h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I still like it - it doesn't cover all the bases, but its a good overview of the period.

Well done.

Covering all the bases would take a book. I think you've touched on all of the major ones.

One nit to pick...

In the "Background" section...

"Mao himself is reported to have said." appears to be left over from a bit of editing and in need of deletion.

NBY

VMT. Will fix that. No white smoke from the Scouts yet, though.

Mao: The Untold Story arrived from [a well known bookseller that shares its name with a South American river] at the weekend. My wife is ploughing through it. Hey! And the White Stripes album should arrive today!

Ho hum! I'm indulging in increasingly embarassing attention-seeking behaviour now. Actually - I think this entry is a lot better than some of the other rubbish I've submitted - and that's all been picked up fairly instantly.

Sadly the less complicated entries tend to get picked ahead of the more detailed ones. One of mine was in PR for nearly six months....

I think that the Wade-Giles/Pinyin transliteration issue deserves a footnote. I did a short module in the early history of the Chinese Communist Party, and these differences were the bane of my life at the time. I think sticking to the more generally recognised version is fine, but I think the isue should be flagged up for the reader. A good way of explaining it would be to refer to the change in pronounciation from 'Peking' to 'Bejing' as the best known example.

On the subject of political philosophy, I think Maoism differed to Leninism in its view of the peasantry. I think Lenin (and most European Communists) didn't really regard the peasants as a revolutionary force - rather, they tended towards conservatism and were difficult to mobilise and radicalise due to their isolation. Maoism differed because he regarded the peasantry as being the key to the revolution in countries like China.

The footnote sounds like a good idea.

On Leninism vs Maoism - I'm not convinced that the difference is in the attitude towards the proletariat. Certainly Lenin (and Marx) saw revolution as emerging from the people, radicalised by a political elite. The difference for Mao is maybe that the CCP were closer to the peasantry than were the Soviet CP. During the civil war especially, they relied on them for basic subsistence. So now I'm wondering about the relationship between Che Guevara's revolutionary philosophy and Chinese Communism.

The reality, of course, was different. The Jung Chang view seems to be that Mao didn't have an ideology - merely a set of excuses for his behaviour. The role of the Chinese peasantry was to feed the CCP machine - food to the cities, steel to Stalin, canon fodder to Korea.

Hmmm. But Marx (and Lenin) believed that the revolution would come from the urban proletariat. Marx was convinced that it would be Germany - or possibly Britain. China wasn't industrialised. It didn't have proletariat in the Marxist sense.

(Of course, the revolution nearly *did* happen in Scotland in 1919 - but that's another story).

Is that a further entry you're hinting at there ????

Could be!

I'll add it to my list of planned entries, along with:
The Baader-Meinhof Gang
How to Eat Mangoes
Lorem Ipsum: Latin for Typographers

A relative of one of the Red Clydeside revolutionaries was my landlord for a while. It obviously wasn't in the blood, because he was a prominent Scottish Tory. Actually - strictly speaking, it was his children who were my landlord. Presumably a tax dodge.

Have the intelligentsia reached a decision as to whether this entry is finished?

'The Baader-Meinhof Gang'

Oooh, yes please. And if you do, make sure you metion the excellent Baader Meinhof album by Luke Haines, which is a concept album about the terrorist group.

Your Guide Entry has just been picked from Peer Review by one of our Scouts, and is now heading off into the Editorial Process, which ends with publication in the Edited Guide. We've therefore moved this Review Conversation out of Peer Review and to the entry itself.

If you'd like to know what happens now, check out the page on 'What Happens after your Entry has been Recommended?' at EditedGuide-Process. We hope this explains everything.

Thanks for contributing to the Edited Guide!

Well done ETB

YAY " 'bout time.

Congratulations!

It's been a Long March, hasn't it?

That was... rather a good pun actually