Mao: the Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

14-9-2005

June 04, 2005

Biography

The greatest dictator
Seventy million dead, a nation taken back to the Stone Age . . . in a century of despots Mao stands alone, as Jung Chang reveals. Chris Patten salutes her bombshell book

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday is published by Jonathan Cape, £25;

Who was the most wicked tyrant of the 20th century? Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot could all lay claim to the devil’s horns and tail. But readers of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao will surely reckon that they have made a convincing case for handing the indictment to the deeply wicked former chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

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.

The only thing that makes me carp is its scale. Sometimes when you read long biographies you feel that they contain a rather good but much smaller book seeking to escape. With Mao, it is the opposite. There is a much longer book trying to get in. I suppose the publishers were right to refuse a two-volume life, although it would certainly have been worth it. The wealth of footnotes and sources, and the occasional feeling that you are having to leap like the Swiss chamois from one peak of otherwise unused material to another, made me reckon that at least another couple of hundred pages would have been worth the tree-felling required.

Despite that, this formidable husband-and-wife team — whose fortitude in living with so much horror for so long has to be admired — has given us a storming account of what the subtitle calls “The Unknown Story”. It gains from being written on the whole in a clipped, matter-of-fact style that leads you mercilessly from one glimpse of hell to another.

I am not sure whether all monsters start as monsters, pulling the wings of flies, but Mao certainly seems to have done so. As a 24-year-old student, he wrote long commentaries in a book by a minor late 19th-century German philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen. “I do not agree,” he wrote, “with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others. People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.”

Mao lived this philosophy, coming to violence through his character, not through any ideology, bereft of any sense of social justice or of egalitarianism. For him, for example, the Long March was the long carry; he smoked and read in his litter while his “comrades” staggered along beneath the weight of their leader and his books.

In these early years Mao had to manoeuvre this way and that to stay on the right side of Stalin and the Comintern. Moscow had created the Chinese Communist Party and used it ruthlessly to pursue its own interests, for example in relation to Japan and its possible designs on the Soviet Union’s far eastern territories. Mao also subordinated military strategy to his tactical needs as he jockeyed for position in the party’s hierarchy, seeking to discredit his rivals or weaken their own military resources.

The authors shred the myths on which Mao’s national and international reputation rested. It was only with reluctance that the party’s then principal leaders allowed him to tag on to their Red Army as it began its long trek north. The Communists were allowed by General Chiang Kai-shek to escape the Nationalist trap in which they had been caught because he hoped that by driving them into Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces his own armies would be welcomed there by the local warlords without a fight. He was also anxious to trade the improbable escape of the Communists for the return of his son held hostage by Stalin.

Much of the detail of this epic march was simply fabricated for Mao’s greater glory; for example, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday produce a wealth of evidence — all carefully documented in the excellent notes appended to the book — showing that the fabled fight to cross the raging torrent of the Dadu River never happened. The fabrication was sedulously copied out as the truth by the journalist Edgar Snow. Mao was lucky in the schmucks such as Snow who wrote about him; their number naturally included France’s leading female fathead, Simone de Beauvoir. Her own book on China, The Long March, famously contains one entry in the index for the word violence: “(Mao) on violence, avoidance of”.

Others, who should have known a lot better, were equally wrong about him. George C. Marshall, one of the greatest Americans of the past or any century, pressed Chiang Kai-shek not to pursue the fleeing Mao into Manchuria, which allowed him to regroup there. This helped his final military victory over the Nationalists, who put a series of generals into the field against him who were almost certainly Communist sleepers.

Mao could not have survived and prospered among the ruins of his policies and the death of his people — almost 38 million were estimated to have died during the Great Leap Forward — without the craven complicity of those he terrorised from the early years in Yenan to the end of his life. Chou En-lai was always regarded as the suave, handsome and acceptable face of Mao’s China. In reality, he was Mao’s stooge, a charming if sometimes reluctant partner in his wickedness. The heroes were the President of China, Liu Shao-chi, his brave wife Wang Guang-mei, and the stalwart old Communist General Peng De-huai. They had earned Mao’s wrath by seeking to call a halt to the insanities of the Great Leap Forward. They died long and painful deaths during the Cultural Revolution.

Is there a case to be made for the defence? Henry Kissinger (whose finest hour this was not) paid humiliating court to Mao, and has described him as a “philosopher” pursuing a “quest for egalitarian virtue”. That is, I suppose, one way of describing a career that was responsible for well over 70 million deaths. In the long run, we are, indeed, all dead, and Mao recognised the virtuous equality of mass graves.

One of the best arguments against him is what has happened in China since he died. Spurred on initially by the reforms of Deng Xiao-ping, China has enjoyed a real Great Leap Forward, without the death, cannibalism and destruction of the economy that accompanied the first. Manic tyranny was not necessary to keep China together; and vainglorious and blind attachment to stupidity — remember the sparrows that were supposed to be eliminated through fatigue before they could peck up the harvest — and Stone Age economics were never going to put the country on the road to economic power.

There is much talk of the necessity for Chinese leaders to re-examine what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Far more important will be for China to review honestly the years of Chairman Mao. No country can be at ease with itself that does not look its own history straight in the eye. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have done this extraordinary country a huge service with this book, which will one day be read as widely inside China as it will deservedly be in the coming months in the world outside.

Read on

· Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine by Jasper Becker (John Murray)

· The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhisui (Chatto & Windus)

· The Origins of the Cultural Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar (three volumes, Oxford University Press)

· Modern China by Graham Hutchings (Penguin)

Bad element

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have revealed Mao as one of the 20th century's greatest monsters, says Michael Yahuda

Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian

Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
832pp, Cape, £25

The author of Wild Swans and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao and the Communist party of China to this day have hidden the true picture of Mao the man and Mao the ruler. Mao now stands revealed as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible, Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both.

