Com o apoio do marido, o historiador britânico Jon Halliday, a escritora descobriu lendas e mentiras que Mao impôs como verdades. Embora o governo chinês tenha ordenado aos poucos sobreviventes do restrito círculo do “Grande Timoneiro” que pensassem bem no que diziam, o aviso de pouco valeu, já que muitos desobedeceram, desejosos de denunciar o que durante décadas calaram.

Monstro de Pequim.

A sua monstruosidade foi igualmente bem documentada na biografia publicada pelo médico pessoal, Li Zhisui, em 1994. O facto de não tomar banho – e não lavar os dentes – durante quase um quarto de século não impediu Mao de ser um mulherengo compulsivo, admirador confesso de menores. Em 1953, foi mesmo criada uma trupe especial de jovens cuja única finalidade era satisfazer sexualmente o camarada. Quem nadava todos os dias e exigia ser lavado com toalhas aquecidas descartava-se delas com a mesma velocidade com que ordenava execuções: ao longo de décadas desenvolveu o hábito sádico de assistir a torturas e mortes violentas, admirando com gozo especial as imagens das sevícias exercidas sobre outros membros do partido. E nem pelos filhos demonstrou qualquer afeição. Durante a Longa Marcha, ordenou que um deles, recém-nascido, fosse abandonado à sua sorte. Ao ser chantageado por Estaline, que ameaçava raptar outro, não hesitou: “Pode ficar com ele.”

Durante anos atirou-se para o chão sempre que ouvia aproximar-se um automóvel a baixa velocidade. Pensava que seria repatriada a qualquer momento. Que a enviariam de novo para a China e para o terrível campo de trabalho, no sopé dos Himalaias, onde aprendera a ser camponesa. Jung Chang diz que o medo paralisante desapareceu ao escrever “Cisnes Selvagens”, ajuste de contas com o passado, relato dos tempos em que meninas eram gueixas ao serviço de senhores que lhes mandavam enfaixar os pés, descrição do sofrimento infligido aos membros do Partido Comunista Chinês por Mao Tse-Tung durante a Revolução Cultural, narrada pela voz de três gerações.

The truth about Mao

A mass murderer, womaniser, liar and drug baron: a book by the bestselling author Jung Chang paints an horrific portrait of the erstwhile hero of the Chinese revolution

By Jonathan Mirsky

28 May 2005

On the cover of Mao: the Unknown Story is a tiny photograph of the Chairman. It is wrinkled and tattered. Until Mao Tse-tung's death in 1976 anyone found with such a damaged photograph of the Great Helmsman, Teacher, and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts faced possible death and certain detention. In 1981, I met a woman in Nanjing who had found a bag full of Mao badges in the gutter - five years after his death - and had taken them to the nearest police station so she could not be blamed for possessing cast-off memorabilia of the Great Helmsman.

Indeed, the huge portrait of Mao with his immense mole still hangs, gazing into the distance, over the gate from Beijing's Forbidden City into Tiananmen Square.

Can this be, still? Mao Tse-tung, who was responsible for the peacetime deaths of perhaps 70 million of his fellow Chinese?

It is amazing that only now has Mao received the historical coup de grâce. No one argues any more that even though Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot did terrible things, they were, somehow, "great". The unchanged view of Mao is partly the fault of the Chinese Communist Party's leaders, who claim to be his heirs and hang his portrait in the emotional centre of the capital. But even elsewhere in the world Mao is often praised, after his brutality has been acknowledged, as a visionary, poet, calligrapher, guerrilla chieftain, military genius, unifier, and even - as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger claimed - charmer.

Not any more. In their decisive biography, Mao: the Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday leave Mao for dead. By that I mean that Mao's reputation as a "great man," unless one includes Hitler and Stalin too, is finished.

Chang's previous book, Wild Swans, which is said to be the biggest-selling non-fiction paperback ever, and worth every penny, showed the effects of Maoism on her family and herself. Halliday, her husband, is a specialist on Soviet archives. His best-known book, written with Bruce Cumings, is Korea: the Unknown War, which was turned into a vivid television series. Chang and Halliday use the word "unknown" again in their new book.

The central thesis of this biography is that Mao was as evil as Hitler and Stalin. Some will dismiss this is a hatchet job, meaning that Mao cannot have been that bad. He was. Chang and Halliday have taken a wrecker's ball to Mao, but they use the scalpel too. They have investigated every aspect of his personal life and his career, peeling back the layers of lies, myths, and what we used to think of as facts. Many of these facts were really lies, usually originating in the titanic autobiographical lie that Mao fed the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936 for his scoop, Red Star Over China. For decades, that series of lies underpinned all that Chinese and foreigners knew about Mao.

