Sean Rocha

Little Red Book by Mao Tse-tung, second edition, 1967

I might have been unpersuaded by the Xiamen street vendor’s Mao-inflected salesmanship in an earlier post but I do own this rare second edition of Mao’s famous Little Red Book of quotations, which was once practically required reading in the People’s Republic of China.  I found this official English-language version at a street market in Alexandria, Egypt in 1995 though a sticker inside the front cover indicates it was sold originally by the Trans World Press Agency at 29 Emad el-Din Street in Cairo for 25 piastres.  It was published in 1967 by the official Foreign Language Press in Peking, as it was then known, as part of a propaganda effort to distribute Mao Tse-tung thought around the world.  What makes the second edition unusual is that it contains a foreword written in 1966 by Lin Piao (sometimes written Biao) who was Mao’s top lieutenant and close ally before emerging as a potential rival and then dying in a suspicious plane crash in 1971.  Piao’s foreword was subsequently removed from all later editions of the Little Red Book.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2011 at 8:15 am. It is filed under Found Object and tagged with books, China, East Asia, Mao, politics, revolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.