Far from being the first Chinese communist leader to stand up for the Chinese peasantry and to respond to their needs and lead them out of exploitation, Mao is exposed as a man who disdained the peasants, despite his protestations to the contrary. He is shown during his command of armed forces in the countryside in the late 1920s and early 30s to have lived off the produce of the local peasants to the extent of leaving them destitute. He consciously used terror as a means to enforce his will on the party and on the people who came under his rule. In the course of the Long March, Mao is shown to have had no qualms in sacrificing thousands of scarce fighting men in fruitless diversions to serve no other purpose than to advance his bid for leadership.

His callous disregard for the lives of comrades and fellow Chinese became more evident once he commanded the larger stage of China itself. Against the advice of his commanders on the ground, Mao persisted in prolonging the Korean war in the expectation of tying down hundreds of thousands of American troops, regardless of the disproportionate sacrifice of far greater Chinese casualties. The livelihood of China's peasants was tightly squeezed through most of Mao's rule, not simply to meet the needs of industry and the urban population, but also to pay the Soviet Union and the east Europeans for the development of advanced weapons - especially for the development of nuclear weapons.

The suffering of the peasants plumbed new depths during Mao's hare-brained scheme to overtake Britain and the United States in the disaster known as the Great Leap Forward, which led to the starvation and premature deaths of 30-40 million people. To the end of his life Mao continued to sacrifice the Chinese people in his search for superpower status.

Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao's tumultuous life. Among the most significant of their discoveries is that the myth of the Long March was a sham. Chiang Kai-shek in effect made a safe passage for the Reds through particular provinces where his rule was weak, so that his pursuing forces could overcome the local warlords. Moreover, Chiang was constrained from destroying the Reds because his son was held hostage in Moscow. Even the fabled crossing of the Dadu chain bridge, when, according to Mao, his heroic soldiers managed to cross the narrow bridge against heavy machine-gun fire, is shown to be a complete invention. The indefatigable authors consulted Nationalist sources, interviewed local historians and even visited the scene.

Mao is shown to have been completely dependent on Soviet support and to have taken the view that the Chinese communists would succeed only if they were able to link up with the Soviet Union and receive massive assistance. This eventually happened in Manchuria in 1946-47. The American General Marshall, who had attempted to mediate in the civil war, had unwittingly saved the communist armies by imposing a truce in the summer of 1946 that lasted for four months. It was this truce that prevented Chiang's armies from crushing the retreating Reds. The ceasefire enabled the latter to be massively replenished by the Soviet side and then reverse the tide to win in Manchuria and then gain the rest of China.

Some of the distortions of history perpetrated by Mao and the Communist party have already been exposed by western and Chinese scholars. They have had access to writings and documents released by Chinese party historians, and their studies have also been enriched by access to archives from the former communist bloc, notably those in Moscow.

Chang and Halliday have not only made full use of this literature, but judging from their notes, they have spent the past 11 years going through the archives themselves, some of them in countries whose records had not been examined for this purpose before. They have also used their contacts in China to interview an extraordinary array of people who were close to Mao and other leaders. These range from family members to friends, colleagues, secretaries, witnesses and even a woman who once washed Mao's underwear. Consequently, the authors are able to shed new light on virtually every episode of Mao's life. For example, it has been known for some time that one of the dirty secrets of Yenan was that opium was produced and marketed from there. The authors show how this enriched those at the top and built up the reserves of the local government, and alleviated some the depredations made on the peasantry - but they also show how the inflation caused by the opium money made things worse, too.

Mao himself comes across as a uniquely self-centred man whose strength was his utter disregard for others, his pitilessness, his single-mindedness, his capacity for intrigue and his ability to exploit weakness. He neglected his wives, whom he treated cruelly, and had no time for his children. He loved food and reading and had an infinite supply of young women. Mao lacked personal courage and had some 50 villas built for him in different parts of China, which were constructed to withstand bombing and even nuclear attack.

Mao had none of the skills usually associated with a successful revolutionary leader. He was no orator and he lacked either idealism or a clear ideology. He was not even a particularly good organiser. But he was driven by a personal lust for power. He came to dominate his colleagues through a mixture of blackmail and terror. And he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it. Indeed what he learned from his witnessing of a peasant uprising in his home province of Hunan in 1927 was that he derived a sadistic pleasure from seeing people put to death in horrible ways and generally being terrified. During the Cultural Revolution he watched films of the violence and of colleagues being tortured.

The use of terror typified Mao's rule. Although he had his equivalent of the KGB, Mao's distinctive form of terror was to get people to use it against each other. This was the model that he perfected in Yenan, when everybody was coerced into the exercise of criticism and self-criticism by which they were forced to confess and implicate each other in terrible "wrongs". It was a method that was then extended to the whole of China, as people were confined to their work units in the cities and their villages in the countryside.

This magnificent book is not without its blemishes. There is no discussion of the quality of the sources or how they were used. The motives of people in general and of Mao in particular are asserted rather than evaluated. There is no introduction or concluding chapter to bring together the key themes of the book. Nevertheless it is 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, even as they require others to do so.

Michael Yahuda is professor emeritus at the London School of Economics and visiting scholar, George Washington University

Putting the ghosts to rest
Reviewed by John Weston

Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Cape, 814pp, £25, ISBN 0224071262

In 1976, the year of Mao’s death, I went back to China when the British foreign secretary Anthony Crosland paid an official visit there. Asked what he thought of Mao’s colossal experiment in social engineering, Crosland replied, ‘It’s revolting.’ If you’re puzzled by this reaction from Old Labour’s leading thinker, you should read the new biography by Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday. The book breathes life from every page. In addition to extensive Chinese and non-Chinese written sources, the authors have conducted several hundred fascinating interviews with people who were close to Mao and his entourage or witnesses to events described.