Here is a startling example of what Chang and Halliday discovered during their decade's research. The central heroic narrative of Mao's life, indeed of the Communist Party's life, is the Long March, 1934-35, long before Mao came to power in 1949. A Chinese Odyssey, it goes like this: the Red guerrillas escaped from the encirclement of President Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces and, over terrible terrain, often attacked by the Nationalists and hostile local people, and after almost 90 per cent losses, finally reached safety in the remote north-west. From their guerrilla stronghold at Yanan they built up their reputation as land-reforming revolutionaries and went on to conquer China in 1949. For years Mao was given the credit - largely from what he told Snow, who thought him "Lincolnesque" - for commanding the Reds during that epochal ordeal.

And of all the ordeals along the way, the worst was crossing the Dadu River, by way of a bridge over the deep gorge. The Nationalists on the other side had set the bridge alight, the story goes, and if the Reds had stalled there, exhausted and diminished as they were, the Long March would have probably ended in annihilation. But in the Mao legend, volunteer soldiers scrambled hand over hand along the suspension chains, through the flames, and although some fell to their deaths in the rapids below, the survivors got to the other side, drove off the enemy, the bridge was repaired, and the Reds got across and survived.

It didn't happen. Not didn't happen like that, but didn't happen at all. "This is a complete invention," write Chang and Halliday. "There was no battle at the Dadu Bridge." There were no Nationalist soldiers there, "Chiang had left the passage open for the Reds," there were no flames and "the Red army crossed the bridge without incurring a single death". How do Chang and Halliday know this? They interviewed "a sprightly 93-year-old" woman who ran a bean curd shop right next to the bridge in 1935 and saw the whole thing. They also read an interview with Peng Dehuai, a senior commander at the time, who could recall no fighting or a burning bridge. The widow of Zhu De, Mao's closest comrade in arms on the March, mentioned no fighting at the Dadu gorge.

As for Mao, the inspiring commander, he now emerges as nearly left behind by the March, disliked by almost everyone, wrong-headed in both tactics and strategy, and, most disgracefully for the legend, a survivor of the Long March only because President Chiang let the Reds go. At one point the Nationalists left a truck at the side of the road loaded with food and detailed maps of the route ahead. Chang and Halliday maintain that Chiang spared the Reds partly because Stalin was holding his son hostage. Mao and the other leaders were carried in litters. A survivor told Chang and Halliday that the elite "lounged about in litters, like landlords". Not a single high-ranking leader, no matter how ill or badly wounded, died along the March, although most of the soldiers perished. This was an early example, Chang and Halliday assert, of "the stony-hearted hierarchy and privilege under Mao's dominion".

The final nail in the coffin of the guerrilla years is that Mao rarely fought either the Nationalists or the Japanese during that period, and when his commanders did fight Chiang's forces, just twice, Mao was furious.

For several years Mao oversaw the growing of opium poppies and the extremely lucrative sale of "the black product" in areas outside his control. He told Premier Chou En-lai that the business was worth six times the official Yanan budget. The Russians, whose sources on Mao's career are Halliday's most significant contribution to the biography, estimated sales then at $60m "or some $640m (£350m) today," a humiliating admission for a patriotic movement that based its hatred of imperialism on the British export of opium into China in the 19th century.

And there are many other well-documented assertions: Mao was not dragged into the Korean war by the Communist leader Kim Il Sung and the American assault on the north: he wanted the war and knew Chinese losses would be astronomical, but was willing to trade hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives for Stalin's help - he didn't get it - in building a Chinese arms industry. Later he lured President Nixon to China and persuaded, beguiled and dazzled the president and Kissinger into offering him secret intelligence on the Soviet Union.

All this knocks big holes in the Mao legend. But the ultimate target of Chang and Halliday's onslaught on Mao is the cold heart that drove his pitiless behaviour. Four times married, he abandoned, one way or another, all his wives and most of his many children. The three wives of his adult life seemed to have been crazy about him no matter what. His surviving children tended to go mad. For a man once famed among women's liberationists in the West, he exploited and devoured numbers of women right up to his final senile, unwashed, toothless days. I knew one such woman, who as a teenage air force soldier attended Mao's dancing parties in the late Sixties where the great moment was being invited into the Chairman's bedroom to "make me some tea".

