In the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, "Today, Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." For Chang, author of Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to history, but to decency. Mao: The Unknown Story does not contain a formal dedication, but it is clear that Chang is writing to honor the millions of Chinese who fell victim to Mao's drive for absolute power in his 50-plus-year struggle to dominate China and the 20th-century political landscape. From the outset, Chang and Halliday are determined to shatter the "myth" of Mao, and they succeed with the force, not just of moral outrage, but of facts. The result is a book, more indictment than portrait, that paints Mao as a brutal totalitarian, a thug, who unleashed Stalin-like purges of millions with relish and without compunction, all for his personal gain. Through the authors' unrelenting lens even his would-be heroism as the leader of the Long March and father of modern China is exposed as reckless opportunism, subjecting his charges to months of unnecessary hardship in order to maintain the upper hand over his rival, Chang Kuo-tao, an experienced military commander. Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao's ascent to power and subsequent grip on China in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon's visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao's unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao's ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors' consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. --Silvana Tropea
10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Q: From idea to finished book, how long did Mao: The Unknown Story take to research and write?
A: Over a decade.
Q: What was your writing process like? How did you two collaborate on this project?
A: The research shook itself out by language. Jung did all the Chinese-language research, and Jon did the other languages, of which Russian was the most important, as Mao had a long-term intimate relationship with Stalin. After our research trips around the world, we would work in our separate studies in London. We would then rendezvous at lunch to exchange discoveries.
Q: Do you have any thoughts about how the book is, or will be received in China? Did that play a part in your writing of the book?
A: The book is banned in China, because the current Communist regime is fiercely perpetuating the myth of Mao. Today Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, and the regime declares itself to be Mao's heir. The government blocked the distribution of an issue of The Far Eastern Economic Review, and told the magazine's owners, Dow Jones, that this was because that issue contained a review of our book. The regime also tore the review of our book out of The Economist magazine that was going to (very restricted) newsstands. We are not surprised that the book is banned. The regime's attitude had no influence on how we wrote the book. We hope many copies will find their way into China.
Q: What is the one thing you hope readers get from your book?
A: Mao was responsible for the deaths of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime, and he was bent on dominating the world. As China is today emerging as an economic and military power, the world can never regard it as a benign force unless Beijing rejects Mao and all his legacies. We hope our book will help push China in this direction by telling the truth about Mao. Breakdown of a BIG Book: 5 Things You'll Learn from Mao: The Unknown Story
1. Mao became a Communist at the age of 27 for purely pragmatic reasons: a job and income from the Russians.
2. Far from organizing the Long March in 1934, Mao was nearly left behind by his colleagues who could not stand him and had tried to oust him several times. The aim of the March was to link up with Russia to get arms. The Reds survived the March because Chiang Kai-shek let them, in a secret horse-trade for his son and heir, whom Stalin was holding hostage in Russia.
3. Mao grew opium on a large scale.
4. After he conquered China, Mao's over-riding goal was to become a superpower and dominate the world: "Control the Earth," as he put it.
5. Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "half of China may well have to die."
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Chairman Mao has always been an acceptable tyrant. Compared to Hitler and Stalin, Mao Zedong has usually gotten good if not great press, despite having been responsible for the peacetime deaths of millions of his countrymen because of bad policies or purges. On the left, the view of the chairman has remained petrified in the 1930s, when the American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a flattering account of Mao and his communist comrades' fight against Japanese aggressors and Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt nationalist regime, and in the 1960s, when Mao fever swept American college campuses. (I remember going to sleep as a youngster to the chants of Columbia University students: "Mao, Mao, Chairman Mao.") From the right, Mao looked good for standing up to the Soviets in the 1970s. Generally speaking, China lovers have given Mao a break and followed the official Communist Party line: that the chairman was 30 percent wrong and 70 percent right as he united China and led tens of millions of people to their deaths.But unlike in the West, where the view of Mao has remained petrified, scholars in China are battling over the meaning of the man. For a growing group of them, who have published their books and essays in out-of-the-way or overseas publishing houses, Mao was a tyrant. In recent years, historians writing in mainland China have made enormous contributions to the study of Mao's life -- showing how his particular brand of cruelty helped fashion China's peculiarly successful brand of totalitarianism, dissecting his debauchery and sexual deviancy, detailing his sadism, his disastrous policies, the famines he caused and the lives he destroyed. Another group has shown how Mao's crimes have devastated China's culture, creating a broken snitch society absent a moral compass.
Against that backdrop arrives the extraordinary Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and her husband, the scholar Jon Halliday, who last collaborated on Chang's bestselling family portrait, Wild Swans. Their 814-page tome relies heavily on new Chinese scholarship; indeed, it probably could not have been written without it. The biography also benefits from solid research by Halliday in newly opened Soviet archives.
When it sticks to the new Chinese and Russian sources, the book shines, providing readers with the most detailed portrayal of the "Great Helmsman" to date. But when it pretends to tell us what the chairman is thinking and feeling, the book veers toward magical realism. Finally, its tendency toward hyperbole damages its otherwise persuasive case against Mao.