In public life we should never forget what can happen when political ‘narrative’ parts company with the truth, and language loses touch with reality. The conventional picture of Mao’s place in history is that he was the visionary, statesman, strategist of genius, philosopher and poet, who in his lifetime brought China from semi-colony to Great Power, making changes in one generation that took the West centuries to achieve. With China now one generation away from overtaking the United States as the largest economy, who is to say that this view is all wrong? But in a world where the contest between Western democratic values and absolutism remains unresolved, we still need to understand the true price of alternatives. Jung Chang’s book highlights the immense human costs of Mao’s career and the appalling political monster that this Frankenstein created.

Other biographers have stated that the victims of Mao’s land reforms, purges, political campaigns and famines (such as those triggered by the Great Leap Forward) were exceeded only by all the dead of the second world war; and greatly outnumbered the killings of Stalin or Hitler. Mao: The Unknown Story now puts the total of those who perished in peacetime as a consequence of Mao’s misrule at over 70 million — a figure significantly larger than that normally attributed to the second world war.

Based on death rates from Chinese demographers, these authors say that close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the four years 1958–61, 22 million of them in 1960 alone. These magnitudes were confirmed by Liu Shao-chi to the Soviet ambassador at the time. During the first two of these years, Mao actually exported millions of tons of grain, to pay for industrial and defence hardware. The regime apologist Han Su-yin stated that Chinese urban housewives (NB, not peasants) got 1,200 calories a day in 1960: presumably she was unaware that this was significantly less than the daily intake granted to concentration-camp labourers at Auschwitz. At times of shortage Mao, an ignoramus on economics, simply issued the order ‘Educate the peasants to eat less.’

Famine apart, the authors calculate that deaths in prisons and labour camps over Mao’s years from 1949 totalled some 27 million. In the ten years of the Great Purge (1966–76) that came with the Cultural Revolution, at least three million people died violent deaths outside prison. Post-Mao leaders have stated that 100 million people (one-ninth of the entire population) suffered in one way or another during that period.

The first half of this admirably annotated and indexed book moves deftly through Mao’s political coming of age, the Long March, to his supremacy in the Party, the building of his power base in Yenan, culminating in the eventual defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the founding of the Chinese People’s Republic in 1949 when Mao was 55 years old. The second half covers his last 27 years in power, his pursuit of superpower and nuclear status, his drawn-out revenge on political opponents in the Cultural Revolution which brought the whole country to its knees, and the final Götterdämmerung that followed Lin Biao’s plane crash as he fled with his son to Russia.

There is much material for students of politics and professional historians. The book brings out, for example, just how dependent Mao was at every turn on financial and material support from the Soviet Union, despite his fractious relationship with the Kremlin. Stalin thought Mao ‘insubordinate but a winner’. Later Soviet leaders found him dangerous enough to keep on side, despite the Sino–Soviet dispute. But once having opened for him Pandora’s box of nuclear weapons, they were by 1969 so exasperated that they consulted Washington about a possible strike to destroy Chinese nuclear facilities, Kosygin refusing to rule this out when Chou En-lai saw him later the same year.

There are excellent accounts of Japan’s invasion of China, and Mao’s duplicitous role (proposing a Japan/Soviet carve-up of his country, with Japan holding north of the Yangtze and the Chinese Reds the south); of the naïve postwar diplomacy of General Marshall, whose diktat to Chiang Kai-shek in 1946, effectively handing Manchuria to the Reds, was ‘the single most important decision’ in giving civil war victory to Mao; and of Mao’s adventurist pretensions in the Korean War, where he committed ex-Nationalist POWs as cannon-fodder in exchange for obtaining a modern air force from the Russians.

The Long March is another myth the book rejects: less a heroic saga of escape and derring-do than a deliberate ruse by Chiang Kai-shek to channel the Reds northwards out of China’s rich heartlands and to earn a bit of credit with the Russians. The Yenan revolutionary base, far from the romantic image sold by Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, turns out to have been what one Yenan veteran called a loathsome terror regime, where Mao in true mafioso style secretly grew opium from 1942–4, earning him in one year the modern equivalent of half a billion dollars. Snow, who claimed Mao never censored Red Star, privately complained to his wife at the time that there had been ‘so many things cut out, it begins to read like Childe Harold’. Unsurprisingly, Jung Chang and Halliday have only contempt for those in the West who swallowed or served Mao’s propaganda aims over the years, and they name quite a few of them, including Field-Marshal Montgomery in one of his more barking episodes.

But for the general reader, what gives this book special flavour and interest is Jung Chang’s vivid human touch, as a Chinese who lived on the spot through so much of the later Maoist phenomenon she describes. Especially from 1961 on, she gives us the illusion of seeing events with all the clarity and focus of real-time newsreel, as she draws on sources such as Mao’s personal valet or interpreter, or the surviving daughters of Jiang Qing and Lin Biao. If just occasionally one is reminded of the racier snippets to be found on street-corner wall-posters during the Cultural Revolution, I also recall how often such handwritten samizdat material turned out to have been the only true account of what was actually happening.

Few of the top Party hierarchy were redeemed by any normal human virtues. To survive in this odious political jungle, such qualities were either not selected for, or were expunged by relentless group- bullying and self-criticism. Mao himself was a moral solipsist, who explicitly rejected conscience and duty to others (unlike Jung Chang’s own father, whose fate so troubles her earlier book). But the authors do show grudging respect for Liu Shao-chi, Peng De-huai and Deng Xiao-ping, each of whom tried in his own way to deflect the worst expressions of Mao’s megalomania, and paid a heavy price in the process. On the other hand, for all his common sense, Chou En-lai — so often the darling of diplomatic luvvies in the West (including Kissinger) — earns a distinctly negative report: ‘a ruthless apparatchik’ who ‘served his Party with a dauntless lack of personal integrity’, and was a ‘self-abasing slave to Mao for more than three decades’. No doubt that is why he survived.