What about Mao the national leader? Actually, he cared little for peasants and during the worst famine ever, suggested they eat leaves while he sold their produce abroad, partly to give the impression that China was thriving.

As for his close comrades from the guerrilla days, Chou En-lai, Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai, Zhu De and the rest, Mao turned on them all. Of Premier Chou En-lai, famed among Western leaders for his courtly manners, and believed still by many Chinese to have saved certain people from Mao's wrath, Chang and Halliday write: "When Mao gave the word, Chou would send anyone to their death." Mao never forgot past slights or acts of disobedience. In the case of Chou, it seems, Mao remembered that in 1931 he had criticised the young Communist Party in a newspaper, and on the basis of this ancient document - which may not have been authentic - Mao was able to blackmail Chou into years of slavish obedience.

He instilled fear and obedience in ever wider circles until he achieved something Hitler and Stalin had never attempted: turning millions of his people against each other, by persuading them that spies, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, and Mao-haters were everywhere. He had learnt early that rather than shipping victims off to camps or the Gulag, or torturing and murdering them in secret, what really terrified the masses was watching torture and execution and making such murderous acts a revolutionary virtue.

In short, he was a monster, and Chang is right to claim that Mao "was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did". She also says - hence "the Unknown Story" subtitle - that "the world knows astonishingly little about him."

This is untrue. Millions of Chinese know enough about Mao to be glad he is dead. More than 20 years ago the Party itself held Mao chiefly responsible for the Cultural Revolution, "the greatest disaster" since 1949, although it also insisted that his good points greatly outweighed the bad. One of his former secretaries, Li Rui, has written that Mao "did not care how many he killed" and others have long-since pulled the veil away from Chou En-lai. In the West, the opium story has been published, as has much of Mao's reckless self-serving behaviour on the Long March, Chou En-lai's grovelling, and how Nixon and Kissinger crawled. There are excellent biographies of Mao. In a very short one, Mao, based on already published materials, Jonathan Spence of Yale wrote that Mao's rule "was hopelessly enmeshed with violence and fear". Harvard's Stuart Schram, an early biographer, has published his multi-volume Mao's Road to Power, a collection of every existing scrap of paper Mao wrote up to 1949, which shows his ruthlessness. In the late 1970s, Lucian Pye of the Massachusetts Institute of Technologylaid out Mao's psychopathology, at a time when this was regarded as over the top. Harvard's Roderick MacFarquhar's three volumes, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, compares Mao to Stalin and describes his eating well even while his policies were creating "the worst man-made famine in history". The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Mao's doctor, Li Zhisui, displays the patient as monster.

I discuss these earlier works not to undermine Chang and Halliday. What they fail to do, when they say "the Untold Story", is credit others - even if they cite them in their bibliography - with insights similar to their own. Their primary sources in Chinese and Russian are copious but how they were evaluated we do not know.

Nonetheless, what Chang and Halliday have done is immense and surpasses, as a biography, all that has gone before. There is much new material here and brutal analysis. Mao must be understood, at last, as an Olympian monster, with abilities but not virtues. Once he was in a position to wield power over and against others, his inner circle knew that "Mao liked killing," but with rare exceptions, were too terrified and mesmerised to resist. In 1966, Mao Tse-tung met a young Red Guard from a school where the headmistress had just been murdered. His advice to her? "Be violent."

Complex legacy of Chairman Mao

He may have been a despot, but the leader of the largest country in the world unintentionally did his people good

Will Hutton
Sunday May 29, 2005
The Observer

It is less than 30 years ago that the 20th-century's bloodiest dictator was approaching death, his country still dirt poor, his vision in ruins, with tens of millions of his fellow citizens dead at his hands. Today, that same country has enjoyed three decades of the most unparalleled economic growth. Mao's death has proved the trigger for an extraordinary economic renaissance.

History is the story of contradictions and unintended consequences. This book - and our understanding of China - would have been stronger still had it acknowledged them.

 

Exposing The Evil

A new biography ranks Mao alongside Hitler.

By William Underhill

Newsweek International

June 27 issue - Jung Chang sits in her elegant London drawing room and talks demurely of torture. It's a subject she knows well. In the course of China's Cultural Revolution, her mother was forced to kneel on broken glass and was paraded through the streets in a dunce's cap. Her father was driven mad by persecution. Chang herself, now 53, saw many of her compatriots humiliated and beaten. Such experiences, she says, have traumatized an entire generation of Chinese. "We have all seen horrific scenes. They are etched on our hearts."

