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

October 23, 2005

'Mao': The Real Mao

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

If Chairman Mao had been truly prescient, he would have located a little girl in Sichuan Province named Jung Chang and "mie jiuzu"- killed her and wiped out all her relatives to the ninth degree.

But instead that girl grew up, moved to Britain and has now written a biography of Mao that will help destroy his reputation forever. Based on a decade of meticulous interviews and archival research, this magnificent biography methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao's claim to sympathy or legitimacy.

Almost seven decades ago, Edgar Snow's "Red Star Over China" helped make Mao a heroic figure to many around the world. It marked an opening bookend for Mao's sunny place in history - and this biography will now mark the other bookend.

When I first opened this book, I was skeptical. Chang is the author of "Wild Swans," a hugely successful account of three generations of women in her family, and it was engaging but not a work of scholarship. I was living in China when it appeared, and my Chinese friends and I were all surprised at its success, for the experiences she recounted were sad but not unusual. As for this biography, written together with her husband, Jon Halliday, a historian, I expected it to be similarly fat but slight. Also, the subtitle is "The Unknown Story" - which, after all that has been written about Mao, made me cringe.

Yet this is a magisterial work. True, much of Mao's brutality has already emerged over the years, but this biography supplies substantial new information and presents it all in a stylish way that will put it on bedside tables around the world. No wonder the Chinese government has banned not only this book but issues of magazines with reviews of it, for Mao emerges from these pages as another Hitler or Stalin.

In that regard, I have reservations about the book's judgments, for my own sense is that Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China. And at times the authors seem so eager to destroy him that I wonder if they exclude exculpatory evidence. But more on those cavils later.

Mao is not only a historical figure, of course, but is part of the (tattered) web of legitimacy on which the People's Republic rests. He is part of the founding mythology of the Chinese government, the Romulus and Remus of "People's China," and that's why his portrait hangs in Tiananmen Square. Even among ordinary Chinese, Mao retains a hold on the popular imagination, and some peasants in different parts of China have started traditional religious shrines honoring him. That's the ultimate honor for an atheist - he has become a god.

Mao's sins in later life are fairly well known, and even Chen Yun, one of the top Chinese leaders in the 1980's, suggested that it might have been best if Mao had died in 1956. This biography shows, though, that Mao was something of a fraud from Day 1.

The authors assert, for example, that he was not in fact a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, as is widely believed, and that the party was founded in 1920 rather than 1921. Moreover, they rely on extensive research in Russian archives to show that the Chinese party was entirely under the thumb of the Russians. In one nine-month period in the 1920's, for example, 94 percent of the party's funding came from Russia, and only 6 percent was raised locally. Mao rose to be party leader not because he was the favorite of his fellow Chinese, but because Moscow chose him. And one reason Moscow chose him was that he excelled in sycophancy: he once told the Russians that "the latest Comintern order" was so brilliant that "it made me jump for joy 300 times."

Mao has always been celebrated as a great peasant leader and military strategist. But this biography mocks that claim. The mythology dates from the "Autumn Harvest Uprising" of 1927. But, according to Chang and Halliday, Mao wasn't involved in the fighting and in fact sabotaged it - until he hijacked credit for it afterward.

It's well known that Mao's first wife (or second, depending on how you count), Yang Kaihui, was killed in 1930 by a warlord rival of Mao's. But not much else is known of her. Now Chang and Halliday quote from poignant unsent letters that were discovered during renovations of her old home in 1982 and in 1990. The letters reveal both a deep love for Mao and a revulsion for the brutality of her time (and of her husband). "Kill, kill, kill!" she wrote in one letter, which became a kind of memoir of her life. "All I hear is this sound in my ears! Why are human beings so evil? Why so cruel?" Mao could easily have saved this gentle woman, the mother of his first three children, for he passed near the home where he had left her. But he didn't lift a finger, and she was shot to death at the age of 29.

By this time, the book relates, many in the Red Army distrusted Mao - so he launched a brutal purge of the Communist ranks. He wrote to party headquarters that he had discovered 4,400 subversives in the army and had tortured them all and executed most of them. A confidential report found that a quarter of the entire Red Army under Mao at the time was slaughtered, often after they were tortured in such ways as having red-hot rods forced into their rectums.

One of the most treasured elements of Chinese Communist history is the Long March, the iconic flight across China to safety in the northwest. It is usually memorialized as a journey in which Mao and his comrades showed incredible courage and wisdom in sneaking through enemy lines and overcoming every hardship. Chang and Halliday undermine every element of that conventional wisdom.

First, they argue that Mao and the Red Army escaped and began the Long March only because Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deliberately allowed them to. They argue that Chiang wanted to send his own troops into three southwestern provinces but worried about antagonizing the local warlords. So he channeled the Red Army into those provinces on the Long March and then, at the invitation of the alarmed warlords, sent in troops to expel the Communists and thus succeeded in bringing the wayward provinces into his domain.

More startling, they argue that Mao didn't even walk most of the Long March - he was carried. "On the march, I was lying in a litter," they quote Mao as saying decades later. "So what did I do? I read. I read a lot." Now, that's bourgeois.

The most famous battle of the Long March was the Communists' crossing of the Dadu Bridge, supposedly a heroic assault under enemy fire. Harrison Salisbury's 1985 book, "The Long March," describes a "suicide attack" over a bridge that had been mostly dismantled, then soaked with kerosene and set on fire. But Chang and Halliday write that this battle was a complete fabrication, and in a triumph of scholarship they cite evidence that all 22 men who led the crossing survived and received gifts afterward of a Lenin suit and a fountain pen. None was even wounded. They quote Zhou Enlai as expressing concern afterward because a horse had been lost while crossing the bridge.

The story continues in a similar vein: Mao had a rival, Wang Ming, poisoned and nearly killed while in their refuge in Yenan. Mao welcomed the Japanese invasion of China, because he thought this would lead to a Russian counterinvasion and a chance for him to lead a Russian puppet regime. Far from leading the struggle against the Japanese invaders, Mao ordered the Red Army not to fight the Japanese and was furious when other Communist leaders skirmished with them. Indeed, Mao is said to have collaborated with Japanese intelligence to undermine the Chinese Nationalist forces.

Almost everybody is tarnished. Madame Sun Yat-sen, also known as Song Qingling, is portrayed as a Soviet agent, albeit not very convincingly. And Zhang Xueliang, the "Young Marshal" who is widely remembered as a hero in China for kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek to force him to fight the Japanese, is portrayed as a power-hungry coup-monger. I knew the Young Marshal late in his life, and his calligraphy for my Chinese name adorns the Chinese version of my business cards, but now I'm wondering if I should get new cards.

After Mao comes to power, Chang and Halliday show him continuing his thuggery. This is more familiar ground, but still there are revelations. Mao used the Korean War as a chance to slaughter former Nationalist soldiers. And Mao says some remarkable things about the peasants he was supposed to be championing. When they were starving in the 1950's, he instructed: "Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel. The State should try its hardest . . . to prevent peasants eating too much." In Moscow, he offered to sacrifice the lives of 300 million Chinese, half the population at the time, and in 1958 he blithely declared of the overworked population: "Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die."

At times, Mao seems nuts. He toyed with getting rid of people's names and replacing them with numbers. And discussing the possible destruction of the earth with nuclear weapons, he mused that "this might be a big thing for the solar system, but it would still be an insignificant matter as far as the universe as a whole is concerned."

Chang and Halliday recount how the Great Leap Forward led to the worst famine in world history in the late 1950's and early 1960's, and how in 1966 Mao clawed his way back to supreme power in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Some of the most fascinating material involves Zhou Enlai, the longtime prime minister, who comes across as a complete toady of Mao, even though Mao tormented him by forcing him to make self-criticisms and by seating him in third-rate seats during meetings. In the mid-1970's, Zhou was suffering from cancer and yet Mao refused to allow him to get treatment - wanting Zhou to be the one to die first. "Operations are ruled out for now" for Zhou, Mao declared on May 9, 1974. "Absolutely no room for argument." And so, sure enough, Zhou died in early 1976, and Mao in September that year.

This is an extraordinary portrait of a monster, who the authors say was responsible for more than 70 million deaths. But how accurate is it? A bibliography and endnotes give a sense of sourcing, and they are impressive: the authors claim to have talked to everyone from Mao's daughter, Li Na, to his mistress, Zhang Yufeng, to Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford. But it's not clear how much these people said. One of those listed as a source is Zhang Hanzhi, Mao's English teacher and close associate; she's also one of my oldest Chinese friends, so I checked with her. Zhang Hanzhi said that she had indeed met informally with Chang two or three times but had declined to be interviewed and never said anything substantial. I hope that Chang and Halliday will share some of their source materials, either on the Web or with other scholars, so that it will be possible to judge how fairly and accurately they have reached their conclusions.

My own feeling is that most of the facts and revelations seem pretty well backed up, but that ambiguities are not always adequately acknowledged. To their credit, the authors seem to have steered clear of relying on some of the Hong Kong magazines that traffic in a blurry mix of fact and fiction, but it is still much harder to ferret out the truth than they acknowledge. The memoirs and memories they rely on may be trustworthy, most of the time, but I question the tone of brisk self-confidence that the authors use in recounting events and quotations - and I worry that some things may be hyped.

