Historian whose Mao’s China and After judged the Chinese revolution critically from within the Marxist tradition
He brought Mao-era China into US classrooms from 1968, then spent his later years recording how the reform era slid into what he called bureaucratic capitalism.
From Detroit, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His first book, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (1967), showed how nationalism and faith in the peasantry combined as Marxism was received in China. Mao’s China and After, first published in 1977, became the standard textbook history of the People’s Republic, reading Maoism through the tension between socialist ideals and the modernisation of a backward country. He criticised the repression of the Mao years while judging that the marketisation of the reform era had abandoned socialism’s promise.
Also known as: Maurice J. Meisner
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1968–1999Professor of history, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Related historical events
- 1956–1957From the Hundred Flowers to the Anti-Rightist CampaignHistorian of the Hundred Flowers’ “tragic irony”He wrote that the break with the Soviet model of development was not accompanied by a break with Stalinist political methods.
- 1976–1992Reform and opening: the Deng Xiaoping eraCritical historian of reform-era marketisationIn Mao’s China and After judged that reform abandoned socialism’s promise.
Becoming a China historian in the antiwar and concerned-Asia scholars movement
Meisner began his studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he was an outstanding enough student to be admitted to its graduate program after only two years of college. He and his wife Lorraine went on to doctoral study at the University of Chicago, and there he chose Chinese history. Even as the 1949 revolution and the Korean War made China's rise visible, Chinese history was then an obscure choice: he had to learn the Chinese language for research and travel to collaborate with the rather few China scholars of the time. In 1955 he completed a master's thesis on the agrarian economy in nineteenth-century China. His 1962 doctoral dissertation examined the original contributions to Chinese revolutionary theory of Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, arguing that the adaptation of Marxism to China commonly credited to Mao Zedong had actually been accomplished by Li. Prepared under the sinologist Earl H. Pritchard and the Sovietologist Leopold Haimson, and developed during a further year at Harvard's East Asian Research Center, it was published by Harvard University Press in 1967. The Cold War and McCarthyism reached directly into his household. In 1952 Lorraine was subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee over her attendance at the 1951 World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, and like most witnesses called before such hearings she refused to testify. Her assertion of Fifth Amendment rights carried no direct legal penalty, but David Henry, president of Wayne State University, where she was also a student, expelled her; the move was seen as unusually harsh even at the time, and other schools were reluctant to admit a student dismissed on such grounds. Meisner was an early member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. The group opposed American participation in the Vietnam War and also set out to demystify China at a time when "Red China" was regularly portrayed as a threat to America. He wrote for its Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, and at his death in 2012 he was still listed on the journal's advisory board.