Whether it's painful or not, Chang is determined to keep the memory alive. In her new biography, "Mao: The Unknown Story" (Jonathan Cape. 814 pages), written with her husband, the British historian Jon Halliday, Chang aims to correct misconceptions about China's past. In the early ' 90s, her global best seller "Wild Swans" told the story of China's calamitous 20th century through three generations of women in her own family. Now she has turned her attention to exposing the principal architect of her country's suffering: Chairman Mao. "I saw him bring disaster to my family and to the entire nation, [but] because he is so little known, he is still seen as largely harmless," she says.

Chang's biography unpacks the myth of the benign Great Helmsman in devastating detail. The Mao that emerges from these pages ranks alongside Hitler and Stalin for unprincipled ruthlessness. The former darling of the West's modish left was, in fact, untroubled by conscience or ideology. By Chang's reckoning, Mao was responsible for the peacetime deaths of at least 70 million Chinese—more than any other despot in history.

Her verdict looks unassailable. The book pulls together familiar material with a mass of original research. Although denied access to Chinese state archives, Chang managed to quiz some of the key survivors of the Mao era. And the success of "Wild Swans" helped open doors: the list of interviewees ranges from Henry Kissinger to Imelda Marcos.

All that's left to admire in her subject is his unquenchable thirst for power. Even some of the most famous episodes of the Mao legend turn out to be totalitarian propaganda fed to a gullible West. Chang demonstrates, for instance, that during the Long March of the 1930s, when Mao led his forces 9,600 kilometers across enemy territory, his Nationalist foes were actually keen to let him escape.

His private life, too, contrasted sharply with the public image. While the regime preached austerity, a sensualist Mao was staging sex romps in a sound-insulated lounge. Bodyguards broke in new shoes for him; his favorite fish was couriered 1,000 kilometers to his dinner table. And his personal habits were far less than heroic: he didn't take a bath for 25 years and fretted constantly about his bowel movements.

Still more startling is Mao's indifference to the fate of his own people. Even at times of acute famine, he shipped thousands of tons of grain to Russia and other communist countries in return for military hardware. Mao's prescription: "Educate the peasants to eat less." And they did. In the four years of the Great Leap Forward, 38 million died of starvation and overwork.

Fear and the potency of mass indoctrination help explain his dominance. Chang herself is a powerful witness to their impact; once a true believer, she recalls the words of a song taught in her childhood: "Father is close, mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao." Her adolescence brought disillusionment and the Cultural Revolution. As her parents' tormentors burst into their home, Chang found herself flushing down the toilet a poem she'd composed: poetry was deemed a dangerous example of free thinking. "I thought to myself, If this is paradise, then what can hell be like?"

Her own trials included stints working as a peasant, a steelworker and an electrician before she escaped to Britain to study linguistics. Today, Chang lives in a stuccoed house in fashionable Notting Hill. Her soignee good looks and flawless English suggest bourgeois comfort. But she's still driven by her mission to spread the truth. All spare time is devoted to translating the book into Chinese, even though there's little chance of publication in China; "Wild Swans" remains banned.

As she sees it, no place needs her book more than China. An outsize image of Mao, she points out, still dominates the entrance to Beijing's Forbidden City. "It is unthinkable that Hitler's portrait should still be in the center of Berlin or that German leaders should speak of themselves as Hitler's heirs," she says. Only squaring up the past can safeguard the future.  

THE TLS n.º 5338, JULY 22 2005

An abnormal mind

Perry Link

MAO
The unknown story
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

814pp. | Cape. £25. | 0 224 07126 2

In their new biography, Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, a best-selling memoir of oppression under Mao, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, show Mao Zedong not as a great philosopher, social idealist, or romantic hero of the downtrodden, but as a tyrant who manipulated anyone and anything he could in pursuit of personal power. The authors count him responsible for well over 70 million deaths in China, and on the whole see him as a greater scourge to the twentieth century than either Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. But while Hitler and Stalin have been repudiated, both in their home countries and around the rest of the world, the myth of Mao survives today: not only as an emblem of the Chinese government, but as a romantic idea in the world’s imagination. Chang and Halliday want to change that.