Why did Mao’s awful rule prevail for so long? How did China come to be one vast torture chamber, as foreign minister Chen Yi called it, during the cataclysmic Cultural Revolution? The book reminds us that Mao supplied his own answer, when he described himself as ‘a man without law or limit’. His first move in 1949 was to clamp down on the media and to replace the law-courts with Party committees. In the early Fifties officials faced him with a draft constitution that spoke of the need to protect the legal rights of all citizens: Mao wrote in the margin, ‘What is a citizen?’ The Chinese case brings to mind the less quoted part of Lord Acton’s adage, which is that when power is concentrated in a few hands, ‘all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control’. These lessons remain relevant and enduring.

Interviewed about her family memoir Wild Swans in 1991, Jung Chang commented on the unbearable mass cruelty she had witnessed, adding, ‘Without proper discussion we cannot put the ghosts to rest.’ If and when her formidable new biography of Mao comes to be available for normal sale and proper discussion within China, we shall know that at last a small step has been taken towards a decent sweeping of the graves where so many millions of his innocent victims lie.

During the Cultural Revolution, Sir John Weston and his wife were in the British Mission in Peking when a Red Guard mob sacked and burned it down in 1967.

Bad element

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have revealed Mao as one of the 20th century's greatest monsters, says Michael Yahuda

Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian

Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
832pp, Cape, £25

Michael Yahuda is professor emeritus at the London School of Economics and visiting scholar, George Washington University

Mao: the unknown story, By Jung Chang & Jon Halliday

Too much hate, too little understanding

By Frank McLynn

05 June 2005

The main facts about Mao-tse-tung are fairly well known: his peasant background in Hunan province, his humble beginning as a library assistant; his conversion to Communism at the age of 28; the establishment of the communist republic in Jiangxi province (south-east China) in 1931-34; the famous Long March to escape from Chiang-kai-shek's Nationalist forces in 1934 which relocated the Chinese communists to Shanxi province (north-west China); the resistance to both Chiang and the Japanese in 1937-45; the civil war with Chiang which resulted in Communist victory in 1949; the halcyon years of Chairman Mao and the disastrous liberal experiment of the "Hundred Flowers" in the 1950s; the failure of the "Great Leap Forward" in 1958-61 which may have resulted in the deaths of some 30 million peasants; the Sino-Soviet rift of the 1960s; the Mao-abetted period of anarchy during the "Cultural Revolution" of the late 1960s; the dramatic Sino-American rapprochement in 1972 and the Nixon-Mao summit; and the final, gloomy illness-strewn years. To anyone who knows nothing of all this, this new life of Mao might serve as a useful introductory primer. But for anyone else this attempt at a "groundbreaking biography" will be deeply problematical.

I imagine most people would accept it as axiomatic that a good biography (never mind a great one) of a towering political figure cannot be written from a stance of pure hatred. As we know from Jung Chang's Wild Swans, she suffered grievously during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. But that in itself does not establish one's credentials to be a Mao biographer. The problem with this book is that it is an 800-page polemic, along the lines of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, but unconscionably prolix, and a sustained polemic does not a biography make.

Let me make it clear that I fully share the authors' view that Mao was a monster, as were Hitler and Stalin. But, just as "Hitler was simply a madman" makes for poor history and unintelligent biography, so this one-sided rant leaves one with no understanding of modern China or its benighted helmsman. To write about Hitler effectively one must enter into his mental world (while condemning it) and provide a detailed social, economic and political context. This is the one thing Chang and Halliday never do when discussing Mao. He comes across as a posturing maniac, a crazed gangster, a hydrophobic, fundamentally stupid (though cunning), mouth-frothing sociopath. The authors cannot decide whether he was just incredibly lucky to have got so far or whether (in at least partial contradiction of their main thesis) he had a steel-trap political mind of Napoleonic calibre. But everything is one-dimensional. It is all Mao and his rages, Mao and his women, Mao and his rivals, Mao and Stalin, but never Chinese social structure or the analysis of the peasantry. Mao's (admittedly dotty) contribution to Marxist-Leninist theory - crucial for understanding the entire Third World notion of peasant revolution, as in Guevara, the Sendero Luminoso in Peru or the guerrillas in contemporary Nepal - is not even dealt with.

There is a lot of bad history in all senses in this volume. Bad not just in the methodological sense - calling the Japan of the 1930s "fascist" means nothing unless it is to be read as simply another emotive outburst - but also in the interpretive sense. Everything that can be construed as working in Mao's favour during his struggle with Chiang is freighted with a meaning it cannot bear, whether it is General George Marshal's visit to China in 1945-46 (the authors are meanspirited and misleading about Marshal and do not even mention Vinegar Joe Stilwell, another American general who saw right through Chiang) or Stalin's many vacillating interventions in Chinese affairs. There is, for example, an obvious contradiction between the widespread destruction of plant and material by the Soviet Union when it entered the war against Japan in its last days in 1945 - and which so angered Mao - and the assertion that only with Soviet help did Mao prevail in the civil war. On the Korean war the authors revive the old myth about "hordes" of Chinese swamping the American army and defeating them by sheer weight of numbers, which was simply propaganda put out by the Pentagon, embarrassed by the poor showing of the US Marine Corps. And who is their historical source for the Chinese "human waves"? Michael Caine. Come again? Yes, I do mean that Michael Caine, the movie actor, whose personal memories of the Korean War are given the status of holy writ.

