As part of the McCarthy era investigations, Lorraine was subpoenaed[2] before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952 in relation to her attendance at the World Festival of Youth and Students held in East Berlin the previous year.

[3] Meisner's 1962 doctoral dissertation on Li Ta-chao and the origins of Chinese Marxism[4] was prepared under the Sinologist Earl H. Pritchard and the Sovietologist Leopold Haimson.

This was the same year as the Tet Offensive which became widely viewed as a psychological turning point in the Vietnam war and American public opinion, the assassination of Martin Luther King and its aftermath, anti-war protests and police violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and election of Richard Nixon as president.

The Chinese Communist Party, in contrast, had denounced the Marxism of the Soviet Union as "revisionist," and Maoist groups were prominent among the more militant factions involved in protest actions and ideological debate.

Competing Maoist groups in the U.S. (such as from the breakup of SDS) and the West attached themselves to the legacy of Mao Zedong and the cultural revolution, propelling interest in the recent history of China, the subject of Meisner's continuing research.

Despite the difficulty in obtaining objective information, his study of the period made it into the classroom and would be incorporated into his 1977 work Mao's China: A History of the People's Republic.

By the late 1970s not only had the earlier wave of campus radicalism subsided, but definite changes were underway in China which were troubling, at best, to the remaining American Maoist currents and the so-called New Communist Movement which had emerged from the remnants of the New Left.

Fascination with the cultural revolution had benefited from popular perceptions and slogans at a time when direct contact with Chinese communists was sparse, but in the years following Richard Nixon's China visit that began to change.

With the death of Mao and the defeat of the Gang of Four, the political course of China was to rapidly change, whereas Western observers, both on the right and on the left, were often unable or unwilling to recognize the enormity of the transformation that had begun.

A subsequent edition of that book published in 1985 included additional chapters addressing the aftermath of the power struggle, but which still saw the market reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping as a tactical turn in the development of socialism.

Following some years of China's accelerating economic and political evolution, however, Meisner's assessment of the entire period became more sober as he traced the rise of what he termed "bureaucratic capitalism," albeit under the official banner of building "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

The curious evolution of socialist China towards capitalism, all the while maintaining Communist Party rule, was the subject of Meisner's 1996 work The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994.

Rather than simple concerns for greater democracy, the movement was propelled by a disgust of privilege attained by powerful bureaucrats which was seen as official corruption, and in fact a result of the market reforms.

Struck by the death of his friend in 1987, Meisner was instrumental in establishing the Harvey Goldberg Center for the Study of Contemporary History[10] to honor and remember the beloved professor.