Take the great famine from 1958 to 1961. The authors declare that "close to 38 million people died," and in a footnote they cite a Chinese population analysis of mortality figures in those years. Well, maybe. But there have been many expert estimates in scholarly books and journals of the death toll, ranging widely, and in reality no one really knows for sure - and certainly the mortality data are too crude to inspire confidence. The most meticulous estimates by demographers who have researched the famine toll are mostly lower than this book's: Judith Banister estimated 30 million; Basil Ashton also came up with 30 million; and Xizhe Peng suggested about 23 million. Simply plucking a high-end estimate out of an article and embracing it as the one true estimate worries me; if that is stretched, then what else is?

Another problem: Mao comes across as such a villain that he never really becomes three-dimensional. As readers, we recoil from him but don't really understand him. He is presented as such a bumbling psychopath that it's hard to comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead China and emerge as one of the most worshipped figures of the last century.

Finally, there is Mao's place in history. I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao's legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea. Indeed, Mao's entire assault on the old economic and social structure made it easier for China to emerge as the world's new economic dragon.

Perhaps the best comparison is with Qinshihuang, the first Qin emperor, who 2,200 years ago unified China, built much of the Great Wall, standardized weights and measures and created a common currency and legal system - but burned books and buried scholars alive. The Qin emperor was as savage and at times as insane as Mao - but his success in integrating and strengthening China laid the groundwork for the next dynasty, the Han, one of the golden eras of Chinese civilization. In the same way, I think, Mao's ruthlessness was a catastrophe at the time, brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book - and yet there's more to the story: Mao also helped lay the groundwork for the rebirth and rise of China after five centuries of slumber.

Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, has written books about China and Asia together with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.

Putting a knife into heart of the Chairman's legend

Reviewed by Howard W. French

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Mao

The Unknown Story

By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

KNOPF; 814 PAGES; $35

A recent headline in a Shanghai newspaper lamented that China had a dearth of feature-length movies depicting the country's war against Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, and went on to wonder why.

Could it be because the official story known to Chinese during the 56 years since the revolution had gotten it all wrong; that the Communists who have taken credit for liberating the country in fact did precious little of the liberating?

Could it be because to explore the truth about the man whose smiling countenance peers out from every piece of paper money in the country would be to reveal him as anything but a hero, indeed as a surpassingly evil man?

Opening lines have an outsize importance for many writers. But in answering the question of just how evil, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, the wife and husband who wrote Mao: The Unknown Story," have perhaps set a new standard. For here is an 814-page book including index, bibliography and extensive notes that concludes its central business in a remarkable first line: "Mao Zedong, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader."

To say that the rest of the book consists of mere details would be doing a disservice to the years of research that went into the couple's work. Chang and Halliday have plunged a dagger deep into the heart of the Mao legend, so deep it is hard to imagine anything like a full recovery.

Their act of literary violence, which bears the whiff of revenge, is built on compelling if sometimes disjointed anecdotes told for page after page about this great and terrible man. Readers who are even slightly inclined toward the subject are likely to find the book, for all its weightiness, hard to put down.

There is a nagging problem, though, in both their method and in their style, which in the end detracts from the conclusion they have labored so hard to support: Scarcely a sentence in the book is dispassionate. Not even for a moment is the reader left in doubt as to the results of the indictment. And by the end of the reader's efforts, the thrill and even titillation that comes from learning many dark truths about someone you thought was already familiar have gradually come to be dulled, perhaps for some even outweighed by a yearning for countervailing facts or alternative points of view.

The gripe here is not that Mao was not the greatest killer of a very bad century of killers, although Chang and Halliday have not quite proved their brief. But as someone who has been fascinated with Mao's story since high school in the 1970s, when the country was first opening up again after the Cultural Revolution, I was most disappointed with the book's exploration of the chairman's motives.

The authors have reduced him to a bloodthirsty, power-obsessed egotist, someone who never believed in communism, nor in anything else, and this from the very first pages of the book. "I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others," Mao wrote as a 24-year-old. "People like me want to satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes."

Moreover, they have given us a picture of Mao as lazy and cowardly, rendering him responsible for all that went wrong during his era and none of what went right.

Among the most widely cited anecdotes from the book is the authors' rebuttal of the standard legend of the Long March, a 5,000-mile trek across the country during the civil war and the war with Japan. The book says that Mao's fighters were merely allowed to survive by Chiang Kai Shek. More watertight than their brief against Mao as a monster for his responsibility for death on an unprecedented scale, or their theories about the anti-Japanese war -- both stories are by necessity more complex than they admit, both morally and in their intimate details -- is their picture of him as a woefully ill-inspired economic thinker.

Mao was wedded to two things -- personal and national prestige and an aversion to the rise of new, entrenched economic elites, fueling endless purges and a depletion of the great energies developing China today. Toward the end, the Helmsman was confessing his failure to other statesmen, telling Le Duan, head of the Vietnamese Communist Party, "now the poorest nation in the world is not you, but us," and telling Henry Kissinger his country was "backward," capable only of firing "empty cannons." Rather than change course, though, Mao praised Pol Pot for creating a slave society with "no more classes," and mounted yet another purge of Deng Xiaoping.

Historians will find much to quibble about in this voluminous but jaunty work. Chang and Halliday's word is far from the last, and yet for anyone who reads it there is no way to mistake Mao's smiling countenance for anything like benevolence again.

Howard W. French is a senior writer for the New York Times and author of "A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa." He lives with his family in Shanghai.

October 21, 2005

BOOK REVIEW

Long march to the real Mao Tse-tung

By Seth Faison, Special to The Times

Mao

The Unknown Story

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Alfred A. Knopf: 704 pp., $35 

MAO TSE-TUNG still is worshipped widely in China as the greatest leader of modern times, admired as a powerful ruler who stood up to Confucian tradition and foreign domination, and heralded as a champion of the poor farmers who remain the majority of the nation's 1.3 billion people. In the years since Mao's death in 1976, many Chinese and even some Westerners have clung to the notion that he was a noble patriot, an acceptable kind of tyrant.

In "Mao: The Unknown Story," Jung Chang and Jon Halliday take apart, brick by brick, the towering myths surrounding Mao: that he was a voice for China's peasants, a military genius who masterminded the "Long March" of his Red Army to safety, then led it in a war to repel Japan.

Instead, Chang and Halliday portray Mao as a conniving, backstabbing, relentless schemer whose motivation was power. It drips with tales of betrayal and treachery on an almost unimaginable scale. It also is a powerful narrative about China's sorrow, about a country wrecked by his malevolent methods. Chang wrote "Wild Swans" (1991), a best-selling history of her family that also lyrically rendered China's beguiling culture and violent past. For "Mao," Chang and her husband, Halliday, conducted a decade of exhaustive research, interviewing members of Mao's inner circle and hundreds of others.

Mao emerges in these pages as a restless rebel in Hunan with a passion for literature who rose to power by outfoxing countless rivals to rule the Communist Party. He engaged in spectacular political fights, was responsible for a famine that killed more than 30 million and led a "Great Purge," the authors' name for Mao's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s that devastated Chinese society.

It is a book full of juicy characters. Lin Biao, who was so afraid of water that he didn't bathe, promoted Mao as a god and the Little Red Book of Mao quotations as a Bible, only to consider assassinating him and then, once discovered, was killed trying to escape to the Soviet Union. Chou En-lai, the polished diplomat who covered up decades of Mao's worst acts, was betrayed by Mao in the end. Jiang Qing, Mao's fourth wife and shrill attack dog, said at her trial, "Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit."

The myths that fall are numerous. One is that Mao's empathy with China's farmers put him at the helm of an agrarian-led revolution. In fact, the authors demonstrate, the "peasant uprisings" Mao claimed to have led were actually sophisticated power-grabs in which he relied on bandits and used elaborate trickery to gain access to soldiers and power. Another is that the Red Army won the people's support by being upright, never looting or taxing the poor. The book shows persuasively that he stole aggressively from the rich, the poor and the in-between, and always insisted on luxuries for himself — eating delicacies, residing in palaces, bedding young women — even in the direst moments of war.

Chang and Halliday portray the Long March as a series of makeshift steps, each intended to further Mao's own ascension, and they contend that his climactic battle at the Dadu River, intricately told in Edgar Snow's classic book "Red Star Over China," was entirely made up. They describe his treatment of his wives and children, whom he cast aside when they became inconvenient, and of his enemies, whom he exiled, poisoned or executed.

The authors use newly available Soviet documents to illuminate Mao's complex relationship with Josef Stalin, how Mao begged for and depended on Stalin's aid in the 1940s, and may not have been able to defeat Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army without it. They cite cable traffic between the two men to show how eagerly Mao welcomed the Korean War and sent millions of Chinese soldiers to death to serve his other purposes.

In some places, Chung and Halliday go too far, effectively diluting the force of their argument: that Mao was a sophisticated thug who bullied his way to the top and stopped at nothing to hold power. They allege that he was responsible for more than 70 million deaths, but their calculations are rife with guesses and worst-case suppositions. Many of their "revelations" have been published in bits and pieces in a recent gush of Chinese-language histories and memoirs. Some items are unreliable, others implausible.

