In this dazzling blend of history, literature and politics, the world's pre-eminent historian of China, gets to the heart of the complex personality of Chairman Mao Zedong. Steeped in Chinese politics and culture, Spence penetrates Mao's rhetoric and infamous self-will to distil an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn and mysterious as the emperors he disdained. How did this farm boy from the remote Hunan province, with a haphazard education and unexceptional talents, evolve from a rebel youth cutting off his braided queue and refusing the 'legalized rape' of a bourgeois marriage to the Iron hand that devastated millions for so long? Spence masterfully illuminates a man who, at a watershed moment in history, turned the classic Chinese concept of reform through reversal into an endless adventure in upheaval and examines why he is still remembered with hate, awe and even reverence.