The Little Red Book - or, to give its full title, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong - contains 267 aphorisms from the Communist Chinese leader, covering subjects such as class struggle, "correcting mistaken ideas" and the "mass line", a key tenet of Mao Zedong Thought. Included is Mao's famous remark that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun".

Originally produced in 1964 by the People's Liberation Army - an early version was titled 200 Quotations from Chairman Mao - it soon became a key feature of the leader's personality cult. The Ministry of Culture aimed to distribute a copy to every Chinese citizen and hundreds of new printing houses were built in order to achieve this. Mao himself reportedly liked its resemblance to books of quotations by philosophers such as Confucius.