But why bother with the tiresome discipline of historical research when you can make wild assertions buttressed by unknown or suspect oral sources that are (in the authors' recurrent mantra) "little known today". Maybe that is their gloss on Caine's "not a lot of people know that".

If you can believe that Chou-en-lai, the master diplomat who wowed everyone from Kissinger to Orson Welles, really was a hypermasochistic craven nonentity who played lickspittle and toady to Mao for no apparent reason (at least the authors do not suggest one), or are interested in the number of minor actresses Mao bedded, this book has a certain entertainment value. But it is neither serious history nor serious biography.

'They can fertilise the ground'
(Filed: 05/06/2005)

Nicholas Shakespeare reviews Mao: the Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Title
Mao: the Unknown Story

Author
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Publisher
814pp, Jonathan Cape, £25

ISBN

0224071262

My father grew up in pre-Maoist Peking, where his most vivid memory is of his nanny thrusting him to the floor of a car to avoid the sight of a public execution. In the 1930s he lived in the British Legation overlooking the Forbidden City. It was an artificial existence, of visits to the racecourse and to Manchuria to collect stamps. Few in the Embassy paid attention to the communist uprising in the countryside but, when my father became a diplomat, the ideals of its leader tracked him from China to Peru, where Mao Tse-tung's successor as "Chairman of the World Revolution" currently sits nursing his psoriasis in a Lima cell. Arrested in 1992, Abimael Guzmán pleaded to be allowed one object to take into custody: his badge of Mao, acquired on a visit to Peking.

Aged 12, Jung Chang believed likewise that Mao was God. She has now rounded on the object of her worship with the vengeful scorn of a deicide. Co-authored with her husband, the English historian Jon Halliday, Mao: the Unknown Story reads like a revisionist corrective to the portrait first presented to the world by the American journalist, Edgar Snow. Mao Tse-tung's Autobiography (1937) was based on the only extensive interview granted by the secretive Mao, and for a long while swayed Western opinion into a lazy celebration of the Great Helmsman - characterised by a vogue for his posters and the Neanderthal musings of his Little Red Book - that hoodwinked, among others, Viscount Montgomery, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Chang and Halliday have spent a decade interviewing everyone from the woman who washed Mao's underpants to Edward Heath. They persuasively demolish Snow's Mao as "a colossal falsification". Demonstrating the same pitilessness that they judge to be Mao's "most formidable weapon", they unstitch the myths that sustained him in power for 40 years and that continue to underpin China's regime.

Far from being the throbbing light behind the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao was hounded out of it early on. His part in the Long March of 1934-35, in which 80,000 Communists plodded 6,000 miles to escape Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, is also exposed as shy on heroism: Mao was carried on a litter after almost being left behind, and was allowed to pass unmolested by the Nationalists because of a deal between Chiang and the Soviets (who had Chiang's son as a hostage). The iconic battle at Luding bridge is found to be a "complete invention", as is Mao's commitment to ridding his country of the Japanese.

Most shocking is the revelation of his "food for arms" programme: to make China a nuclear superpower Mao paid for the Soviet technology, which he told his people was a gift, with his people's grain, vegetable oil and pork. As a result, 38 million starved to death. "They can fertilise the ground," he said of the corpses. When his closest colleagues rebelled, he turned on them too. By the time he died in 1976, mumbling "Call the doctors", he was responsible for 70 million deaths, making him, in one of the hyperbolic claims favoured by the authors, "the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world".

The "rosebud" incident - something that locates in childhood the pathology of the adult - is the cheesiest moment in many biographies. But when it's not there one rather misses it. In Mao's case, one hunts in vain for an explanation for his destructive, megalomaniac character. If there is a fault in this coherently awful version of the man, it is that the authors gallop too briskly through his youth, covering his first 31 years in as many pages, and don't give us enough about the society that he wished to replace, nor about how he formed his political ideas. "Mao had a carefree childhood," we are told. His father was a prosperous landowner, and the "Kulak" accusation with which Mao sent many to their executions could have applied to him. From where, then, came the conviction that he had to "control the Earth"?

The "exploiting classes" that Mao railed against are as shifting and vaguely defined as his ideology, which was a sort of Ayn Rand philosophy of selfishness. He had no sympathy for the masses, whom he transformed into a robotic nation of Stepford wives, husbands and children, all controlled by the Party. He was 32 before he expressed interest in peasants, and although everything was done in their name he was as contemptuous of them as they of him. Nor could he communicate with them. There is a priceless moment when he decides to drop in on a peasant house: "The couple could not understand a word of his Hunan dialect, nor he theirs… Mao's guards whisked him away."

Chang describes herself and Halliday as "a couple of detectives", but they more closely resemble sappers laying a powerful mine under Mao's corpse. The portrait that emerges is devastating, not so much "warts and all" as "all warts". In contrast to Snow's impressive egalitarian, their Mao has oily ears, smelly armpits and likes to fornicate with young women in villas where natural light is shut out by three layers of curtains. His passion is to brutalise others, and his only sufferings are constipation and sleeplessness. Not until page 639 does he betray vulnerability, shedding tears when he finds he can't read. While some might find Mao: the Unknown Story a dish served up too cold, quite a few will weep as they read it. I suspect that when China comes to terms with its past this book will have played a role.

The long march to mass murder
(Filed: 05/06/2005)

Max Hastings reviews Mao: the Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.

Of all the follies of the 20th century's "useful idiots", popular enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung was among the most foolish. It reached its zenith in western Left-wing circles in the 1960s and was compounded a decade later by tourists who flocked into China after the Cultural Revolution, headed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

They professed to see virtues in a Chinese leader who surpassed Hitler and Stalin as a mass murderer. Kissinger made the preposterous assertion that Mao and his coterie were ''a group of monks… who have… kept their revolutionary purity''. Nixon's staff asserted that under Mao's rule, ''the lives of the Chinese masses have been greatly improved.''