But the book's main flaw is excess. The authors seem so set on demolishing Mao's reputation that they overreach. In one place, they imply that Mao's comments precipitated the erecting of the Berlin Wall. In another, they suggest that Mao caused Stalin's death because of a document found at Stalin's bedside about Josip Broz Tito, the troublesome Yugoslavian communist leader whom Stalin once compared to Mao — as if the mere thought of Mao were enough to trigger a stroke.

One of Mao's genuine achievements was to promote the rights for Chinese women after centuries of repression. Yet the authors argue that by mandating equal manual labor for men and women, Mao "felt little tenderness" for women.

The authors also portray Mao's rivals as compassionate humanitarians, evidently to make Mao look more evil. Peng Dehuai, a war hero and defense minister purged by Mao, is described as someone who "cared about the poor and downtrodden." They write that Liu Shaoqi, Mao's deputy until 1967, was "patriotic" and upset to learn about starvation.

The authors' haphazard method of spelling Chinese names seems to reflect a disregard for accuracy. Most readers won't care, but anyone familiar with Chinese history will find it strange that Mao's third wife, He Zizhen, is referred to only by a nickname, Gui-yuan.

In their efforts to demonize Mao, the authors fail to reflect on why Mao is still so admired in China today. Part of that phenomenon is an intense nostalgia that rests on Mao's perceived victories, his cleverness, his unpredictability. Although information about Mao's sordid past is emerging, many Chinese insist on seeing him as the founding father of communist China, as the embattled winner of its civil war and fight against Japan, the rough equivalent of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt wrapped into one.

At the same time, Mao clearly stood for poverty and totalitarian control, now completely discredited in China. Mao also went against many so Chinese ideals — respect for authority, concern for appearances — that he seems to represent everything that Chinese people ordinarily despise.

In a repressive culture, it may be that the Chinese people yearn for a hero who rebels against all the traditional restrictions that they themselves willingly suffer. The authors do not mull this possibility.

Their epilogue is two sentences long, noting that Mao's portrait still hangs alone at the main gate of Tiananmen Square and that the Party "fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao."

In saying this, Chang and Halliday miss the complexity and subtlety of today's China and fail to explain why Mao still has such a hold.
 

Seth Faison, a former correspondent for the New York Times in China, wrote "South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China."
 

N Z Z  Online

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 18. Oktober 2005, Ressort Bücherherbst

Der Welt grösster Massenmörder

Jung Chang und Jon Halliday über Mao Zedong

Von Urs Schoettli

Noch liegt die Leiche Maos im Mausoleum auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens. Noch sind das Wirken und das Vermächtnis des Grossen Vorsitzenden in der Volksrepublik China unantastbar, auch wenn seine Maximen von den Parteioberen heute nicht mehr so häufig zitiert werden und die jüngeren Generationen in ihm eher einen gütigen Onkel denn einen Revolutionsführer sehen. In Trödlergeschäften kann man in Peking noch immer Mao-Memorabilien kaufen, und amüsierte Touristen nehmen sie mit nach Hause. Man denke, welchen Sturm der Entrüstung ein ähnliches Angebot von Hitler-Andenken in Berlin auslösen würde. Manche der «Achtundsechziger», die sich heute in den Sinekuren des von ihnen einst bekämpften Kapitalismus eingerichtet haben, tragen Mitschuld daran, dass Mao auch im freien Westen noch immer viel gnädiger behandelt wird als Hitler und Stalin.

Dabei konnte die Welt bei Mao, auch wenn sie von den blutigen Intrigen und Abscheulichkeiten, die er während des Bürgerkriegs beging, nichts wissen konnte, das wahre Gesicht gleich zweimal zur Kenntnis nehmen, beim sogenannten «Grossen Sprung nach vorn» und bei der sogenannten «Grossen Kulturrevolution». Man wird, wenn man die intellektuellen Kniefälle von Leuten wie Sartre oder die abscheulichen Kotaus von westlichen Politikern, allen voran Kissinger und Nixon, in Rechnung stellt, den Verdacht nicht mehr los, dass tiefsitzender Rassismus die Weissen auf der Linken wie der Rechten dem Massenmörder Mao eine Sonderabsolution hat erteilen lassen. Insgeheim hegten sie vielleicht dieselbe Ansicht wie der Grosse Vorsitzende, dass bei so vielen Millionen Chinesen es nichts ausmacht, wenn die eine oder andere Million auf dem Altar der Geschichte geopfert wird.

Konterrevolutionär

Jung Chang, die sich mit ihrem Erinnerungsbuch «Wilde Schwäne» bereits einen Namen gemacht hat, und ihr Ehemann, der Historiker Jon Halliday, legen eine gründlich recherchierte Biografie vor. Für Beobachter ohne ideologische Scheuklappen bringt das Buch zwar nichts wesentlich Neues, als sorgfältige Sammlung der Schandtaten des Diktators aber ist es von erheblichem dokumentarischem Wert. Von der wahnwitzigen Paranoia, die am Hofe Maos und seiner vierten Frau, Jiang Qing, herrschte, wusste man bereits aus dem Bericht von Maos Leibarzt Li Zhisui. Das neue Buch geht weit vor die Zeit zurück, da Mao Zhongnanhai, die exklusive Residenz unweit von Pekings Verbotener Stadt, bezog. Es zeigt die endlosen und meist blutig endenden Machtspiele, die Mao betrieb, um an die Spitze der Kommunistischen Partei zu gelangen und sich als absolutistischer Herrscher über Leib und Leben seiner Komparsen zu behaupten. Es kommt dabei das Bild eines klassischen Konterrevolutionärs heraus, der, wenn es um die Beseitigung von Rivalen ging, auch nicht davor zurückschreckte, dem Feind wiederholt zu Vorteilen zu verhelfen, und dem selbstverständlich kein revolutionäres Prinzip auch nur einen Deut wert war. Noch und noch mussten engste Weggefährten über die Klinge springen. Lange vor dem endgültigen Sieg über Chiang Kai-schek zeigte Mao den wahren Charakter seiner Herrschaft. Als er zwischen 1931 und 1935 das erste kommunistische Staatsgebilde auf chinesischer Erde führte, erlebten die unter seine Fuchtel geratenen Regionen die gravierendsten Bevölkerungsverluste in ganz China. Der wenige Jahre später folgende Terror in Yenan etablierte Mao als den Stalin Chinas.

Am 1. Oktober 1949 konnte Mao auf Pekings Platz des Himmlischen Friedens die Volksrepublik ausrufen. Er war am Ziel angelangt, der Gegner hatte nur noch eine kleine Insel, Taiwan, unter seiner Kontrolle. Doch dieser Erfolg vermochte den Machthunger Maos nicht zu stillen. Bald sollten das Misstrauen gegenüber und die Rivalität mit der Sowjetunion hinzukommen, noch später schliesslich die Wahnidee, für China den Status einer Supermacht zu erreichen. Diesen machtpolitischen Zielen wurde alles untergeordnet, auch der letzte ökonomische Sachverstand den es in der ausgepowerten Volksrepublik noch gab. Der «Grosse Sprung nach vorn» führte das Land ab 1958 in den totalen Ruin und bescherte China die grösste Hungersnot, welche die Menschheit je gesehen hatte. Auch als Dutzende von Millionen seiner Untertanen elendiglich verhungerten, liess Mao wertvolle Nahrungsmittel zur Bezahlung von Kriegsmaterial in die Sowjetunion verschiffen.

Die Autoren kommen zum Schluss, dass Maos Schreckensregime nicht weniger als siebzig Millionen Tote auf dem Gewissen hat, wobei in dieser horrenden Zahl nicht einmal die Menschen berücksichtigt sind, die auf dem Schlachtfeld häufig wegen Maos militärischer Unfähigkeit oder wegen seiner Perfidie das Leben lassen mussten. Nach der Katastrophe des «Grossen Sprungs» gab es für das geschundene Volk nur einen kurzen Lichtblick, ehe mit der von Mao losgetretenen «Kulturrevolution» die Misere erneut losging. Diesmal zeigte Mao seinen abgrundtiefen Hass auf die chinesische Kultur unverhohlen. Die geistige Elite wurde von das Mao-Büchlein schwingenden Kulturrevolutionären in den Dreck getreten, Kulturgüter von unschätzbarem Wert wurden willentlich zerstört. Das, was in Tat und Wahrheit nichts anderes als die nach Stalins Vorbild realisierte «grosse Säuberung» war, kostete drei Millionen Menschen das Leben. Nicht weniger als hundert Millionen Chinesen, ein Neuntel der damaligen Bevölkerung, wurden von dem Wahnsinn in Mitleidenschaft gezogen. Familien wurden zerstört, und das Trauma dieser Raserei besteht bei vielen älteren Chinesen bis in unsere Tage fort.

Krankhafter Egomane

Liest man die ganze Aufzählung von Maos Schändlichkeiten, so stellt sich die Frage, weshalb niemand gegen diesen Mann, der offensichtlich ein krankhafter, für intensive psychiatrische Behandlung reifer Egomane war, aufzustehen vermochte. Engste Weggefährten wurden eliminiert oder wie Staatspräsident Liu Shaoqi in den Tod getrieben. Auch Tschou En-lai, den manche auswärtige Beobachter als das akzeptable, moderate Gesicht von Maos Herrschaft ansahen, kommt bei den Autoren sehr schlecht weg. Er wird nicht nur als Schwächling geschildert, der sich von Mao jederzeit vorführen liess, sondern auch als williger Kollaborateur bei der Unterdrückung porträtiert. China beklagt sich zu Recht über die mangelhafte Aufarbeitung der Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Japan. Liest man die aufwühlende Chronik von Maos Regime, so wird einem gewahr, welch monumentale Aufgabe China bei der gründlichen Inventur seiner eigenen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert noch bevorsteht.

