Chang, who was born in China in 1952 and left for Britain in 1978, recounted her family’s suffering under Mao in her award-winning Wild Swans (1991). With husband-historian Halliday, she has written a shocking, authoritative account of Mao’s life. The authors present evidence that refutes almost every aspect of the Chinese Communist Party’s account, from the claim that the Party fought the Japanese to Mao’s role in the Long March. Having gleaned indicting information from newly available Chinese and Soviet archives, they depict Mao as a bloodthirsty, ruthless egoist who committed crimes against humanity as serious as Hitler’s and Stalin’s. While critics acknowledged the authors’ contemptuous, one-sided depiction of Mao, few faulted it. Some tedious details, vague generalizations, and scarce imperial history and context for Mao’s rise frustrated some critics. But the book will destroy Mao’s reputation forever.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

*Starred Review* This biography of the giant of twentieth-century Chinese history boasts a monumental marshaling of detail and historiographically overturning revelations. It takes time to get through and more time to digest, but there is no time when its value is not apparent. Chang is the author of the hair-raising family history Wild Swans (1991), and she and coauthor Halliday prepare a vastly comprehensive accounting of Mao's entire life. The first sentence of their startling book underscores the point of view to follow: "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader." Obsessed with both power and personal safety, Mao engineered his way through the collapse of the Chinese social order in the wake of the collapse of the imperial regime with horrendous cynicism and ruthlessness. While analyzing Mao's life, from the beginning of his career to his dying breath, the authors clear up several myths--actually deceptions--perpetuated about him, including the real nature of his status as peasant leader. For all contemporary history and government collections. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao's tumultuous life…a stupendous work and one hopes that it will be brought before the Chinese people, who still claim to venerate the man and who have yet to come to terms with their own history…"
-Michael Yahuda, The Guardian

"Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have not, in the whole of their narrative, a good word to say about Mao. In a normal biography, such an unequivocal denunciation would be both suspect and tedious. But the clear scholarship, and careful notes, of The Unknown Story provoke another reaction. Mao Tse-Tung's evil, undoubted and well-documented, is unequalled throughout modern history."
-Roy Hattersley, The Observer

"Ever since the spectacular success of Chang's Wild Swans we have waited impatiently for her to complete with her husband this monumental study of China's most notorious modern leader. The expectation has been that she would rewrite modern Chinese history. The wait has been worthwhile and the expectation justified. This is a bombshell of a book."
-Chris Patten, last British governor of Hong Kong, in The Times

"A triumph. It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research."
-Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Sunday Times

"Jung Chang and Jon Halliday enter a savage indictment drawing on a host of sources, including important Soviet ones, to blow away the miasma of deceit and ignorance which still shrouds Mao's life from many Western eyes...Jung Chang delivers a cry of anguish on behalf of all of those in her native land who, to this day, are still not free to speak of these things."
-Max Hastings, The Sunday Telegraph

"Demonstrating the same pitilessness that they judge to be Mao's most formidable weapon, they unstitch the myths that sustained him in power for forty years and that continue to underpin China's regime…I suspect that when China comes to terms with its past this book will have played a role."
-Nicolas Shakespeare, Telegraph

"The detail and documentation are awesome. The story that they tell, mesmerising in its horror, is the most powerful, compelling, and revealing political biography of modern times. Few books are destined to change history, but this one will."
-George Walden, Daily Mail

"decisive biography…they have investigated every aspect of his personal life and career, peeling back the layers of lies, myths, and what we used to think of as facts…what Chang and Halliday have done is immense and surpasses, as a biography, everything that has gone before."
-Jonathan Mirsky, The Independent, Saturday

"written with the same deft hand that enlivened Ms. Chang's 1991 memoir, 'Wild Swans'…"
-The Economist

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1982, the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Her award-winning book, Wild Swans, was published in 1991.

Jon Halliday is a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, University of London. He has written or edited eight previous books.

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.

On the Cusp from Ancient to Modern

(1893–1911 H age 1–17)

Mao tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. He was born into a peasant family in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China. The date was 26 December 1893. His ancestors had lived in the valley for five hundred years.

This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic age. Buddhist temples dating from the Tang dynasty (ad 618–906), when Buddhism first came here, were still in use. Forests where nearly 300 species of trees grew, including maples, camphor, metasequoia and the rare ginkgo, covered the area and sheltered the tigers, leopards and boar that still roamed the hills. (The last tiger was killed in 1957.) These hills, with neither roads nor navigable rivers, detached the village from the world at large. Even as late as the early twentieth century an event as momentous as the death of the emperor in 1908 did not percolate this far, and Mao found out only two years afterwards when he left Shaoshan.

The valley of Shaoshan measures about 5 by 3.5 km. The 600-odd families who lived there grew rice, tea and bamboo, harnessing buffalo to plough the rice paddies. Daily life revolved round these age-old activities. Mao’s father, Yi-chang, was born in 1870. At the age of ten he was engaged to a girl of thirteen from a village about 10 kilometres away, beyond a pass called Tiger Resting Pass, where tigers used to sun themselves. This short distance was long enough in those years for the two villages to speak dialects that were almost mutually unintelligible. Being merely a girl, Mao’s mother did not receive a name; as the seventh girl born in the Wen clan, she was just Seventh Sister Wen. In accordance with centuries of custom, her feet had been crushed and bound to produce the so-called three-inch golden lilies that epitomised beauty at the time.

Her engagement to Mao’s father followed time-honoured customs. It was arranged by their parents and was based on a practical consideration: the tomb of one of her grandfathers was in Shaoshan, and it had to be tended regularly with elaborate rituals, so having a relative there would prove useful. Seventh Sister Wen moved in with the Maos upon betrothal, and was married at the age of eighteen, in 1885, when Yi-chang was fifteen.

