperialism and All Reactionaries are Paper Tigers; Dare to Struggle and Dare to Win; People's War; The People's Army; Leadership of Party Committees; The Mass Line; Political Work; Relations Between Officers and Soldiers; Relations Between the Army and the People; Democracy in the Three Main Fields; Education and the Training of Troops; Serving the People; Patriotism and Internationalism; Revolutionary Heroism; Building Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality; Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle; Methods of Thinking and Methods of Work; Investigation and Study; Correcting Mistaken Ideas; Unity; Discipline; Criticism and Self-Criticism; Communists; Cadres; Youth; Women; Culture and Art; Study.

The Little Red Book succeeded as a political instrument because its formal properties — brevity, portability, memorability, ritual repeatability — matched the needs of a mass-mobilizational political regime. The book demonstrates what happens when aphoristic compression meets industrial-scale printing and compulsory group recitation. The result is a political technology distinct from both traditional religious catechism and modern political manifesto: the pocket anthology as loyalty test.

Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in May 1966 with the 'May 16 Notification,' an attack on the Party's cultural establishment. Within two months, the Red Guards movement had formed among radicalized university and high-school students. Red Guards carried the Little Red Book as their emblem, cited it at struggle sessions, and used it as both political credential and rhetorical weapon. Over the decade that followed, tens of millions were persecuted; estimates of Cultural Revolution deaths range from five hundred thousand to two million.

From 1966 onward the Little Red Book was translated into more than fifty languages and exported globally. It was adopted by armed revolutionary movements (Shining Path, Naxalites, Khmer Rouge), Black radical organizations (the Black Panther Party), Western New Left intellectuals and activists (Sartre, Althusser, Parisian Maoists of 1968), and dozens of small Maoist parties in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. 'Maoism' as global revolutionary brand is inseparable from the pocket book.

Mao died September 9, 1976. The Gang of Four — Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen — was arrested October 6, 1976, and tried in 1980-81. In June 1981 the CCP adopted the 'Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China,' which repudiated the Cultural Revolution and assessed Mao as '70 percent correct, 30 percent incorrect.' Under Deng Xiaoping's 'Reform and Opening' program (1978 onward), the Little Red Book was quietly removed from public circulation. By the mid-1980s it had become an ironic tourist item.