Mao is thought to have been responsible for some 70 million deaths in purges and authorised famines. Since the victims were anonymous Chinese without friends in the West, it seemed churlish for outsiders to make much of the matter, except when the Great Helmsman ventured outside his own borders and began to massacre Tibetans, as he did in 1960.

Jung Chang, however, is herself Chinese. It was her people who suffered martyrdom. Her rage on behalf of Mao's victims informs every page of this emotional book, the fruit of 15 years' research alongside her British husband, Jon Halliday. In Wild Swans, which became an international best-seller, she offered an account of the experience of three generations of her own family through China's tragedy. Now, she seeks to set Mao's homicidal achievement in a wider context.

Mao was born in Hunan in 1893, the eldest surviving son of a relatively prosperous farmer. A wilful and unsatisfactory youth, he was prone to drop out of schools and proved unwilling to commit himself seriously to any career. From an early age, he revealed priapic instincts which caused him to couple obsessively with four wives and numerous lovers, leaving in his wake unbroken misery and unwanted children, most of whom perished.

The authors suggest that Mao's early enthusiasm for the nascent Chinese communist party reflected personal ambition rather than ideological commitment or a concern for the proletariat. Always an iconoclast, he declared an early commitment to wiping out traditional Chinese culture. Such a line was not unfashionable in those first years of republican government, when warlords dominated the country, but it was given to Mao to vent his anger against the traditional values of a father he despised, by sacking the temples of his nation.

Chang and Halliday write: "Mao did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally. A good name after death, he said, 'cannot bring me any joy because it belongs to the future and not to my own reality'." Throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, he lurched up and down the Chinese communist hierarchy.

He showed an early enthusiasm for purging perceived opponents. Once he had gained a sufficient armed following, this extended to wholesale butchery. Mao's notorious observation that ''power comes out of the barrel of the gun'' dates from 1927, a period when his outlaw band was pursuing extortion and terror throughout its region in a shamelessly apolitical fashion.

Mao's rise was driven less by support from Chinese fellow communists, many of whom hated and feared him, than by the shrewd calculation that Stalin's backing would prove decisive. The pursuit of power, and concern about his chronic constipation, became the principal forces in his life. One of his early poems was posted beside the stage at a public execution rally he organised in 1928: "Watch us kill the bad landlords today./ Aren't you afraid?/ It's knife slicing upon knife."

The authors offer a comprehensive demolition of the ''myth'' of the heroism of the Red Army's Long March to northern China in 1936, where Mao spent the next decade establishing a power base. Far from fighting great battles with Chiang Kai-shek's forces en route, they assert that it suited the Nationalists to let the communists go by. Mao himself was carried on a litter for much of a journey that killed all but 10,000 of the 80,000 marchers who set out. When they arrived in Yenan, he and his personal entourage issued hair shirts to the rank and file, while they themselves became sybarites.

Chou En-lai, whom Kissinger and many Westerners later fêted as the ''civilised face'' of Maoism, was in reality another ruthless opportunist, steeped in blood. Some of the most vivid testimony about the nature of Mao comes from his abandoned wife Kai-hui, who described her sufferings and disillusionment in secret writings discovered only in 1990, and still partly censored by the rulers of modern China.

In the Second World War, the authors argue, Westerners, and especially General George Marshall, were deceived by Communist claims that they were fighting the Japanese more effectively than the Nationalists. They swallowed the nonsense written about Mao by the American reporter Edgar Snow in his visionary portrait Red Star Over China. In truth, Mao carefully husbanded his forces for the coming civil war, collaborated to a substantial degree with the Japanese occupiers, and traded opium to fund his rule in northern China. In 1945-46 he was ready to exploit the arsenal supplied by the Soviets through Manchuria.

From beginning to end, Mao's life as described here is a progress of torture, murder and exploitation of the Chinese people, who finally became his prisoners after the 1949 communist victory in the civil war with Chiang.

Chang and Halliday suggest that Mao actively sought a military showdown with the US in Korea in 1950, rather than merely indulging Kim Il Sung's invasion of the South. By 1952 the Russians and North Koreans were desperate to end the war, but even after losing 400,000 Chinese dead Mao remained eager to provoke the Americans to the limit, because he believed - eventually rightly - that such a confrontation would induce Moscow to give him the secrets of the atomic bomb.

Mao's 550 million subjects paid an awesome price for his drive for status as a world leader. From 1958 to 1961, the Great Leap Forward poured cash into arms production and botched industrial development. The starving peasantry also supported an imperial lifestyle for their Chairman - he provided himself with estates by the dozen, concubines by the score. He became, say the authors drily, egalitarian China's only millionaire.

Military spending absorbed 61 per cent of the national budget, including over £2 billion to the nuclear weapons programme. In search of influence and prestige abroad, Mao committed nearly seven per cent of China's 1973 GNP to foreign aid which was badly needed at home. Some 38 million people died of famine and overwork even before Mao's crowning enormity, the Cultural Revolution, which paralysed China for almost a decade, and killed another legion of innocents.

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. Their account of the fall of Marshal Peng, Liu Shao-chi, Lin Biao and finally Chou En-lai, as one by one the tyrant's principal instruments were obliged to acknowledge the disastrous nature of his rule, makes for devastating reading.

''Hatred, frustration and self-pity dominated Mao's last days," the authors write. He died on September 9, 1976.

If this biography has a weakness, it is that it attributes Mao's rise and long rule entirely to repression, and does not explain why so many of his own people remained for so long committed to his insane vision. The Chinese people did unspeakable things to each other at his behest for the best part of half a century, in a fashion that made Stalin's stewardship of the Soviet Union seem almost moderate. Jung Chang delivers a cry of anguish on behalf of all those in her own native land who, to this day, are still not free to speak about these things.

