A friend not so long ago asked me if I could recommend any good historical works on the Chinese Revolution (and by implication of course Mao and the history of Maoism), specifically from a non-Leninist point of view, generally any history not writen by the RCP. Interestingly enough as I have reviewed my own bookshelf and asked around for other suggestions I could only initially come up with maybe two or three definitive works on the subject under this criteria.
(The problem of course is the difficulty in finding any single work that sums up the major features and issues of any great and all encompassing revolution as the Chinese Revolution. As anything, if you want a full view understanding of events of such importance, you need to have a good reading list, access to the works, and a great deal of time on your hands.)
So after doing some research (and reading), here is an overview of the best and brightest works on the Chinese Revolution available. Follow the links to the wikipedia articles on the authors and backgrounds, both politically and socially.
1. Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949, by Lucien Bianco [1]Probably the best overview of the Chinese revolution ever writen. It's brief but invaluable. A good compliment to his work is below.
2. Peasants Without the Party: Grass-Roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China, by Lucien Bianco [2] 2001. This work out does the previous work in its scope of the details of rural discontent and the responses the peasants gave to injustice and brutality.
3. The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Simon Leys [3]Leys lays out the deal with the "Cultural Revolution" (it was neither, BTW) using a journal like detailing of the day to day developments.
4. Fanshen: A Document of Revolution in a Chinese Village, by William Hinton. [4] This is the book that just about every Maoist today will kneejerk-ily refer you to if asked for a source on the revolution. Its good, but limited of course to ONE village during a particular period of the pre-1949 period.
5. The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985, by John King Fairbank [5]. Scholarly and dry, but generally good.
6. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, by Arif Dirlik. The best and I guess only overview of the history of anarchism in China.
7. Schools into Fields & Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927 -1932, by Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik. A detailed look at the inflluence of anarchism on the NLU.
8. Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, by A Belden Fields, published 1988. An overview of Trotskyist and Maoist political groups and parties through the 1980s. Good detail on how the Maoists of the west were interpreting developments in China.
9. Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Benjamin Schwartz. This is a survey of the Communist Party and its relationship with both the Comintern and its base. A good source on the early doctrinal disputes.