Some parts of Chang and Halliday’s story were already known: how Mao welcomed Japan’s invasion of China, because it made his own political victory easier; how he grew opium in Yan’an to swell his coffers, encouraged Kim Il sung to launch the Korean War, and precipitated a huge famine during the Great Leap Forward. But Chang and Halliday are better than most in showing Mao’s wizardly ability as a schemer and tactician. He was no orator, and shunned public speaking; but he trolled incessantly for political information and was ruthless in calculating his personal advantage in any situation. Throughout his life he despised rivals. No one could remain his second-in-command for long; sooner or later every one of them was killed, banished, or immobilized by blackmail. Mao easily turned against people who were close to him – his mentors, his wives, his brother, his barber, even a bodyguard. To say that he “betrayed” these people would not be quite accurate, because betrayal implies a sense that one’s actions are wrong, and Mao seems to have been free of such notions. He simply did what worked. Chang and Halliday also review Mao’s personal indulgences: his villas, his sexual appetites, his catered towel-rubs in lieu of baths, his elaborate security measures, his lack of a wristwatch because he scheduled
no appointments: he summoned anyone, at any time of day or night, whenever he felt like it. But, except that we now have endnotes on such matters, none of these stories is exactly new. Chinese people have been relaying them for decades.

The most important of Chang and Halliday’s new discoveries have to do with the sustained role of the Soviet Union in Mao’s rise. Halliday reads Russian, and has made excellent use of the opening of Soviet archives after 1992. He and Chang assert that the idea of a Communist Party of China originated in Moscow in 1919 and detail the ways in which, beginning in 1921, the Comintern called the shots for Mao and other early Chinese Communists. Mao accepted the European Communists as his masters, and used them against his Chinese rivals, but also manipulated their feelings whenever he saw an advantage in doing so. The aim of Mao’s 1934–5 Long March to the north-west of China was to link up with the Soviets to obtain arms. Chang and Halliday destroy the myth of the Long March (which was rooted in Edgar Snow’s classic 1936 interview with Mao) by showing how its foot-soldiers were not eager Revolutionaries but common folk, recruited by force and shot if they straggled. The authors also marshal evidence to suggest – but not quite prove – that the Long March succeeded, not because of spectacular tenacity, but because the Soviets were holding Chiang Kai-shek’s son in a kind of genteel hostagecaptivity, and this induced Chiang to let the Reds through – even to provide them with maps. After 1949, Mao, turning towards the world stage, was obsessed with the goal of attaining nuclear arms from the Soviets, and made the fateful decision to export food from the Chinese countryside in order to pay for them. Chang and Halliday observe that if one counts the Great Leap famine deaths as in this sense nuclearrelated, then they outnumber the bomb-related deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by about a hundred to one.

But weren’t Mao’s sympathy for peasants and his “rural strategy” his distinctive contributions to Marxist theory? Not at all, say Chang and Halliday. In the Civil War of the late 1940s, it was Mao’s rival Liu Shaoqi who pressed for a countryside strategy, while Mao insisted on attacking cities; after 1949, it was Mao who decreed an apartheid-like household-registry system that made peasant migration to the cities illegal. Chang and Halliday go so far as to refer to Mao’s “war on peasants”, but that metaphor does not seem quite right. Millions of peasants died incidentally to Mao’s purposes, and there is little evidence that he cared that they perished; but the deaths themselves were not his goal. “Contempt for peasants” would be a better phrase; Mao referred to them as “two shoulders and a bum” – that is, producers of labour and of human fertilizer. In large numbers, as “the masses”, they were like schools of anchovies to him, great swaths of which could be netted for his needs – which included, at various times, corvée labour, guerrilla armies, siege victims (who could thereby generate political leverage), producers of food for export, and grounds for the claim that China need not fear nuclear attack because so many people would still be left alive.

“His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power”, write Chang and Halliday. This is a good summary of their book, but to infer what was in Mao’s mind, at the end of his life or any other time, is not so easy. It was not a normal mind. (In 1955, Mao observed to a Finnish ambassador that a nuclear explosion of Earth would be “a big thing for the solar system” but nothing much for the universe as a whole.) Few people were close to Mao, but some who were – two girlfriends, his physician and a personal secretary – have left memoirs that suggest a truly peculiar psychological trait in Mao: he was without human sympathy. Mao’s doctor Li Zhisui tells of sitting next to Mao at a performance in Shanghai when a child acrobat slipped and crashed to the floor. The audience gasped. Mao, alone, laughed. Both the crowd’s gasp and Mao’s laugh were reflexive responses, not the products of deliberation. In my view, any attempt to understand the mind of Mao must seek to understand the mental conditions that would produce that kind of laugh.