Chang and Halliday's work mocks the Western statesmen who deluded themselves that Mao Tse-tung was worthy of respect even as an adversary, and lays bare the absurdity of Mao's admirers, who supposed him to be the standard-bearer for a coherent social vision.

Max Hastings's new book, 'Warriors: Extraordinary Tales From The Battlefield', has just been published by HarperCollins

THE SCOTSMAN

SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ONLINE

Sat 28 May 2005

Tyrant of the people

BOOK REVIEW

Review by TOM ADAIR

MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY
BY JUNG CHANG AND JON HALLIDAY
Jonathan Cape, 650pp, £25

WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS THE publishing phenomenon of the 1990s, Wild Swans sold more than ten million copies and was translated into 30 languages. Its author, Jung Chang, became a literary superstar.

Telling the tale of her family's suffering in 20th- century China, a country ruled by suspicion and terror, the book touched and gripped the reading public. It told a story of family misfortunes under oppression - her father, a Communist Party high-ranker, was denounced by the Maoists, cast into madness, a broken man. Her mother was forced to wear a placard of self-accusation and walk through the streets in political shame. In the 1960s, at the age of 14, Jung herself became a Red Guard. But, faced with everyday privations, fearful of sleep in case she mumbled indiscretions in her dreams, she too, as her parents had before her, became disillusioned with the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao.

Twelve years ago, with Jon Halliday, the historian who had helped her write Wild Swans (they married in 1991), she began her follow-up, the keenly awaited exposé entitled: Mao: The Unknown Story. It is, at 650 pages, a detailed account of the Chinese dictator's improbable rise to power.

Reading Wild Swans is not a prerequisite for reading the Mao biography, but it helps. The memoir makes personal the effects of Mao's social and economic initiatives, while painting the human picture, the foreground of individual lives in the throes, for example, of Mao's "Great Leap" in the 1950s, or under his talons during the Cultural Revolution. In the aftermath of Wild Swans, Jung Chang asserted that her Mao book would "be more devastating still". As prophecies go, this is almost certainly a significant understatement.

Proponents of Mao may demand a retrial. After all, they will argue, how could the author of such a powerful condemnation as Wild Swans remain impartial when coming to grips with the life of the man who had caused her family such personal pain? The answer lies, at least in part, in the authors' method. Readers dubious of Chang's and Halliday's partiality should start where the narrative ends: with the book's screed of footnotes, its list of interviewees spread over 38 countries (a cast of more than 350), its bibliographies listing more than 1,000 sources. She and Halliday have, if nothing else, been both scrupulous and rigorous in their pursuit not merely of Mao, but of vital sources of previously hidden information, all part of the pointillist approach to building a three-dimensional portrait of a two-dimensional demagogue.

It is this, the clear emergence of a dictator of such single-mindedness that he sheds no moral complexity in any sphere of his long and destructive life, that so astounds. From the very beginning, with his mocking manipulation of his father, Mao showed a capacity for discovering others' weaknesses, and exploiting them to advantage. His baseline philosophy is contained within the annotated notes he scribbled in the margins of his copy of Friedrich Paulsen's A System of Ethics:

"I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others ..."; "People like me want to ... satisfy our hearts to the full and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are there only for me."

And, he goes on: "People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people."

Judged by his deeds, this simple, but riveting, philosophy came from his core and ran through his life. At every stage we encounter evidence - from the pattern of his actions, from his disclosures to colleagues and allies, from secret files and from Mao's own notes - of his pragmatic, embedded cynicism. Ideology served his needs, but he was driven by personal power. Using the Russians under Stalin (one of the first to spot his potential as a motive force for communism in China), Mao hatched a plan to rule his country, increase its military might and become a figure of global dominance.

His beginnings were inauspicious. Growing up in a land of predators (tigers, leopards) in a remote region geographically cut off from China's mainstream, Mao was the bane of his father's life. Expelled from school, uncouth, misanthropic, he finally qualified as a teacher, trying his luck for work in Peking, returning home jobless. He joined the Communist Party in 1921, one year after it was founded (official history in China has been doctored to register Mao as one of the founders), but his initial impact was slight. He was excluded from the Party's Second Congress for ineffectiveness at organising labour but restored to the fold a year later. At this time the party was barely a splinter in the Chinese body politic, with a membership less than 1,000 nationwide.

Urged by Stalin to take up arms, the Chinese Communists turned to banditry, with Mao adopting the role of brigand leader and, in cahoots with Moscow's diktats, currying favour inside the Kremlin. Deploying guerrilla tactics, Mao conducted raids against the forces of the Nationalists, who were then led by Chiang Kai-shek, in a widespread hit-and-run civil war carried on for two decades. This taxing period, which is charted by the authors with great fastidiousness, catches Mao in a series of clever machinations within the Party, while forging closer ties with Moscow and building a power base across the land.

Once in power, Mao wasted no time in promoting his interests and those of Russia, shoring up Kim Il Sung's dictatorship in Korea - a ploy to consume American lives and persuade the Russians to back his campaign to boost Chinese armaments. In the 1950s and 1960s he sought the Soviet Union's help in acquiring nuclear installations, an objective which, indirectly, cost the lives of almost 40 million Chinese.

In parallel with Mao's international dealings, the book amply illustrates his personal life with its equally mechanistic, self-serving modus operandi: his four marriages, his callous disregard for his children's welfare (when Stalin threatened to take one son hostage, Mao replied: "Keep him"), his flagrant sexual indiscretions and the creation of more than 50 private estates with opulent villas - all on a whim - expressed his old credo that: "people like me only have a duty to ourselves". The authors' interviews with survivors from Mao's inner circle have proved a rich vein of information. Russian archives yielded extensive corroboration (and sometimes correction of Chinese sources thought to be "fishy").

