主题：【原创】关于毛泽东时代,关于大多数中国人的尊严,欢迎斧正 -- 葡萄

下面是她给我的回信，主要是介绍了一下莫里斯这个作者，并补充了一些资料，希望对楼主的研究能有点用处：

I'm not with my computer and can't type in Chinese. The first thing I want to say is, I agree, if you are interested, you should read the original text. I do not trust any Chinese translation of English stuff. The Chinese translation took part of something trying to make it look like something else. Not to say the author was not trying to say the same thing.

So one obvious mistake this thing claimed is, Maurice Meisner is not a Yale professor. It made me suspicious of how big a picture this translator knows about the whole thing. Meisner is a very old man I suppose. He is a retired professor from University of Wisconsin, and he is a history professor. One of the things about history study in western academic world is you make your own conclusion from the same materials, so it's sort of encouraged that there are many explanations of history. (This is something different if you read political science, which sort of has a stronger mainstream idea or theory for each field.) So you'd read a lot of history books about the same issue and they argue different causal relationship between history events and results. There are lots of academic "fight" over certain issue too. You'll get used to it if you read ten twenty books about the same subject.

Meisner's books are sort of too "tong su yan yi（[COLOR=red]通俗演义）" because he retired and could afford having fun writing those mass-popular books. But his book is easy to read. I have never read this one. The other book of him is called "Mao's China and after." A pretty good one. If you want to start figuring out Chinese modern history, you can start from Fairbank's Chinese history book and Jonanthan Spencer's book. Jonanthan Spencer is a big shot. One of his book that every China study student has to read is called "the search for modern China". These are considered the very neutral, fair type of classic entry books. [/COLOR]