Chang and Halliday avoid a topic that Chinese intellectuals have often speculated on: was Mao, to some degree, insane? Insanity ran in his family, including two of his children. In his later years Mao was so paranoiac that he ordered attendants to make noise as they approached so as not to terrify him when they drew near. He had no normal family life and no true friends. For all his immense privilege and power, it is hard to imagine him, in the ordinary sense, as happy.

The myth of Mao diverges so far from the reality that one can understand an author’s impulse to approach it with a hatchet, as Chang and Halliday have very effectively done. But this approach leads them to omit the good that happened during the Mao years, even if it was not of Mao’s doing. The authors may have feared that to acknowledge anything beneficial would weaken their case against Mao or would play into the hands of those who argue that, despite all, the emergence of New China made it worthwhile to pay the price of Mao. They should have set such fears aside. No fair-minded reader can finish their book and then conclude that Mao was worth the price that China paid. To point to some of the good which occurred during the 1950s or 60s would not have undermined the authors’ case, but would rather have given it extra credibility.

For example, Chang and Halliday mention the many young people who, in the 1940s, believed the Communist ideals, and either flocked to Yan’an or joined the Party underground in the cities. But then they describe how Mao mistreated these idealists, without mentioning that, in the 1950s, they and large numbers of others, went on to help China to achieve significant progress in such areas as health, life expectancy, employment, housing, literacy and social services. Many 1950s idealists truly cared for the public good, made sacrifices for it, and thought that in doing so they were associating with Mao. Chang and Halliday could have shown this to have been a gigantic case of false consciousness. The exalted image of Mao in people’s minds bore no resemblance to the actual, highly secretive, Mao, who in fact was calculating how to exploit popular idealism as just one more route to personal power. In his Anti-Rightist drive of 1957, Mao betrayed the idealists. He criticized them, humiliated them, drove many to ostracism, divorce and suicide – and for every one that he persecuted he frightened dozens more. All this is without doubt true, but it does not follow that what these people did in the name of Mao was not good.

In China, traces of idealistic socialism survived as late as the 1980s, even as many of its intellectual leaders – Liu Binyan, Wang Ruoshui, Su Shaozhi and others – were purged or exiled. (Mao and his heirs have never tolerated serious Marxists.) In a 2004 interview, Liu Binyan, twentieth-century China’s leading investigative reporter, said that he still believes that “socialism with a human face” could have worked in China. In a posthumously published book entitled The Newly Discovered Mao Zedong, Wang Ruoshui, formerly a deputy editor-in-chief at People’s Daily, holds Mao responsible for numerous “errors”. Wang, certainly at the end of his life, was far from naive. His insistence on the word “errors” is his way of agreeing with Liu Binyan: things could and should have been different.
Another notable good that sprang from the Mao years was utterly unintended and unforeseen by Mao. Following the mayhem of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, a generation of Chinese suddenly saw their leader’s inspirational language (“serve the people”, etc) as fraudulent “empty talk”. Disillusionment taught them, better than any words of a Great Helmsman ever could, that from now on they would have to think for themselves. The co-author Jung Chang herself, who was born in 1952 and was once a Red Guard, is a clear example of this effect. Broadly speaking, among Chinese people of all kinds, the decades since high Maoism have seen a steady increase in the readiness to protest and to rebel at unfair treatment. This trend has had much less to do with intellectual influences, Maoist or Western, than with a recoil from the disasters that Mao inflicted. The same recoil has, of course, also had its costs. The often noted collapse of public morality in China in recent times is closely related. The unscrupulous, grab-what-you-can mentality that plagues China today flourished under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, but the foundation for public cynicism was laid by Mao.

The situation in China today seems also to explain why Chang and Halliday have written Mao: The unknown story. Their passion may be partly the result of Chang’s memories of the pain she suffered under Mao, as set forth in Wild Swans. But a greater reason is clearly that the Mao myth still haunts China today. Hitler and Stalin have fallen from grace, and the less gargantuan twentieth-century tyrants – Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and others – are buried even further from any greatness. But Mao’s “portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square”, write Chang and Halliday, and the current Chinese regime “declares itself to be Mao’s heir” even as it continues to obliterate much of the truth about the man. A recent survey by China Women magazine found that Mao is a number-one hero among Chinese teenagers, who understand “hero” to mean, inter alia, “kind and caring; tolerant; selfless; honest; brave” – all qualities that could not be further removed from the Mao that Chang and Halliday reveal. Early this summer, Chinese government officials notified editors at the Far Eastern Economic Review that its June issue would be banned from China if it carried a review of Chang and Halliday’s book written by the distinguished China-watcher Jonathan Mirsky. Reviews in the Financial Times and on the BBC were also blocked.

