Anyone attempting to prepare a work based on selections from
Mao Tse-tung's writings finds himself confronted with a staggering
problem, i.e., the nature of the source material. In the case of most
political writers, there exist recognized, authentic texts, a literature
that has been published, annotated, and translated. To be sure, the
authenticity of one or another of these texts may occasionally be
questioned, or (as in the case of Marx) unpublished writings may
be discovered many years after the author's death. Nonetheless,
there exists a nucleus of basic texts that, save for a few minor vari-
ants, may be considered definitive.

In contrast, the person dealing with Mao's works finds himself
in the paradoxical situation of working with materials that have
never been assembled, much less translated. The Selected Works,
published in Peking in Chinese beginning in 1951, and then trans-
lated into various languages, include only about half of Mao's writ-
ings during the past half century. ^* Moreover, the texts included in
the Selected Works have been subjected to such numerous and pro-
found changes by the author that one cannot accept even a single
sentence as being identical with what Mao had actually written
without checking it against the original version.

In the face of such a situation, the logical solution would consist
in first establishing the authentic Chinese text of Mao's complete
works, to provide a solid basis for selecting extracts. Various people
have thought of doing this. But the task is enormous, for it in-
volves several thousand pages of Chinese texts, scattered through-
out numerous books and periodicals, many of which are available in
only one or two libraries outside of China. It is therefore improb-
able that such a project will be completed within the next few
years. In view of the importance of Mao Tse-tung, both as a politi-
cal figure and as an intellectual influence in the underdeveloped
countries, I feel I should not wait until the ideal basis has been
created before publishing this volume of extracts.

Since no authoritative edition of Mao's complete works exists,
the orientation of this anthology is slightly different from that
which might be expected in an introductory volume of this kind.
Instead of presenting only the most typical and most fundamental

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