FRANKFURTER RUNDSCHAU

Dokument erstellt am 18.10.2005 um 16:40:11 Uhr
Erscheinungsdatum 19.10.2005
 

Zertrümmerte Mythen

Jung Chang und Jon Halliday klagen Mao in ihrer "Biographie" eindrucksvoll an, argumentieren aber höchst einseitig

VON KARL GROBE

Jung Chang / Jon Halliday: Mao. Das Leben eines Mannes, das Schicksal eines Volkes. Aus dem Englischen von Ursel Schäfer, Heike Schlatterer und Werner Roller. Karl Blessing Verlag, München 2005, 974 Seiten, 34 Euro.

Seine Wirkung hat das Buch schon erzielt, das mit lapidaren Satz beginnt: "Mao Tse-tung, der jahrzehntelang absolute Macht ausübte über das Leben eines Viertels der Weltbevölkerung, war verantwortlich für über 70 Millionen Tote in Friedenszeiten - kein anderer politischer Führer des 20. Jahrhunderts reicht hier an ihn heran."

Es nimmt Mao nicht aus der Weltgeschichte heraus, aber es demontiert den Menschen und den Politiker. Jung Chang, deren autobiographisches Werk Wilde Schwäne zu Recht berühmt geworden ist, und ihr Ehemann, der britische Historiker Jon Halliday, legen hier eigentlich keine Biographie vor, sondern eine umfassende Anklageschrift. Auf 974 Seiten, von denen mehr als 160 auf Fußnoten, Bibliographie und Register entfallen, präsentiert sich das Werk aber der Form nach als Biographie, und als solche hat es eine Reihe kritischer Anmerkungen verdient.

Erstens: Wirklich neu ist das meiste nicht, was die Autoren zusammengetragen haben. Die hagiographischen Schriften, die noch über Maos Tod (1976) hinaus zum eisernen Bestand der einschlägig Interessierten gehörten und das Mao-Image beeinflusst haben, sind längst nur mehr von antiquarischem Interesse.

Die historische Forschung und die Beschäftigung mit allmählich zugänglich gewordenen Quellen und Erinnerungen haben dieses Image nachhaltig relativiert. Was es mit den Kampagnen Maos, den "elf Linienkämpfen", dem millionenfach tödlichen "Großen Sprung", der so genannten Kulturrevolution auf sich hatte, ist hinreichend bekannt. Die Relativierung und die Widerlegung erklären jedoch nicht ausreichend die Hintergründe der absoluten Macht. Die liegen nicht allein im Charakter Maos.

Zweitens: Im Umgang mit den Quellen, auch vielen neu erschlossenen, sind die Autoren oft sehr selektiv umgegangen. Die zeitgenössischen Umstände interessieren sie viel weniger, als es ihrem Anspruch gemäß wäre. Wenn beispielsweise für die Aufstiegsjahre Maos eine Fernförderung und Fernsteuerung durch den sowjetischen Diktator Josef Stalin postuliert wird, darf auf eine wenigstens kurze Darstellung der Kämpfe in der Kommunistischen Internationale (Komintern) nicht verzichtet werden.

Eine Biographie als Anklageschrift

Ein Satz wie "Bucharin, der ehemalige Vorsitzende der Komintern, wurde der Spionage für Japan beschuldigt" (Seite 276), darf so nicht stehen bleiben. Die durch nichts begründete Anklage gehörte zur verlogenen, während des letzten Moskauer Schauprozesses vorgetragenen Polemik gegen den letzten überlebenden unabhängigen Kopf der KPdSU. Und die Bemerkung "chinesische Trotzkisten galten als japanische Spione" (ebd.) ist ebenso monströs, auch wenn sie sich auf den allzeit moskautreuen Zeitzeugen und China-Akteur Otto Braun bezieht.

Drittens: Die Aktivität der kommunistischen Partisanen hinter den japanischen Linien im besetzten Nord- und Ostchina als Ausweichen vor dem ernsthaften Widerstand gegen Japan zu interpretieren - eine Art Feigheit vor dem Feind im Interesse Stalins, der den Krieg mit Japan nicht wollte - ist Chuzpe. Wenn die Autoren aber selbst konstatieren, dass die kommunistische Armee erst nach der Kapitulation Japans, durch sowjetische Mithilfe, moderne Waffen und Geräte in nennenswertem Umfang bekam, könnten sie auch auf den Gedanken kommen, das Fehlen solchen Geräts habe zu einer anderen militärischen Strategie als der Kriegführung an klaren Fronten Anlass gegeben.

Viertens: Der rasche Zuwachs an Kämpfern und - politisch kaum gebildeten - Genossen im Partisanenkrieg lässt sich mit den zweifellos vorhandenen Repressionsmechanismen im "befreiten Gebiet" nicht zureichend erklären; eine andere Erklärung bleiben die Autoren aber schuldig.

Fünftens: Die Mittäterschaft Maos und Stalins beim Koreakrieg (1950-1953) steht außer Zweifel. Die Motive waren machtpolitisch. Zum Hintergrund gehört jedoch auch die Politik der USA in Ostasien, die Korea als "außerhalb des Perimeters amerikanischer Interessen" definierte, bis es zu spät war. Diese Einlassung konnte in Peking, Moskau und Pjöngjang als Hinwies auf eine Eroberungschance verstanden werden - und wurde genauso verstanden. Maos zynische Überlegungen über das Opfern Hunderttausender Soldaten und den "Papiertiger Atombombe" sind unbestritten; sie enthalten aber nicht die ganze Wahrheit.

Sechstens: Das "Ködern des Kommunistenjägers Nixon" wäre Mao und seinem getreuen Zhou Enlai nicht gelungen, hätte es nicht ein starkes US-Interesse gegeben, die "chinesische Karte" gegen die Sowjetunion auszuspielen, also sich ködern zu lassen.

Siebtens: Einige formale Dinge sind einzuwenden. Dass die Transkription chinesischer Namen zwischen der in der Volksrepublik und auch international heute üblichen PinyinUmschrift und vereinfachten Versionen der Wade-Giles-Umschrift schwankt, ist vielleicht eher Sache des Lektorats als der Autoren. Das Schwanken stört jedoch. Weniger angenehm berührt der anbiedernde Ton bei der Namenswiedergabe selbst. Der Rivale Maos Mitte der 30er Jahre hieß Zhang Guotao (meinetwegen: Chang Kuo-tao). Ihn im fortlaufenden Text aber stets als Kuo-tao zu erwähnen ist ähnlich ungehörig wie eine Erwähnung des US-Generals und Präsidenten Dwight D. Eisenhower nur als "Dwight" wäre; Kuo-tao (Pinyin: Guotao) ist der Vorname. Dieses Muster wiederholt sich störend oft.

Achtens: Die Quellen der Anklage sind eindrucksvoll und beweiskräftig. Sie sind aber auch einseitig und interessengeleitet, beispielsweise die Schriften des erwähnten Otto Braun oder des Sowjetvertreters in der Bürgerkriegshauptstadt Maos Yanan, Peter Wladimirow. Mao zugetane ausländische Beobachter wie Jack Belden gar nicht oder wie Harold C. Hinton nur mit einer nebensächlichen Schrift zu erwähnen, andere wie Edgar Snow, Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow), Anna Louise Strong oder Agnes Smedley als verblendete Kommunisten und nichts anderes abzutun, mag im Sinne der Anklage sein. Aber es entfernt sich von der zeitgenössischen Wahrnehmung. Mao reinzuwaschen kann heute ebenso wenig gelingen wie Stalin zum humanistischen Helden zu verklären. Die Fakten lassen das nicht zu, das sei ausdrücklich betont. Eine faire Biographie zu schreiben mag heute noch nicht möglich sein; der Satz Zhou Enlais über die Französische Revolution von 1789 (die Autoren zitieren ihn aus dem Zusammenhang) kommt einem in den Sinn: "Noch zu früh, ein Urteil zu fällen".

Plädoyer gegen den Gewalttäter Mao

Das Verdienst dieses Buches ist sein Charakter als zusammenfassendes Plädoyer gegen den politischen Gewalttäter Mao. In diesem Sinne - nur in diesem - ist es unverzichtbar. In diesem Charakter ist seine Wirkung begründet. Wenn es einmal möglich sein wird, es einem chinesischen Publikum unverändert vorzulegen, wird für China viel gewonnen sein, wenn nicht alles. Vorderhand verhindert das Erbe (und verhindern die Erben) Maos, dass die Erben der Opfer sich mit dieser Zertrümmerung der Mythen beschäftigen können.
 

Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005.

The Mao That Roared

A biography of the man who changed China paints an opinionated but vivid portrait of a brutal despot

By ADI IGNATIUS

When I first traveled to China in the late 1970s as a student and then a foreign correspondent, the Chinese were giddily beginning to explore the new boundaries of freedom after Mao Zedong's death. There was a propaganda onslaught against the Gang of Four--the quartet (including Mao's wife Jiang Qing) that was blamed for the Cultural Revolution, the decade of terror that Mao had unleashed and then nourished. Mao didn't count among the fiendish four, but when the plucky Chinese I encountered talked of the Gang, they would hold up five fingers, then fold the thumb back slowly to conform to the official co-conspirator count. The message was clear: Mao was that disappearing finger.

