There are lots of things to keep in mind when working with texts by Mao Zedong. Many of the works that come to us today were speeches or notes on speeches that have undergone significant changes over time as Mao edited many of his best known works. In research on, say, the 1930s and 1940s, you may well want to know, to the degree this can be determined, what a given text or speech from that period looked like in its original form, or at least the form that was available to actors that are relevant to your research question.1 If, on the other hand, you are mostly interested in the post-1949 Chinese history through the Cultural Revolution, the versions of his works found in the first four volumes of Mao’s Selected Works (《毛泽东选集》) offer you a more stable canon of materials that were read by millions in China and, in Foreign Language Press translations, many others across the world.2 The individual texts in the volumes can be found on marxists.org here as well as downloads of PDFs of the volumes. If you are a student reading these texts because they were so widely circulated and read in Maoist times, quoted in thousands of other texts, and heavily influenced the discourse of the People’s Republic, I think these four volumes are a great place to set your primary focus.
These four volumes add up to a huge amount of material. Most students who encounter Mao’s works in a history class are likely to encounter a few of his texts in isolation in a course reader, online links, or via assigned sourcebooks such as Sources of Chinese Tradition or The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection or Sources in Chinese History: Diverse Perspectives from 1644 to the Present. Beyond Mao’s own work, there is now a wonderful variety of source material on the social and cultural history of modern China available in English translation. Good riddance, I say, to the days when when broader modern survey history classes almost exclusively assigned works by or about political leaders or the machinery of the state.
Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung
When it comes to studying the history of the Maoist period in depth (in, say, an upper year honours module or graduate course with only English language materials), however, I do think there is something valuable to be gained by spending more quality time swimming around in Mao’s world of most circulated texts to get a feel for the language, the repetition, the contradictions (and not just in the texts with that in the title), and the changes over time. Precisely because of the nature of Mao’s regime, and especially in the years of the Cultural Revolution, the discourse represented by this canon of texts echoes throughout Chinese society and many of our sources from the time. So, if the four volumes of the Selected Works are too much to ask but if we wanted to go beyond reading some half a dozen texts by Mao, what might we do? One option is Stuart Schram’s The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (1969) which has a wonderful array of texts, but besides being out of print, they are often a bit too fragmented. At the bottom of this post you can find other older sourcebooks like it. Of course, another obvious option is just to widen the selection of hand-picked materials based on their importance and build your own reader. But my point here is less about the need to read any particular key text, but to get the feel for the canon.
Another option with some advantages and disadvantages is the Foreign Language Press Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung (1971) which is available as a PDF on Marxists.org. This is a translation of the (A) version (甲种本) from the 1965 second edition of《毛泽东著作选读》. Of course, the works chosen for inclusion and exclusion in this collection, as well as abridgements made of some the texts within are quite revealing of the particular moment in which collection emerged, and has the advantage of being a single volume that can be read in part or as a whole across a semester.
To see the benefits but also the limitations of Selected Readings From the Works of Mao Tsetung as a single volume option, we can consult the table and lists below. First I compare the Selected Readings selection with the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung and then share a list of English translations of works by Mao found in various historical sourcebooks, many of them now long out of print, which is a shame since they contain a wealth of historical sources on modern China (well beyond the works of Mao listed here). You can browse the results below yourself, and I won’t further lengthen the post with more of my own reflections.
Why does he believe the electric projecting killing machine is in a station at some distance from himself? His letters often describe his reconnaissance efforts around the station, to pinpoint the exact location of the ray. It is possible, of course, that he has been writing these letters to several stations, and these are the only ones that got preserved in his file, and I suspect we will never know for sure. Perhaps it is just the centrality of the station, located as it is just off Nanking Road, or perhaps its historical infamy. The police station is known for one of the darker moments in Shanghai history, the May 30 incident, or “Shanghai massacre” of 1925 triggering the movement of that name (五卅运动). On that day, police officers of Louza police station opened fire on a crowd of protesters, killing several of them and sparking widespread anti-foreign strikes and boycotts around China. If this had something to do with it, however, it is notable that the neither the police themselves nor foreigners are depicted as the villains behind Mr. Sung’s killing machine. 