In sum, Mao: The Unknown Story is a mammoth piece of work, by turns a see-sawing tale of adventure, a book of intrigues and a dark tragic story depicting a country shrouded in fear, suspicion, mass crime and verging at times on the brink of hysterical collapse. The country's history in the 20th century, patchily recorded, is riddled with gaps and inconsistencies. Jon Halliday and Jung Chang have produced a persuasive, coherent version which explodes the myth of Mao as a fatherly icon, and answers many unanswered questions. Will it find its way into China? Being banned will almost certainly guarantee that.

Today's mass publishing world spews out thousands of inconsequential works every year. It is therefore gratifying to read a book such as Mao: The Unknown Story, which might potentially, and for the better, affect the fates of countless millions.

Economist

Mao Zedong

Homo sanguinarius

May 26th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Mao: The Unknown Story
By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Jonathan Cape; 814 pages; £25. To be published in America by Knopf in October

A major new biography-more than a decade in the making-portrays Mao as having been even more ruthless and bloody than was previously believed

IN HIS recent book on Mao Zedong, Philip Short suggested that for all the suffering Mao inflicted on China (“the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history”), he was never as personally culpable as Stalin and Hitler. A new study, by Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday, reaches a different conclusion: Mao, they insist, was a megalomaniac of unremitting evil. Mr Short says that, apart from one period in the 1930s, Mao was not directly involved in executing opponents. The new book insists that not only did Mao arrange their deaths himself, he delighted in having them die in singularly unpleasant ways.

Mr Short and his fellow Mao biographers are no apologists, but Ms Chang and Mr Halliday are uniquely relentless iconoclasts. The “Unknown Story” of their title goes well beyond the kind of anecdotal impressions given in 1994 by Mao's doctor Li Zhisui in his vivid (though unsurprising) book, “The Private Life of Chairman Mao”. Ms Chang's and Mr Halliday's informants include several Mao intimates, but some of the most revealing details come from non-Chinese sources, including the archives of the former Soviet Union, which played such an important role in the rise of the Chinese Communist Party.

The book challenges much of the received wisdom on Mao and the party, and is particularly detailed on its early days. Mao, it seems, was utterly contemptuous of the downtrodden masses whose saviour the party proclaimed itself to be. He had no interest in co-operating with the ruling Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), in the war against the Japanese, leaving virtually all the actual fighting to the KMT while he focused on building his party. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the KMT leader, made no more than a token pretence at trying to stop the communists from moving closer to Soviet-controlled territory, believing that this would please Russian leaders. In return, Chiang wanted the Russians to return his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, whom they were effectively holding hostage. As for who best embodied the spirit of the Long March, it certainly wasn't Mao, who hardly marched at all; he was carried most of the way in a litter.

Another incident that Ms Chang and Mr Halliday cast in a whole new light is the attempted kidnapping of Chiang in 1936. Usually portrayed as a move to force him to co-operate with the communists, it was, the authors say, really no more than an abortive coup by the power-hungry Chang Hsueh-Liang (the “Young Marshal”) who wanted to supplant the Generalissimo. Mao encouraged the Young Marshal to kill Chiang. But Moscow put its foot down, fearing that this might weaken the KMT, help Japan's conquest of China and enable Japan to turn on the Soviet Union. It was Chiang, not Mao, who wanted a united front against Japan. And even when Japan perpetrated an infamous atrocity in China, the Nanjing massacre of 1937-38, Mao showed no interest either then or later. Having assumed control, he is said to have told some Japanese visitors that the communists “would still be in the mountains today” had it not been for the Japanese invasion.

Mao calculated that if the Japanese defeated Chiang, the Russians would have no choice but to intervene. “His plan was to ride on the coat-tails of the Japanese to expand Red territory”, the authors argue. After the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, Mao feared the Soviets might strike a similar deal with Japan. To protect his forces, he mounted a “long, close and little-known collaboration” with Japanese intelligence to help them undermine Chiang.

That Mao gained power at all in 1949 was not thanks to an uprising—there was no spontaneous pro-communist uprising anywhere in China, say the authors—but to foreign powers: the Russians, who handed the communists the key industrial base of Manchuria, liberated by the Russians from the Japanese, and the Americans, who gave the communists crucial breathing space by ordering Chiang to stop fighting them there for four months. The Russians secretly handed the communists tens of thousands of Japanese POWs, to train Mao's army and create an air force for him. Some Japanese troops even fought for him, the authors say.

Once in power, Mao schemed to take over the world. He backed North Korea's invasion of the south, hoping to face down America in a protracted war that would leave hundreds of thousands of American dead. “We will set up the Earth Control Committee, and make a uniform plan for the Earth”, he is quoted as telling provincial leaders in 1958. He feigned assaults on Taiwan in order to encourage the Russians, who did not want to be sucked into a nuclear war on China's behalf, to hand over nuclear weapons technology to China and thus enable China to take care of itself. He encouraged the Vietnamese to escalate war with America in order to draw in American troops, so that if the United States attacked China's nuclear facilities, China could easily retaliate.

All of this is written with the same deft hand that enlivened Ms Chang's 1991 memoir, “Wild Swans”. But how much of it is true? Until China abandons its (now very low-key) cult of Mao, and allows unfettered access to archives and to individuals who knew him, our understanding of his highly secretive world will inevitably be distorted. The authors may be right that Mao built his political machine “not through inspiration or magnetism, but fundamentally through terror”. And they may be right that Chiang Kai-shek was not as ruthless. But by filtering 20th-century China through the life of a single despot without due attention being paid to the iniquities of his opponents, the book feels too much like the story of a lone ogre, and not enough like a complex and dispassionate history.