Shortly after the wedding, Yi-chang went off to be a soldier to earn money to pay off family debts, which he was able to do after several years. Chinese peasants were not serfs but free farmers, and joining the army for purely financial reasons was an established practice. Luckily he was not involved in any wars; instead he caught a glimpse of the world and picked up some business ideas. Unlike most of the villagers, Yi-chang could read and write, well enough to keep accounts. After his return, he raised pigs, and processed grain into top-quality rice to sell at a nearby market town. He bought back the land his father had pawned, then bought more land, and became one of the richest men in the village.

Though relatively well off, Yi-chang remained extremely hard- working and thrifty all his life. The family house consisted of half a dozen rooms, which occupied one wing of a large thatched property. Eventually Yi-chang replaced the thatch with tiles, a major improvement, but left the mud floor and mud walls. The windows had no glass—still a rare luxury—and were just square openings with wooden bars, blocked off at night by wooden boards (the temperature hardly ever fell below freezing). The furniture was simple: wooden beds, bare wooden tables and benches. It was in one of these rather spartan rooms, under a pale blue homespun cotton quilt, inside a blue mosquito net, that Mao was born.



Mao was the third son, but the first to survive beyond infancy. His Buddhist mother became even more devout to encourage Buddha to protect him. Mao was given the two-part name Tse-tung. Tse, which means “to shine on,” was the name given to all his generation, as preordained when the clan chronicle was first written in the eighteenth century; tung means “the East.” So his full given name meant “to shine on the East.” When two more boys were born, in 1896 and 1905, they were given the names Tse-min (min means “the people”) and Tse-t’an (tan possibly referred to the local region, Xiangtan).

These names reflected the inveterate aspiration of Chinese peasants for their sons to do well—and the expectation that they could. High positions were open to all through education, which for centuries meant studying Confucian classics. Excellence would enable young men of any background to pass imperial examinations and become mandarins—all the way up to becoming prime minister. Officialdom was the definition of achievement, and the names given to Mao and his brothers expressed the hopes placed on them.

But a grand name was also onerous and potentially tempted fate, so most children were given a pet name that was either lowly or tough, or both. Mao’s was “the Boy of Stone”—Shisan yazi. For this second “baptism” his mother took him to a rock about eight feet high, which was reputed to be enchanted, as there was a spring underneath. After Mao performed obeisance and kowtows, he was considered adopted by the rock. Mao was very fond of this name, and continued to use it as an adult. In 1959, when he returned to Shaoshan and met the villagers for the first—and only—time as supreme leader of China, he began the dinner for them with a quip: “So everyone is here, except my Stone Mother. Shall we wait for her?”

Mao loved his real mother, with an intensity he showed towards no one else. She was a gentle and tolerant person, who, as he remembered, never raised her voice to him. From her came his full face, sensual lips, and a calm self-possession in the eyes. Mao would talk about his mother with emotion all his life. It was in her footsteps that he became a Buddhist as a child. Years later he told his staff: “I worshipped my mother . . . Wherever my mother went, I would follow . . . going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper money, doing obeisance to Buddha . . . Because my mother believed in Buddha, so did I.” But he gave up Buddhism in his mid-teens.

Mao had a carefree childhood. Until he was eight he lived with his mother’s family, the Wens, in their village, as his mother preferred to live with her own family. There his maternal grandmother doted on him. His two uncles and their wives treated him like their own son, and one of them became his Adopted Father, the Chinese equivalent to godfather. Mao did a little light farm work, gathering fodder for pigs and taking the buffaloes out for a stroll in the tea-oil camellia groves by a pond shaded by banana leaves. In later years he would reminisce with fondness about this idyllic time. He started learning to read, while his aunts spun and sewed under an oil lamp.

Mao only came back to live in Shaoshan in spring 1902, at the age of eight, to receive an education, which took the form of study in a tutor’s home. Confucian classics, which made up most of the curriculum, were beyond the understanding of children and had to be learnt by heart. Mao was blessed with an exceptional memory, and did well. His fellow pupils remembered a diligent boy who managed not only to recite but also to write by rote these difficult texts. He also gained a foundation in Chinese language and history, and began to learn to write good prose, calligraphy and poetry, as writing poems was an essential part of Confucian education. Reading became a passion. Peasants generally turned in at sunset, to save on oil for lamps, but Mao would read deep into the night, with an oil lamp standing on a bench outside his mosquito net. Years later, when he was supreme ruler of China, half of his huge bed would be piled a foot high with Chinese classics, and he littered his speeches and writings with historical references. But his poems lost flair.

Mao clashed frequently with his tutors. He ran away from his first school at the age of ten, claiming that the teacher was a martinet. He was expelled from, or was “asked to leave,” at least three schools for being headstrong and disobedient. His mother indulged him but his father was not pleased, and Mao’s hopping from tutor to tutor was just one source of tension between father and son. Yi-chang paid for Mao’s education, hoping that his son could at least help keep the family accounts, but Mao disliked the task. All his life, he was vague about figures, and hopeless at economics. Nor did he take kindly to hard physical labour. He shunned it as soon as his peasant days were over.

Yi-chang could not stand Mao being idle. Having spent every minute of his waking hours working, he expected his son to do the same, and would strike him when he did not comply. Mao hated his father. In 1968, when he was taking revenge on his political foes on a vast scale, he told their tormentors that he would have liked his father to be treated just as brutally: “My father was bad. If he were alive today, he should be ‘jet-planed.’ ” This was an agonising position where the subject’s arms were wrenched behind his back and his head forced down.

Mao was not a mere victim of his father. He fought back, and was often the victor. He would tell his father that the father, being older, should do more manual labour than he, the younger—which was an unthinkably insolent argument by Chinese standards. One day, according to...