Nearly three decades later, China's people are still struggling over how to process Mao's legacy. The Communist Party continues to protect his memory; his mug still dominates Tiananmen Square in Beijing. And while the Chinese generally acknowledge his brutality, most seem to cherish his image as founder of the nation, who overturned centuries of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Of course, America's Founding Father heroes have warts of their own. (George Washington was imperious; John Adams was a grouch; Thomas Jefferson had that affair.) But as recent biographies have made apparent, Mao was not merely ruthless but his ruthlessness is practically unmatched in history. If iconic, socialist-chic Mao once seemed cuddlier than, say, Stalin, the record now makes clear they were rivals in brutality. Both men, through murder and misrule, were responsible for tens of millions of deaths.

The newest effort to shine history's harsh light on the Great Helmsman is Mao: The Unknown Story (Knopf; 814 pages) by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Chang is the author of Wild Swans, the gripping and mega-selling 1991 memoir of how three generations of her family survived modern China's upheavals. (She was a Maoist Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution's early stages.) Halliday, Chang's husband, is an author and Russia historian.

Their Mao is bad to the core, a relentlessly selfish and duplicitous schemer as a young man who harbored "a love for bloodthirsty thuggery." And then he turned really nasty. Mao purged and murdered rivals. He pigged out on exotic delicacies amid the mass starvation his policies caused. (The authors cite estimates that 38 million people died of starvation and overwork during the Great Leap Forward. Mao, meanwhile, stuck to his misguided industrialization plans, blithely commenting that "half of China may well have to die.") In the 1970s, Mao even forbade surgery for his loyal No. 2, Zhou Enlai, who was suffering from cancer of the bladder, in part to ensure that Zhou would not outlive him.

Mao's celebrated exploits are recast as frauds. The Long March? The authors contend that legendary battles along the way didn't actually occur and suggest Mao and his communist army survived the 6,000-mile ordeal only because his political rival, Chiang Kai-shek, decided to let them move unopposed. The 1949 declaration of the People's Republic? A bust, the authors argue, as a nervous Mao frequently resorted to awkward throat clearing and offered no ideas for benefiting China's people. His love for the peasants? Phony. "There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots any social concerns, much less that he was motivated by a sense of injustice."

Among China scholars, there has been much debate about the book's editorializing (it was published in Britain in June). Chang and Halliday spent years researching the book and conducted interviews with surviving Mao associates around the world. But for all its detail, this is a one-dimensional portrait, an exhaustive trashing that gives one pause, as does the certainty with which many events are described. "Mao did not care one iota what happened after his death," the authors say. Who could characterize even their own feelings with such certitude?

Yet this is an entertaining and, for the big picture, an ultimately informative book about a figure ever ready for re-examination. It's hard to forgive a man who was so obsessed with petty, vindictive politics that after the 1976 Tangshan earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese, he presided over a campaign against his rival Deng Xiaoping that demanded that rescuers halt their work to "denounce Deng on the ruins." Maybe it's time to get that fifth finger back in the air again.

Mao Lives

Arthur Waldron

The 20th century was remarkable not only for the number and scale of the atrocities it witnessed but also for the slowness with which these frightful events were recognized for what they were, let alone condemned. Of these crimes, which began with the mass murders by Lenin and Stalin in the USSR (costing over 20 million lives) and continued through the Nazi Holocaust and the democides in China and Cambodia, only the Nazi horror is regularly acknowledged and truly well known. The others are still primarily the province of specialists.

This is particularly the case with the crimes of Mao Zedong, the founder in 1949 of the People’s Republic of China and, until his death in 1976, its supreme ruler. China has never repudiated Mao as Khrushchev did Stalin at the party congress of 1956. Embalmed in Tiananmen Square, he remains today the final source of legitimacy for the government in Beijing. Nor, with honorable exceptions, have Western scholars ever dealt with Mao as at least some did with Lenin and Stalin. Today, no one in his right mind would put a portrait of Hitler in his house. Yet, in many places in the West, Mao kitsch—posters, badges, busts, and so forth—is still considered not only acceptable but even fashionable.

One reason, perhaps, is that Mao Zedong was introduced to the world stage as a hero. He made his first appearance—as a genial and modest man who happened also to be a dedicated social revolutionary—in a long interview with the American journalist Edgar Snow. The interview, which took place at the Communist party’s headquarters in a remote corner of northwest China, formed the core of Snow’s book, Red Star Over China, which has been continuously in print ever since its first appearance in 1936.¹ Nearly all subsequent accounts descend, in one way or another, from his.

Mao was forty-two when he met Snow. As he told the American journalist, he had been born to a farming family in the south-central province of Hunan, spent a rebellious childhood and youth, attended a teachers’ college, and helped to found the Chinese Communist party.

What Mao grasped, in this account, was that Communism could succeed in China only if it stood with the hundreds of millions of impoverished rural dwellers rather than (as the party’s real leadership in Moscow had insisted) with the relative handful of China’s industrial workers. So, from the start, Mao’s Communism contained a strong admixture of indigenous elements. This remarkable and, as it seemed, durable blending of traditional elements with modernity (in its Communist form) held a powerful appeal for many Chinese whose sense of identity had been shattered by the ending of the old order when the last dynasty abdicated in 1912.

Naturally, Mao’s liberationist intentions also alarmed the class of rural landlords and “gentry” who supported the then-central government of Chiang Kai-shek at Nanjing. Chiang and his allies mounted five “extermination campaigns” against the base areas of the Communists. The fifth, planned with German assistance, would have finished them (so the standard story goes) had not Mao led a brilliant break-out, the celebrated “Long March,” that moved through the most remote areas a step ahead of the pursuing Nationalists, fighting valiantly when attacked and eventually escaping to the security of the northwest, where Snow recorded Mao’s stirring account.

Then came World War II, when—according to the received version—the Communists were the only Chinese really willing to fight the Japanese. (Chiang Kai-shek himself was supposedly much more interested in fighting Mao.) It was then that Mao led a great revolutionary upsurge that, translated into a mighty military force, helped not only to drive the Japanese back but to sweep him and his followers to power in the ensuing civil war of 1945-49. Snow later told this story, too, though its most eloquent and influential version came from the pen of the late Barbara Tuchman.

In Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (1971) and other writings, Tuchman argued that, in supporting Chiang’s Nationalists, the United States had backed the wrong horse in China. This is the so-called “Lost Chance in China” school, whose adherents believe to this day that a different U.S. policy would not only have spared us future conflicts with China over Korea, Vietnam, and the Taiwan Strait but would have changed Mao himself. Aligned with the U.S. (as he wished) instead of with the USSR (as we forced him to become), he would have ruled China in a far more democratic and pro-Western fashion.

Even aligned with the USSR, however, Mao in power continued to be viewed favorably by most Western scholars and commentators. To be sure, confiscating and redistributing land from the rich to the poor involved bloodshed, as did the cleaning-up of such notoriously lawless cities as Shanghai. Mao also attacked the educated, even some who had supported him, as in the Hundred Flowers campaign of the mid-1950’s when criticism of the regime was invited but then crushed as soon as it crossed certain boundaries. Later, in the Great Leap Forward (1959-61), he attempted to substitute China’s abundant manpower for its limited capital in order to make possible a rapid growth of the economy, unfortunately causing widespread death by starvation in the process. Toward the end of his life, worried by the near-extinction of the revolutionary flame in the Soviet Union, he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1965-76) in which marginalized groups, above all students and young people, were encouraged to run riot against entrenched authority.

These blemishes were duly noted, though never the scale of death and destruction they entailed. Always, Mao was seen as searching for new ways to build socialism, and on these grounds much if not everything could be forgiven him.² In 1955, Simone de Beauvoir judged that “the power [Mao] exercises is no more dictatorial than, say, Roosevelt’s was”; in 1972, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed his “revolutionary violence.”

In the academic world, Mao’s achievements were extolled while the alternatives offered by the rival Nationalists, or by parties calling for parliamentary democracy, or by refugee critics were dismissed as hopeless dead ends. Scholars who dissented often paid with their careers. Certainly, it was concluded, Mao had shed blood as he “reformed” the system, and he had often shown a hard, authoritarian hand. But given the results, who could cavil? As the influential Harvard professor John K. Fairbank observed in 1972 on returning from a visit, “The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in centuries.”

Something like this view is still very widespread, among both specialists and the broader public. No American textbook of Chinese history classes Mao with Stalin, or with Hitler. Nor has any foreign leader since the 1960’s ever spoken out against the evils of Chinese Communism with anything like the forthrightness showed by some toward the Soviet Union. Today, though Mao’s legacy is still very much in evidence in China, the European Union is eager to end the trade embargo put in place after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 and to begin selling advanced weapons systems to the Communist regime. Israel has long been a supplier of weaponry to Beijing (though this may be changing). American companies, including Loral, Boeing, and Microsoft, have provided important assistance to China’s military programs and to its suppression of free speech and access to information on the Internet. Although the overwhelming majority of the world’s unfree people live in China, ordinary visitors, cocooned in its luxurious new hotels, are largely unaware of the brutality around them, or, if they are aware, console themselves with the thought that, repressive trends notwithstanding, commerce and trade will eventually transform things for the better.