The Chinese government clings to its Mao myth because it fears that its shaky legitimacy would be even shakier without it. Propaganda officials do what they can to protect Mao’s image, so it is hard to blame Chinese teenagers for their abysmal understanding of Mao. Yet it would be a mistake to see today’s pro-Mao sentiment as something entirely stimulated from above. In the 1990s, a wave of “Mao fever” became a genuinely popular trend in China. Ordinary people, exasperated by rampant corruption and vaulting inequality in the money-rules-all Jiang Zemin years, looked back at the 1950s and felt a certain nostalgia, as if to say, “whatever Old Mao’s faults may have been, at least we didn’t have these problems back then”. Mao may have been “too correct”, but at least there was an idea of correctness in the air, whereas now anything goes, and public morality is a sham. This Mao-nostalgia was made easier, of course, by distance from the man himself. A joke in the 1990s said there are two reasons why people visit Mao’s mausoleum at Tiananmen: to salute him and to confirm his death. Both feelings were genuine.

If China is finally to free itself from Mao, the Chinese people will have to relinquish their Mao myth, and this clearly is what Chang and Halliday hope that their book will help to achieve. In the end, though, they have concentrated too much on the figure of Mao. They tend to divide the leaders of the Communist movement into good people (Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others) who were trying to help the common folk, and bad people (Mao, Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and many others) who cared only for themselves. In making these divisions they feed the assumption, which is deeply embedded in Chinese political culture, that if only the good people can gain the upper hand, everything will be fine. But this is an oversimplification. Not only did the “good” people behave pretty badly (Deng Xiaoping ordered more than one massacre of civilians during his career); more fundamentally, the problems are intrinsic to the whole political system and its subculture, not merely the fault of individuals. To be sure, Mao did play a major role in creating that system – in which fear and blackmail induce “thought work” and “confession”; in which A’s “mistake” can become B’s club for destroying A (Chinese officials, when appearing in groups, still monitor one another’s speech); in which insincere language manipulation turns into an art of self-defence; and in which suspicion of rivals, jockeying for position, colluding and betraying, deception, obsession with secrecy, the private recording of phone calls, etc – behaviour much like that of the Mafia but less brotherly, as Simon Leys observed more than twenty years ago – all become routine. Once this system was established it was not merely peculiar to Mao: it belonged to everyone. In modified form it is still with us.

People inside this system know what it is really like, but, precisely because they are part of it, need to dissemble to outsiders. Foreigners who cannot see past the surfaces become trophies of the system’s deception and sometimes even turn into official “friends of China” (although, to the insiders, little true friendship, and even less respect, is actually involved). Part of Chang and Halliday’s passion for exposing the “unknown” Mao is clearly aimed at gullible Westerners. Mao entranced Edgar Snow, Zhou Enlai charmed Henry Kissinger, and in both cases the consequences for Western understanding of China were severe. Chang and Halliday quote Kissinger on how talking with Zhou resembled a Chinese banquet, “prepared from the long sweep of tradition and culture, meticulously cooked by hands of experience . . . many courses . . . some sweet and some sour . . .”. Here I pause to wonder whether “sweet” and “sour” are a subtle reference to Kissinger’s background knowledge of Chinese culture, specifically to the hybrid dish called sweet-and-sour that is common in Chinese-American restaurants. Would he also, in France, extol haute cuisine by reference to French fries? Kissinger’s memoirs make clear that his praise for the rarefied summit of the Mao world was not only tactical flattery, but the result of naivety and a very superficial understanding of China. Moreover Kissinger is not alone. For decades many in the Western intellectual and political elites have assumed that Mao and his heirs symbolize the Chinese people and their culture, and that to show respect to the rulers is the same as showing respect to the subjects. Anyone who reads Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s book should be inoculated against this particular delusion. If the book sells even half as many copies as the 12 million of Wild Swans, it could deliver the coup de grâce to an embarrassing and dangerous pattern of Western thinking.

Other articles about the book, here