Children of Mao : personality development and political activism in the red guard generation

Children of Mao is the first study to pene trate successfully the inner world of young Chinese growing up in the People's Republic. The author, a sociologist and China specialist, combines the richness of her interviewees' subjective perceptions with her own objective, detached, yet sen sitive interpretations.

As Dr Chan describes in fascinating detail the personality development of four of her interviewees, comparing and contrasting them at each stage of their childhood and adolescence, she breaks off and fills in for readers the social environment in which they came of age. The book reads like fiction interspersed with commentaries-at once biographically intimate and academi cally sophisticated.

Anita Chan shows how the Communist Party's political teachings helped shape the social attitudes and psychological make-up of China's young true believers, the children who became political activists. Her four case studies focus upon the inner feelings of Ao, the conformist, whose predominant concern was always to win the approval of her superiors; Bai, the political purist, who held to the political values with religious passion and spurned any compromise with everyday realities; Chang, the idealist rebel suspicious of all authority figures, who became Second-in-Command of Canton's secondary-school Rebel Red Guard army; and Deng, the Commander-in-Chief, a young pragmatist who always sought to ensure that his political commitment did not undermine his self-interests.