They need to think again. Luckily, to aid their thinking, they can now turn to Mao: The Unknown Story,³ a bombshell of a book that quickly soared to first place on the best-seller lists of England and that has recently been released here. Its author is Jung Chang (born in China in 1952), writing in collaboration with her husband Jon Halliday (born in Ireland in 1939). Halliday, an excellent stylist, is proficient in Russian and other languages and was for a brief time the editor of the British New Left Review. Chang, who lives in England, has been known till now mainly for Wild Swans (1991), a brilliantly fictionalized story of three generations of women in her own family: her grandmother, a concubine whose feet were bound; her mother, initially an enthusiastic Communist but later disillusioned; and herself, who grew up in the violence and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, during which she worked as a “barefoot doctor” in the poverty-stricken countryside while her mother was sent to a detention camp and her father was driven mad.

Mao: The Unknown Story is no ordinary book. Reaching for comparisons, one looks inescapably to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. His was not the first negative account of Soviet Communism, and Mao is not the first book to present Mao and his collaborators as criminals. But like the Gulag, Mao, while factual, is much more than that; resting on a mass of evidence, overwhelmingly accurate and well-supported, it conveys its story in the voice not of the bloodless scholar but of the novelist and the moralist. Already Beijing is terrified of this book, going so far as to ban an issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review that contained an account of it. But we can be certain that pirated copies will soon be circulating in China, if they are not doing so already. Chang and Halliday may not be the first to expose Mao’s crimes, but their work, even with its limitations (of which more below), cannot be ignored. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, it delivers a death blow to an entire way of thinking.

The Mao who emerges from the pages of Chang and Halliday’s book is in every way repellent. He is an ignorant, power-obsessed, manipulative, and cruel mass murderer.

To begin with, the authors show, Mao was an ignoramus, hostile to learning and to intellectuals. A drifter as a youth, he evinced talent but refused the discipline of study, including the “classics of Marxism-Leninism” that his contemporaries mastered as their fathers had mastered classical Chinese literature. Unlike many of those who rose to the top of the Communist hierarchy, he never studied abroad, nor did he travel outside of China until after he had taken power—and then only to Moscow, which formed his idea of “the West.” The antique editions of Chinese classics shelved at the head of his enormous bed, which so impressed visitors to his inner sanctum and photographs of which were studied by Western intelligence agencies for clues to his “thought,” were mostly plundered from the libraries of doomed scholars and arranged for show.

Mao’s hatred of learning was coupled with a passion to destroy China’s cultural heritage. In 1949, when he came to power, the Mongol-Ming-Qing capital of Beijing (Peking) was still intact, with its massive dressed stone walls and gates, its hundreds of temples, its traditional courtyard houses with their exquisite tile roofs, its memorial arches or pailou, and its distinct drama, cuisine, customs, and traditions. Everything had survived the war with Japan; were it extant today, it would constitute one of the world’s most magnificent historical sites.

But Mao decreed its obliteration. In 1958, on the eve of his campaign, roughly 8,000 historical monuments were listed as still standing in the capital. Mao planned to keep only 78 of them; most were destroyed.

Ignorant himself, Mao saw to it that others were kept ignorant as well. Contrary to widespread Western belief, he spent less on the education of his countrymen than had his predecessors. He also ruthlessly limited access to learning. His policy, write Chang and Halliday, “was not to raise the general standard of education in society as a whole, but to focus on a small elite, predominantly in science and other ‘useful’ subjects.” All other Chinese were to remain “illiterate or semi-literate slave laborers.”

As for Mao’s obsession with power, from his earliest days in the Communist party he sought control for himself and the physical elimination of those who opposed him. Already in the 1920’s he was murdering his colleagues and driving his subordinates to death, gradually consolidating his own position by a series of conspiracies and betrayals.

The most important of these took place on the Long March. As Chang and Halliday demonstrate, the received version of this hegira is a myth. Whole episodes, including the great battle at the flaming bridge at Dadu, are inventions. Mao’s main purpose, as the authors see it, was less to save the Communist party than to cripple the far more numerous and effective forces of Zhang Guotao, a gifted Communist general whom Mao was supposed to relieve but whom he left utterly exposed and weakened, thus enabling his own takeover.

By far the most interesting revelation in this section of the book is the authors’ account of the paramountcy of Soviet influence in the establishment and growth of the Chinese Communist movement. Traditionally, this movement has been portrayed as an indigenous force, and one whose alignment with Moscow was a matter only of expediency. In fact, according to Chang and Halliday, from its foundation (by a Comintern agent) to its financing, communications system, leadership, and strategy, the party was an agent of Soviet policy—even when that policy conflicted with the Chinese national interest. Stalin early on recognized in Mao the combination of ambition, intelligence, and ruthlessness that would, so he imagined, serve the USSR better than the slavishly orthodox Marxism of many of Mao’s Chinese rivals.

The subordination of Chinese to Soviet interests was clearest in the conflict with Japan during World War II. Like Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao recognized that war with Japan would be a disaster for China. But Stalin, fearing a Japanese invasion of the USSR from the east, wanted it, and Mao quickly grasped how it would serve his own purposes. By permitting the Japanese to destroy Chiang’s forces while simultaneously helping to keep the USSR strong, he would be well placed to supplant Chiang as Chinese leader. Hence, according to Chang and Halliday, the successful effort by Communists in the military to start such a war, and hence Mao’s decision—again utterly contrary to received myth—to sit it out.

Of course some patriotic Chinese Communists could not swallow this, but Mao saw to them, too. At his redoubt in Yan’an, and helped by the ghoulish secret-police expert Kang Sheng, he carried out purges of a number who threatened his will, dispatching them to a state-of-the-art torture facility called the “Date Garden.” (Well-known to locals, this place is not mentioned by any of the Westerners who visited Mao and his wartime capital.) Over the following decades, he systematically eliminated others, with many finally perishing in the Cultural Revolution three decades later.

Mao was a consummate manipulator. With solid documentation, Chang and Halliday argue that the Hundred Flowers campaign, in which critics of the regime spoke out only to be arrested, was not a product of miscalculation (as it is presented in accounts by Mao’s sympathizers) but a carefully laid trap. Similarly, the disastrous Great Leap Forward grew not out of a Marxist fascination with industrialization but out of Mao’s determination to extract food from the Chinese people to pay for weapons imports and gifts to foreign leaders. The Cultural Revolution, finally, which the authors rightly call “the great purge,” had nothing to do with renewing an ossified party and everything to do with simple revenge.

One of the most striking examples of Mao’s manipulative skills was on display in the early 1970’s in connection with the Nixon administration’s “opening” to China. This, too, we learn here, was a carefully baited trap, and entirely Mao’s idea rather than Washington’s. By the time Nixon arrived for his famous visit in February 1972, he was convinced that, as between himself and Mao, “he was the keener of the two.” But by then Henry Kissinger had already made his own secret visit in July 1971 as Nixon’s national security adviser, bearing “many and weighty gifts and ask[ing] for nothing in return.” Not only did Kissinger offer Taiwan on a platter, write Chang and Halliday, but he promised an American withdrawal from both Vietnam and Korea.

The Mao of The Unknown Story is also, like many a tyrant, deeply insecure and fearful. Arriving outside Beijing in 1949, he fell into a crisis of anxiety before daring to enter the city and seize power. A superstitious man, he never once set foot in the Forbidden City where the emperors had lived, even though his residence adjoined it. Wherever he went, bombproof villas were built and staffed. He kept himself far from the public, making use later in his career of a system of tunnels linking his residence, the Great Hall of the People, with military headquarters in the western suburbs.

Mao delighted in personal cruelty. He tortured the women around him, including his four successive wives. When Chou Enlai, the most popular member of the regime, was diagnosed with bladder cancer, Mao ordered that he be neither told of the condition nor treated for it; even as Chou was engaged in vital negotiations with the United States, Mao toyed with his loyal servant to ensure that he would die painfully.⁴

Most importantly, Mao was the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. Much of the killing was direct, as in the torture and purges at Yan’an. After the Communist seizure of power in 1949, the practice became countrywide. Mao set his numerical targets openly, and stressed the “revolutionary” importance of killing. In 1954, citing the “softness” of his counterparts in Communist Eastern Europe when it came to the need to “eliminate all those counterrevolutionaries,” he urged his inner circle: “We must kill. . . . And we say it’s good to kill.”

He was as good as his word. Millions were liquidated in the first years of his tyranny alone. Later, during the famine of 1959-61, which the authors blame above all on Mao’s confiscation of crops from the countryside, something on the order of 50 million people died—men, women, children, infants. Cannibalism was not uncommon. Yet Mao continued to enjoy Lucullan repasts, served by his half-starved staff.

And so it went. Chang and Halliday’s careful estimate is that by the time of his death in 1976, Mao had been responsible all in all for the death of some 70 million Chinese.

