1924.2.27.–2012.7.8.
○ Natural causes
Pioneer of Mao studies, author of The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung and editor of the ten-volume Mao’s Road to Power
A Mao scholar who weighed Mao's merits against his faults, setting land reform against the executions of the Campaign against Counter-Revolutionaries, the starvation after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He cared less about judging Mao than about his thought's future influence.
A Minnesotan trained in physics who worked on the Manhattan Project before turning to political science, he taught in Paris and directed the Contemporary China Institute at SOAS in London. His 1963 The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung was the first systematic Western analysis of Mao’s thought grounded in the original texts, arguing that it was not a copy of Soviet Marxism but a distinct adaptation to Chinese conditions. In his later years at Harvard’s Fairbank Center he edited Mao’s Road to Power, the unexpurgated collection of Mao’s writings from 1912 to 1949.
Also known as: Stuart Reynolds Schram
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1968–1989Director of the Contemporary China Institute and professor of politics, SOAS
Related historical events
- 1949–1956From New Democracy to socialist transformationScholar who assessed the executionsHe weighed land reform’s gains against the executions of the Campaign against Counter-Revolutionaries.
- 1958–1962The Great Leap Forward and the Great FamineScholar who weighed Mao’s achievements against famine after the Great LeapHe weighed the famine after the Great Leap against the gains of land reform and the First Five-Year Plan.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionScholar who assessed the Cultural Revolution’s horrorsHe weighed the Cultural Revolution’s horrors against the gains of land reform and the First Five-Year Plan.
Building the Contemporary China Institute and European China Studies
When SOAS established the Contemporary China Institute (CCI) in London in 1968, Schram became its first director, serving until 1972. He set out to expand the research base, conduct and publish work on contemporary China, and connect British specialists with scholars elsewhere. After the initial Ford Foundation grant, he secured two successive grants from the Volkswagen Foundation. A key policy was three-year research fellowships for doctoral candidates, intended to build a larger body of European scholars of contemporary China. The institute became the academic home of The China Quarterly and ran a Cambridge University Press book series, an annual newsletter surveying contemporary China research worldwide, and a short-monograph series launched in 1976. Schram left the directorship in 1972 but also organized collaborative research among European China scholars. In 1976 he proposed a project on the Chinese state and helped organize conferences involving Russian, Chinese, American and European scholars; with Rockefeller Foundation support, the final conference took place at Bellagio. The project produced two volumes: The Scope of State Power in China (1985) and Foundations and Limits of State Power in China (1987).