Before Mao: The Untold Story of Li Lisan and the Creation of Communist China

By Patrick Lescot

Book Overview

Combining an exceptional love story with a gripping tale of incarceration in Stalin's gulag and later in Mao Tse-tung's concentration camps, Patrick Lescot's Before Mao is a deeply moving, beautifully told saga of Li Lisan, Mao's predecessor at the head of the Communist Party and a key member of the Russian and Chinese revolutions.

Told in an engaging, highly dramatic style that reads more like a novel than a standard history, Lescot skillfully unfolds this page-turning biography. Li, who led the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s, was a rare survivor among the Chinese members of the International. He was eventually allowed to return to China after having been elected, in absentia, to Mao's government.

When Mao and Khrushchev fell out of power after 1959, the Chinese Communist Party demanded that Li divorce his wife, Lisa. When the couple refused to do so, Lisa was only allowed to stay by becoming a Chinese citizen. Soon after, both would be victims of the Cultural Revolution. Lisa was taken from her husband shortly before he was again arrested, imprisoned, and tortured -- this time fatally. She spent eight years in solitary confinement.

Moving from China to France to the Soviet Union and finally back to China, Before Mao is an extraordinary chronicle of the indomitable human spirit, "allowing us to share in some true moments of emotion, where love wins over totalitarianism's destruction of individuality" (Le Monde).

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060084642
• ISBN13: 9780060084646
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Must read

Renewed interest in Pre-communist china ahs brought this wonderful book to us along with other reads on Chang-Kai Shek among others. This is a needed contribution to the scholarship. Li Lisan was co-founder of the Communist party and went on to study in France and then settle in Russia. Although this book focuses on his love affair with Elizabeth Kushkin, it also tells a weaving fascinating story of the links between international communism and cracks within it. Excellent portraits are given of the mercurial Stalin, who jailed Lisan along with many international communists who didn't toe the party line. In the end Lisan returned to China, saw the civil war to communist victory and then was finally killed in 1967 in the cultural revolution, just prior to the large scale military skirmishes on the China-Russia border that showed the final split between Moscow and Beijing. A wonderful book. A must read for any Chinese or communist enthusiast. This book brings back to life the heady days of warlords, Sun Yet Sun and the birth of communism in China during the chaos of the early 20th century. Seth J. Frantzman