No reader can be unmoved by this book’s passion, or unimpressed by the mountain of evidence upon which it rests. The Chinese say that it takes “ten years to hone a sword,” which understates by two years the amount of time Chang and Halliday have labored over this work. Halliday spent a decade in non-Chinese archives, including those of the Comintern in Moscow and the East-European Communist parties; from this has come much new factual information, as well as a clearer view of the control exercised by the Soviet Union over both the Nationalist and the Communist parties in China in the first half of the century. The unadorned and readable English prose is evidently also Halliday’s, though one can sense his wife’s mind behind much of it. As for Chang, she did all the Chinese research and carried out the hundreds of interviews with people in China and around the world who were personally acquainted with Mao or had knowledge of him.

Specialists, of course, will have criticisms to make, some of them justified. Neither author is trained in Sinology. This is an advantage—unburdened by the inheritance of the field, they offer a new and fresh look, naïve in the best sense of the word. But it is also a disadvantage. One searches in vain for certain staples of the mainstream literature about Mao, which, whatever its flaws, has established facts and raised issues that must be addressed.⁵

Perhaps surprisingly in light of their own previous immersion in Marxist categories (compulsory, in Chang’s case), we find in Mao no real discussion of social or cultural forces. Instead, the human actor is everything. There is only conspiracy after conspiracy, each turning, as in the traditional Chinese novels of which Mao was so fond, on deception, betrayal, espionage, and a cold assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of other individuals.

This stress on conspiracy and personal politics to the exclusion of nearly everything else is a weakness, perhaps the greatest weakness, of Chang and Halliday’s account. Many men, after all, are evil and want power, but only a handful are successful in gaining and holding it and in somehow making their people collude with them in their crimes. In mitigation, one can say that the stress on personal action and conspiracy provides a useful counterweight to the opposite, Western tendency to impose social-science theory onto a Chinese reality that it does not fit and where it does not belong. Nevertheless, there is more to the story.

Specialists will also be puzzled by specific aspects of Chang and Halliday’s account (for instance, of the 1945-49 civil war, or of Mao’s struggle with Nikita Khrushchev over the Taiwan Strait). And both specialists and general readers will wonder how the authors always know what Mao is thinking—even during the Long March, or on his deathbed (when his mind “stirred with just one thought: himself and his power”).

But none of this should distract us from the basic fact: this is the book that will wreck Mao’s reputation beyond salvage. Taken whole, the indictment is too formidable to be dismissed, and any attempt at detailed refutation will inevitably pose even more awkward questions and disclose even more unsavory facts, thus dragging Mao ever more deeply into the mud.

That it is long past time for such an airing should go without saying. As I indicated early on, Chang and Halliday are not the first to expose Mao Zedong as one of the greatest criminals in human history: a few non-Chinese scholars and journalists had the courage in decades past to follow the facts where they led. More recently, their work has been vindicated (and the work of their “mainstream” colleagues discredited) by Chinese scholars like Chen Jian, who in Mao’s China and the Cold War (2001) has given an authoritative account of Chinese foreign policy that matches Chang and Halliday’s, and by eyewitnesses like Mao’s personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, whose The Secret Life of Chairman Mao (1994) presented the human, or more accurately the inhuman, Mao for the first time. The many dissidents within today’s China have likewise kept up a steady flow of documents and news in spite of the government’s best efforts to silence them.

But this brings us back to the question of Western attitudes. Evidence to indict Mao has always been adequate, if not abundant. Shamefully, however, many China specialists and others with access to information actively protected themselves from this evidence, lest it undermine the fantasy of a humane, caring leader. As with early word of the Holocaust, reports of the desperate situation in China during the 1959-61 famine caused by Mao were ignored or buried. When Mao died on September 9, 1976, the New York Times ran a triple banner headline and a two-page obituary that drew on much received wisdom, neglecting or dismissing the mounting evidence that contradicted it.

So Mao: The Unknown Story is not only a formidable but a necessary achievement: a full and convincing portrait of the destruction of tens of millions of innocent lives and the near-destruction of a civilization by a consummately evil man. Nevertheless, something is still missing, and that something has to do with what comes next. Does this atrocity, from which we can no longer turn away, have any significance beyond its own sheer horror, and does it call for any action on our part and on the part of the Chinese themselves? On this the book is silent, but of course the answer is yes.

The first action that is called for is to discover the names of the dead, locate their remains, and honor them—as has been done in exemplary fashion for the victims of the Holocaust and as is beginning to be done for the victims of Communism in Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. China, however, is not only far from having initiated such a process, it completely forbids any activity of the kind. No books published in China acknowledge Mao’s evil; no monuments commemorate the dead. Letters to the authorities from the mothers of students killed by the Chinese army in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 are never answered.

Having honored the dead, we must then seek to understand. Chang and Halliday describe the evil man, but never attempt to probe the origins of his evil or to explain why it spread through Chinese society. Not that this is an easy task. Writing in criticism of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the Holocaust, for example, Hillel Halkin has recently observed that although the Holocaust may have been, as she stipulated, “the work of bureaucrats,” these were bureaucrats whose “minds were formed by the Germany of the Weimar Republic, and of the Kaiser, and of the Christian churches. If they were easily persuaded that the Jews deserved to die, this persuasion came from an older Germany.”⁶ Here in other words is an effort to get beyond Arendt’s mechanistic approach to some appreciation of a living human society, and to understand Hitler as something more than a devil who mysteriously parachuted in to bewitch the German people.

Proposing an analogous social or intellectual explanation for the willingness of the Chinese people to serve as Mao’s slaves, to kill and to denounce one another, is an even more difficult task—and Chang and Halliday do not address it. Where in late-Qing or Republican Chinese society would one find the roots of democide? Where in traditional Chinese philosophy is the justification for mass murder? Some of the necessary ingredients were surely imported with Marxism, but that simply begs the question of how Marxism acquired its authority and why so many Chinese accepted it. These problems cry out for pondering.

Nor is that the end of it. Given the bloody morass through which Chang and her husband lead us, it would be comforting in the extreme to know that the evil in Mao died with his body, and that China has been freed from it. But that is emphatically not the case. Mao died in 1976. Thirty years on, there is still no happy ending. To be sure, China has changed—in appearance, feel, atmosphere, economic condition, and so forth. Maoist and post-Maoist China are admittedly very different. But they are also profoundly similar.

And that is the final point. Mao’s atrocities are not simply of historical interest, but remain central to today’s China—and to our dealings with it. As the authors write in a two-sentence “Epilogue,” “Today, Mao’s portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The current Communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao.”

Mao is, indeed, still revered in China as the wise and heroic founder of the People’s Republic. There has never been any public criticism of him remotely comparable to Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemning Stalin.7 Not only does Mao’s embalmed corpse, with its guard of honor, lie in the midst of Tiananmen Square, visited daily by throngs of Chinese who form long lines to pay their respects. Not only does his portrait continue to hang at the Gate of Heavenly Peace a few steps from the Forbidden City, the traditional center of the Chinese cosmos. In addition, the deep structure of today’s China remains as Mao made it.

Rule in China is as arbitrary and capricious as ever under Mao. The only difference is that a single man is no longer in total charge; what is theoretically still the absolute power of the party is now divided among perhaps twenty people, all lacking Mao’s intelligence and skill and most working at cross purposes with each other. China is not ruled by its constitution or by its laws, nor do courts actually resolve disputes, even in the realm of commerce with foreign countries.

None of today’s Chinese leaders has been chosen according to the rules of the constitution, or even according to the rules of the Communist party. Hu Jintao is in charge because Deng Xiaoping named him to follow Jiang Zemin, himself selected after the June 4, 1989 massacre to replace Zhao Ziyang, who was illegally removed and placed under strict house arrest (lasting until his death earlier this year). And how did Deng become leader? By means of a military conspiracy that ousted Mao’s designated and party-approved successors.

Like Mao, today’s rulers are hypocrites, proclaiming concern for the poor and disenfranchised even as they steal state assets and live lives of luxury. But now the parasitical class of Chinese Communists is much larger than in Mao’s day, and so is the gap between their lives and the lives of ordinary Chinese, whether rural or urban. While desperate poverty and exploitation remain widespread, party members enjoy a privileged existence comparable only to Mao’s, even as they send their children and grandchildren, along with their ill-gotten assets, overseas for safekeeping.

What of the formation of government policy? Again, it would be pleasant to report that decision-making in China has become more rational since the demise of Mao, who regularly ordered up insane projects like the destruction of the old city of Peking, or the backyard “steel” furnaces of the Great Leap Forward, or, in the days of the Sino-Soviet split, the building of immense and useless barriers outside the capital to defend against Soviet tanks. Have Mao’s followers done any better with the Three Gorges Dam, or the huge concrete aqueducts intended to divert water from the south to the parched north, or the slash-and-burn industrialization (as it has been called) with its profligate waste of resources and its utter neglect of sustainability?

When it comes to China’s dynamic economy, moreover, it is by no means clear that the current, export-driven approach to growth will lift China’s poor, let alone help to create a society in which they will be able freely to exercise their talents and energies. Foreign markets now take the place of domestic demand (as they must, for most Chinese have little buying power), and foreign companies are invited not to enrich but to exploit a disciplined labor force under conditions in which any talk of unions or complaints about working conditions are dealt with by the secret police. Labor is kept cheap in China by the government’s manipulation of the currency, and capital, the precious savings of the wretchedly poor, is wasted by state-directed bank loans to money-losing state enterprises. Chinese entrepreneurs are being squeezed out by privileged state firms on one side and privileged foreign investors on the other. Water is scarce and polluted, and the air in many places is unbreathable.

