My HI Topic.. need criticism

[KEHughesy]

My RQ is

In what ways did the relationship between Stalin and Mao lead the to China's Great Leap Forward campaign and the subsequent Cultural Revolution?

Does this have a good enough scope? Any tips or ideas?

[Eastcoast93]

My initial thought is:

Sounds interesting, I would actually quite like to read about that.

However I am not sure whether the scope is too large? How about just the Great Leap Forward. How did Sino-Soviet relations affect Mao's Great Leap Forward?,...something along those lines. Cultural revolution is too much if you are planning to do Great Leap Forward as well i'd say.

Just make sure you will find sufficient sources about the topic.

[KEHughesy]

My initial thought is:

Sounds interesting, I would actually quite like to read about that.

However I am not sure whether the scope is too large? How about just the Great Leap Forward. How did Sino-Soviet relations affect Mao's Great Leap Forward?,...something along those lines. Cultural revolution is too much if you are planning to do Great Leap Forward as well i'd say.

Just make sure you will find sufficient sources about the topic.

Thanks a ton! This is my new restated question:

In what ways did Sino-Soviet relations affect Mao's Great Leap Forward campaign?

That was a big help.

Do you have any good suggestions where I could find some primary source documents?

[Emmi]

My initial thought is:

Sounds interesting, I would actually quite like to read about that.

However I am not sure whether the scope is too large? How about just the Great Leap Forward. How did Sino-Soviet relations affect Mao's Great Leap Forward?,...something along those lines. Cultural revolution is too much if you are planning to do Great Leap Forward as well i'd say.

Just make sure you will find sufficient sources about the topic.

Thanks a ton! This is my new restated question:

In what ways did Sino-Soviet relations affect Mao's Great Leap Forward campaign?

That was a big help.

Do you have any good suggestions where I could find some primary source documents?

Try online databases. Gale and Questia are ones I used and they are very good, but they require access to get to them so see if your school has an account.

Also, try Wikipedia. Don't use the actual Wikipedia article on the Great Leap Forward, but scroll all the way to the bottom and look through all the sources Wikipedia cited in making the article. You should be able to find a couple of good ones in there (I did this for both my EE and HI)

[Tony Stark]

In addition to what Emy suggested, I'd also trawl through Google Books and Google Scholar, they're limited due to the lack of academic papers stored online, but still can be useful for secondary sources which often lead to primary sources.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Tony Stark

[Eastcoast93]

ask your school. they should have some sort of subscriptions to these databases. questia is allright. a google search should reveal some interesting things as well, not too likely for primary sources but you never know. otherwise look for books dealing on the matter and check if your local university/school/library has that book. for my IA i bought the book "Hitler's Pope" by John Cornwell, a highly controversial and debated historian/book, from amazon. it was used and pretty cheap. if you have a good book and you think it will be helpful, you can always find those for cheap prices on amazon/ebay,... just leave yourself enough time for this whole process/task, the writing comes naturally once you have sufficient amounts of sources. also try to find some really controversial stuff, maybe by some historians which are known for their bias/harsh views. that could be valuable for the source evaluation part or as a contrast to the usual perception of your research question.

[-_-]

Hi!

Personally, I think your original RQ is more interesting. There you talk about the relationship between 2 leaders, not something more ambiguous like "Sino-Soviet" because in the end some policymakers formulate the policies anyway. And your 2 RQs are not the same too so pay attention to that. If you can find enough literature, I would say that the 1st one is much better. Perhaps, consider including a time scope? 1949-1953 for example? I mean Stalin died in 1953 anyway... but they had contacts long before 1949 when PRC did not exist yet.

Good luck!

P.S Oh wait, this sounds more like extended essay RQ than HI... careful