The source question on Edexcel A Level History Paper 2, Option 2E.1 (Mao’s China, 1949–76) is where the best-prepared students pull furthest ahead. It is compulsory, worth 20 of the paper’s 40 marks, and most students lose marks not through weak knowledge but through technique. This guide explains what the question rewards, the habits examiners keep criticising, and a method you can use straight away.
The question at a glance
Paper 2 lasts 1 hour 30 minutes and counts for 20% of your A Level. You answer Question 1 in Section A (the sources) and one essay from Section B. Options 2E.1 and 2E.2 share one paper, so make sure you answer the Mao questions.
The Section A question always follows this pattern:
“How far could the historian make use of Sources 1 and 2 together to investigate [enquiry]? Explain your answer, using both sources, the information given about them and your own knowledge of the historical context.”
Spend about 45 minutes on it, including reading and planning. Every enquiry is narrower than its topic. Recent enquiries have included the impact of the people’s communes on the lives of Chinese peasants (2024) and the reaction in China to the death of Mao (2025).
What Level 5 rewards: three strands
| Strand | Level 4 (13 to 16) | Level 5 (17 to 20) |
|---|---|---|
| Inference | Reasoned inferences; treatment of the two sources may be uneven | Both sources interrogated with confidence and discrimination |
| Context | Illuminates or shows the limits of the content | The same, with secure understanding of the values and concerns of the society |
| Evaluation and weight | Valid criteria applied, some weakly substantiated | Criteria fully applied; weight and degree of certainty decide the judgement |
One thin strand holds the whole answer down, so you need all three in every paragraph.
Step 1: Read the caption first
Pearson’s 2024 examiner report noted: “Candidates should read the caption and make full use of it when evaluating the sources”. The caption tells you the nature, origin, purpose, audience and date of each source. Use it to predict the stance before you read: a provincial report to Beijing in 1958 will probably claim success; a memoir published abroad by a rich peasant’s son will probably stress suffering. A passage that runs against your prediction usually bears the most weight.
Step 2: Separate information, claim and opinion
The higher levels reward distinguishing between information and claim or opinion. Take this simulated extract from a commune Party secretary’s report, December 1958: “The commune’s public canteen now feeds four thousand members at no charge. Every member eats his fill. A few backward elements grumble about the food; they miss their private plots.”
- Information: “feeds four thousand members” confirms communal eating on a large scale by December 1958.
- Claim: “every member eats his fill” serves the report’s purpose, so test it against the procurement pressures of late 1958.
- Opinion: “backward elements” shows the language used to delegitimise dissent.
- Inference: “they miss their private plots” is an unwilling admission of discontent, so it bears real weight.
Step 3: Apply provenance, never bolt it on
Provenance earns credit only when it explains the content. End every provenance point with a “so”: so this claim is likely to be inflated, so this admission carries weight. Never dismiss a source as biased or unreliable. Every source is valuable for something; the question is valuable as evidence of what.
Weak: “Source 1 is propaganda from the Chinese government, so it cannot be trusted.”
Strong: “Published in English for foreign readers in 1973, the year after Nixon’s visit, the article was designed to show the countryside gaining from the Cultural Revolution. Its stress on the number of barefoot doctors trained reveals the image Beijing wished to project. Its claims about coverage bear limited weight, but its incidental admission that training lasted only a few months bears more, because it serves no purpose of the author.”
Step 4: Use context to test the source, not to tell a story
The 2024 examiner report was blunt: “Contextual knowledge should be used to illuminate and discuss what is in the source, rather than provide an answer to the enquiry. Long descriptions of linked events are unlikely to gain much, if any, credit”. Use a three-beat sentence:
- The source: point to a specific phrase.
- The knowledge: a precise fact, date or development.
- The effect: confirm, challenge, explain or limit, and say what this does to the weight.
For example: a source’s pride in free canteen meals shows that food was central to how the communes were sold to peasants in their first months. Yet within a year many canteens were running short, because procurement based on inflated harvest reports stripped villages of grain as the Great Famine of 1958 to 62 took hold. The source can be used with confidence for the communes’ early promise, but bears almost no weight for peasants’ experience after 1959.
And remember the 2018 report: “Contextual knowledge should not be used to list all the information that is missing from the sources, unless omission was the aim of the author”.
Step 5: Weigh the sources together
The 2018 examiner report said candidates “should make use of the sources together at some point in the answer.” That is the minimum. At Level 5, each source should change how you read the other:
- Corroboration: sources with opposite motives agreeing on a point raises your certainty.
- Contradiction, explained: provenance or date explains why they disagree, and which bears more weight on which aspect.
- Complementary coverage: each covers a different part of the enquiry, so together they reach further than either alone.
- Official against ground-level: the regime’s aims set against lived experience.
Finally, the 2022 report noted that “weight is not likely to be established by a discussion of what is missing from a source.” Build weight from what is actually there.
See the method in two full-mark answers
The Mao’s China, 1949–76: A*/A Exam Masterclass teaches Section A and Section B in full, with Level 5 model responses colour-annotated sentence by sentence, knowledge chapters for all four key topics, and a map of every Mao question set from 2017 to 2025.
Six habits that cap answers below Level 5
- Paraphrasing the sources instead of inferring from them
- Bolt-on provenance that is never applied to a specific claim
- Floating context that is not tied to a phrase in a source
- Treating the sources separately all the way through
- Narrative instead of argument
- Ignoring the exact focus of the enquiry
Taking Route E? The companion Russia, 1917–91 Masterclass covers Paper 1, and our guide to Russia Paper 1 Section C explains the interpretations question. Browse all Edexcel A Level History Masterclasses.
Get Fluent Now is an independent publisher and is not endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson Edexcel. Edexcel is a registered trademark of Pearson Education Limited. Source extracts in this article are simulated for practice.