In short, if you're hoping for staid, balanced scholarship, don't read this book. It's not history; it's a screed, albeit a screed on the side of the angels. Chang writes with the zeal of the converted. As a youth, she, like millions in her generation, was intoxicated with Mao and viewed him as a god. But he ravaged untold lives, including hers. Chang obviously figured she didn't need to get mad; she got even.
Even screeds have their place, however, and this is an extremely entertaining one. Indeed, sometimes an emotionally charged account -- one written with obvious biases -- can reveal the truth better than ostentatious, morally numbed objectivity that cloaks a lot of Western scholarship on China. Chang and Halliday's point is very simple: Like a small group of scholars in China, they believe that Mao wasn't a revolutionary but a monster. He wasn't a communist but a bandit king. The result is a page-turner with a point.
And that point is honed razor-sharp. "Turning ordinary organisations into virtual prisons was a significant innovation of Mao's," they write. "Here he went far beyond anything either Hitler or Stalin achieved: he converted people's colleagues into their jailers. . . . He greatly enlarged the number of people directly involved in repression, including torture, making the orbit significantly wider than either Stalin or Hitler, who mostly used secret elites (KGB, Gestapo) that held their victims in separate and unseen locales." Chang and Halliday are determined to pin Mao high in the pantheon of 20th-century villainy.
This massive biography traces Mao's life from his rural origins in Hunan province, detailing his hatred of his father and arguing that from the start he was a "lukewarm believer" in communism. The book contends that Mao grew into a young man without a moral code and obsessed with "upheaval and destruction."
"Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty," Chang and Halliday write. "He explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. . . . Mao did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally." He viewed himself, they write, as one of society's "Great Heroes," who lived by their own rules. In fact, they argue, the young Mao was lazy, hated physical labor, failed when he attempted to learn foreign languages and exhibited no leadership skills.
The middle of the book is devoted to Mao's resistible rise. Chang and Halliday portray Mao as perhaps the most disastrous example ever of the Peter Principle: He fails at everything, and yet, because of his ruthlessness, he is cultivated by Soviet agents and destined for prominence. Chang and Halliday argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Mao was a creature of Soviet communism. From the age of 27, they write, he was on the Comintern's payroll.
This point is a significant one. For decades, Western scholars and China buffs -- starting with Edgar Snow -- have sought to emphasize Mao's independence from the Soviet Union. But Chang and Halliday, relying on archival material from Moscow, show that, time and again, Soviet influence, money and weapons saved Mao from his Chinese comrades.
Unfortunately, some of the "scoops" that Chang and Halliday claim for themselves actually belong to others. For example, Chapter Eight focuses on the first bloody purge launched by Mao in Jiangxi province in southern China in 1930, arguing that the purge was "in many ways the formative moment of Maoism" and that it "is still covered up to this day." In fact, in 2000, Gao Hua, a Chinese historian from Nanjing University, published a book in Hong Kong that told this story at length, arguing that the Jiangxi purge created a paradigm for all subsequent Maoist political campaigns. (Gao's work is included in the bibliography, but he is not cited in the text.) Worse, when Chang and Halliday depart from their Chinese and Soviet sources and engage in historical guesswork, the book borders on the unbelievable. One of their central tenets is that Mao didn't truly love China; rather, he loved power, and therefore the real patriot of 20th-century China was Mao's nemesis, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist Party, who fled to Taiwan in 1949 as the communists seized power. As such, the book downplays the massive corruption that infected Chiang's party and government and turns him into a hero of sorts. The book concocts a fanciful argument that the reason Chiang's troops did not destroy the communists during the Long March and other military campaigns was not incompetence on the part of the Nationalist forces but that Chiang, petrified that Stalin would kill his son if the Nationalists crushed their leftist foes, pulled his troops back.
The latter half of the book is devoted to Mao's years leading China. There again, when the book hews close to original Chinese research, it provides much that will be new to American readers. (For instance, Chang and Halliday make a strong case, contrary to conventional wisdom, that Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, the leader of the notorious Gang of Four who led the Cultural Revolution, rarely if ever acted on her own and was, as she claimed in her 1980 trial for "counter-revolutionary" crimes, nothing but Mao's "dog.") But when it swerves into speculation, the story again breaks down. Take the way the book treats the Great Leap Forward, Mao's disastrous 1958-60 campaign to "surpass Great Britain and catch up to America" that left millions dead of starvation. Chang and Halliday allege that the real cause of the famine was not bad agricultural policies but Mao's obsession with getting the atomic bomb. Mao, the book alleges, exchanged China's harvests for nuclear technology, thereby beggaring the countryside. In fact, there is no strong evidence that China was a major food exporter then.
Chang and Halliday also do not explore the effect Mao has had on Chinese society, choosing instead to end their book by reminding readers that his body and portrait "still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." This would be a rich area to probe because Mao's nihilism still exerts a powerful influence on a rising China today.
Chang and Halliday's work is destined to become a classic, but it's a flawed classic. Mao is a great read but not worth believing wholesale. Nonetheless, their central point -- that Mao was a monster and should be remembered as one of history's great villains -- is right on the money.
Reviewed by John Pomfret
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. 
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