Preparer's note: Prepared for MIM's Web site.
I persynally do not have the resources to edit, or add HTML markup to, all of the 1,457 pages in this collection in a time-effective way. Moreover, MIM's Web site's principal function is not to serve as an archive for texts. It provides this collection only because
Collected Works has never before been made freely available on the Internet in this searchable-text format, and because most of
Collected Works' content is, compared to
Selected Works, unusually difficult for non-academic people to obtain off-line in a paper format. Ideally, I would like to see a highly readable, searchable
Collected Works on the Internet without any scanning errors, but it would be doing a disservice to exploited and oppressed people not to make this collection immediately available in a searchable and more-or-less readable format when it was easily possible.
That said, there is a question as to the authenticity of some of the content in this collection. This is
Collected Works, published by the Central Intelligence Agency's Joint Publications Research Service, not
Selected Works. As the editor of
Collected Works themself points out (p. 1), "all works which have already appeared in the current edition of 'Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung' or 'Selected Readings of Mao Tse-tung's Works' are not included." Also,
Collected Works is not just another version of the four additional
Selected Works volumes published by Kranti Publications in India, which
Marxists Internet Archive mistakenly identifies as a way to authenticate the documents contained in
Collected Works. Both
Collected Works and the Kranti "Selected Works" volumes 6-9 contain content not available in official English-language publications of the Chinese Communist Party. Some of the content in the Kranti volumes is duplicated in
Collected Works, but it is very little. Compare
"Letter to the Spanish People" to the same-titled article in
Collected Works vol. 5.2, p. 77.
In the parts of
Collected Works that I have read, I have seen nothing particularly unusual, or unexpected. However,
Collected Works consists of translations of selected Chinese-language documents, translations done by the u.$. government. Since the JPRS is not primarily a propaganda agency,
Collected Works probably does not contain outright falsified content. However, there may be differences in emphasis. For example, the word [Chinese Communist] "regime" is used, by Chinese Communist writers, in
Collected Works in a way that appears to be alien to
Selected Works. Also, in
Collected Works, there may be a lopsided focus on issues that are interesting from the u.$. government's viewpoint, such as government elections in China.
Actually, the need for Maoists to authenticate the content of
Collected Works, and summarize any interesting content in order to further educate people about Chinese revolutionary practice (especially between 1917 and 1949), is another reason to provide
Collected Works here and in a text format.
Collected Works contains detailed directives, policy descriptions, advice, and correspondence, attributed to Mao Zedong before liberation.
How these PDFs were put together. These searchable-text PDFs were created from other PDFs that contained only raw scans (photos) of the pages in
Collected Works. The raw-scan PDFs are 84 MB in total size, prohibitive under restricted bandwidth conditions, and text searches can't be done on raw scans. In contrast, the PDFs on this page are only 7 MB in total size. 1) The original PDFs were converted to 204x196 tiffpack files using GSview. 2) The tiffpack files were converted to Rich Text Format (RTF) files using FineReader. 3) The resulting RTF files were converted to PostScript (PS) files. 4) The PS files were converted to PDF files.
No other changes were made. As such,
there are many scanning errors, but the files are good enough for most informal research purposes. They exist as a starting point for editing, verifying authorship, checking out what's in this collection, etc.
If you are new to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and are looking to sit down and read a good book, check out MIM's bookstore.
Searching. To jump to a particular article or document inside a volume, use the search (Ctrl+F) function in
Adobe Reader, and enter in a few keywords from the document's title. You can also search for all occurrences of a phrase or word. Try searching for "Kuomintang" or "ntang" (in case of scanning error). Both the PDF and TXT files are text-searchable, but the PDF files better-preserve some of the structure in the source files. To search all the volumes simultaneously, download them to their own folder, and then select "Where would you like to search? : All PDF Documents in" option in Adobe Reader.