Nor does China’s foreign policy make more sense now than it did under Mao, at least in terms of the Chinese national interest. To the contrary, post-Mao China has, exactly like Mao’s China, poured billions into weapons procurement while ignoring the plight of its people, especially in the countryside. The difference is that the jets and rockets and tanks produced by Mao’s militarization did not work. The ones that contemporary China is purchasing, or is building with extensive foreign help, do, threatening the rest of Asia as it never was threatened even under Mao.

Violence continues in today’s China: everyday killings by police and untold numbers of deaths in prisons and camps, the victims rarely named and never officially mourned. Censorship, too, remains very tight, with newspapers, radio, and television owned and operated exclusively by the government and the party. Vast sums have been spent on advanced equipment to read and track Internet traffic and block sites of which the dictators do not approve. Surveillance by closed-circuit television and the tapping of telephones is blanket in Beijing. Overseas, extensive networks of secret police monitor not only dissidents, students, and others but also Internet and telephone traffic in North America and elsewhere. Indoctrination, now stressing xenophobic nationalism rather than Mao’s version of Communism, is still rampant.

Sadly, we are not soon likely to witness in China anything like the moral clarity of Alexander Yakovlev, once a servant of the Soviet regime, then the “godfather of perestroika,” and now the man entrusted with the task of memorializing the great Soviet purges and the Gulag archipelago. Yakovlev’s succinct (and radically understated) verdict on both Lenin and Stalin is this: “By every norm of international law, posthumously indictable for crimes against humanity.” As Chang and Halliday demonstrate, that fits Mao, too—in spades.

Unfortunately, however, the world is just beginning an honest reconsideration of Mao Zedong and his poisonous legacy, and China, still Maoist at the root, shows no inclination of moving in that direction at all. The government remains in absolute denial, and, as best as it can, it keeps its people ignorant. Chang and Halliday have given a mighty push, but there are still many to mourn, and many to punish, and much to fear.

Arthur Waldron is the Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington, D.C. In collaboration with Stuart Schram, he is currently editing the wartime writings of Mao Zedong.

1 In Chinese translation, under the anodyne title Record of a Journey to the West, the book also made Mao a hero to many of his countrymen who had hitherto been ignorant even of his existence.

2 To be sure, some did get the story right, and from as early as the 1950’s. They included, among others, the Hungarian Jesuit Ladislao La Dany, publisher of the authoritative Hong Kong weekly China News Analysis; Raymond J. de Jaegher, author of The Enemy Within: An Eyewitness Account of the Communist Conquest of China (1952); the German political scientist Juergen Domes, who was able to arrive at a figure of 10 million victims of Mao’s 1959-61 famine in Internal Politics of China, 1949-72 (1973); Edward Rice, former American consul general in Hong Kong and author of Mao’s Way (1971); Ivan and Miriam London and their collaborator Ta-ling Lee, who in The Revenge of Heaven: The Autobiography of a Red Guard (1972) first brought solid documentation of the Cultural Revolution to an indifferent West; and Jean Pasqualini, son of a Corsican father and a Chinese mother who after release from years in Chinese prison camps wrote Prisoner of Mao (1973) with the American journalist Rudolph Chelminski.

3 Knopf, 832 pp., $35.00.

4 In a case of measure for measure, the doctors who diagnosed Mao with Lou Gehrig’s disease in the mid-70’s agreed not to inform him of it—lest, knowing his days were numbered, he unleash some final purge.

5 One example that can stand for many is a series of essays by Joseph W. Esherick about the Nationalist attempt in the civil war to capture the Communist leadership through a pincer campaign against Yan’an. Chang and Halliday state flatly that the Nationalist commander was a secret Communist who botched the operation on purpose. They make no reference to Esherick, who happens to be favorably disposed to Mao and the Chinese Communists but whose careful research does not support this conclusion.

6 “Eichmann: The Simplicity of Evil,” Commentary, July-August 2005.

Posted 10/19/2005 9:30 PM     Updated 10/20/2005 12:45 PM

'Unknown Story' repeats Mao's brutal history

By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY

Stalin and Hitler rank at the forefront of 20th-century genocidal madmen who brought death and despair to millions. But according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's new biography of Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese leader was just as evil, if not worse. They convincingly argue that Mao caused the death of more than 70 million Chinese in peacetime.

Mao: The Untold Story is mind-boggling. After finishing it, readers will cast a skeptical eye on the media's sympathetic presentation of Mao in his later years, U.S. foreign policy and the current Chinese regime's reverence for Mao.

According to Chang and Halliday, Mao deliberately chose to starve almost 38 million Chinese to death during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s.

While his people suffered in the worst famine in history, Mao mercilessly extracted food from his nation. He exported it to the U.S.S.R. and its satellite nations to fulfill his hunger for weapons and to expand his influence. The Cultural Revolution in the 1960s also killed millions and virtually destroyed China's spirit, the authors say.

From the beginning, Mao employed terror, torture, slave labor, humiliation, brainwashing, public executions and the destruction of trust so he could advance himself. Chang and Halliday do not present Mao as mentally ill. According his biographers, he was clever, loved his mother, grasped people's emotional needs, and enjoyed women, food, swimming and books.

But at every turn, Mao chose self-interest. He abandoned or betrayed wives, friends, soldiers, colleagues, his own children, his country. To Mao, China's greatest asset was its enormous population, and he exploited it fully. It was acceptable for an estimated 400,000 Chinese soldiers to die in the Korean War if their deaths advanced Mao's goal of tying down the United States, Chang and Halliday say.

Moreover, the authors charge that everything we think we know about Mao is false. His family was affluent, and he despised peasants. No patriot, Mao was a puppet of Stalin and would have carved up China with Russia and Japan as long as he got a slice. Chiang Kai-shek, the authors say, allowed the Long March to succeed because Stalin held Chiang's son in Moscow as a hostage.

The background of the two writers serves the book well. Chang is the author of Wild Swans, the international best seller about three generations of women in China. Born in China in 1952, she was a Red Guard at age 14 and "barefoot doctor" before she moved to the U.K. as a graduate student.

Her co-author, Halliday, is a British scholar fluent in Russian.

The copiously researched book, brimming with interviews and facts, would have benefited from another year of editing and rewriting. The sheer mass of detail can overwhelm the lay reader.

Still, for anyone in search of a serious examination of Mao, his gruesome legacy and China, this astonishing book is a must-read.

New Bio Offers Sinister View of Chairman Mao

Talk of the Nation, October 20, 2005 · A new book paints Mao as a monster on par with Hitler and Stalin and challenges almost every part of the conventional biography. Mao Tse-Tung (also written Zedong) led the Communist Party of China from 1943 until his death in 1976. Mao: The Unknown Story was written by Jung Chang, who described the suffering of her family during the cultural revolution in the bestseller Wild Swans and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday. They spent 10 years documenting the life of Chairman Mao, including interviews with members of his inner circle, and they incorporate newly available material from Soviet archives.

Some critics charge that the result is an unrelenting polemic, but most describe the book as a compelling and convincing study that will upend Mao's reputation and challenge the political system that he created.

Read an Excerpt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mao was not a mere victim of his father. He fought back, and was often the victor. He would tell his father that the father, being older, should do more manual labour than he, the younger -- which was an unthinkably insolent argument by Chinese standards. One day, according to Mao, father and son had a row in front of guests. "My father scolded me before them, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I called him names and left the house... My father... pursued me, cursing as well as commanding me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer... My father backed down." Once, as Mao was retelling the story, he laughed and added an observation: "Old men like him didn't want to lose their sons. This is their weakness. I attacked at their weak point, and I won!"

Money was the only weapon Mao's father possessed. After Mao was expelled by tutor no. 4, in 1907, his father stopped paying his son's tuition fees and the thirteen-year-old boy had to become a full-time peasant. But he soon found a way to get himself out of farm work and back into the world of books. Yi-chang was keen for his son to get married, so that he would be tied down and behave responsibly. His niece was at just the right age for a wife, four years older than Mao, who agreed to his father's plan and resumed schooling after the marriage.

The marriage took place in 1908, when Mao was fourteen and his bride eighteen. Her family name was Luo. She herself had no proper name, and was just called "Woman Luo." The only time Mao is known to have mentioned her was to the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, when Mao was strikingly dismissive, exaggerating the difference in their ages: "When I was 14, my parents married me to a girl of 20. But I never lived with her... I do not consider her my wife... and have given little thought to her." He gave no hint that she was not still alive; in fact, Woman Luo had died in 1910, just over a year into their marriage.

Mao's early marriage turned him into a fierce opponent of arranged marriages. Nine years later he wrote a seething article against the practice: "In families in the West, parents acknowledge the free will of their children. But in China, orders from the parents are not at all compatible with the will of the children... This is a kind of 'indirect rape.' Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children... "

As soon as his wife died, the sixteen-year-old widower demanded to leave Shaoshan. His father wanted to apprentice him to a rice store in the county town, but Mao had set his eye on a modern school about 25 kilometres away. He had learned that the imperial examinations had been abolished. Instead there were modern schools now, teaching subjects like science, world history and geography, and foreign languages. It was these schools that would open the door out of a peasant's life for many like him.

Other articles about the book, here