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Mao: The Unknown Story

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Cover of the British edition of Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao: The Unknown Story is an 832-page book written by the husband and wife team, historian Jon Halliday and writer Jung Chang. It was published in 2005 and depicts Mao Zedong, the former paramount leader of China and Chairman of the Communist Party of China, as being responsible for mass murder on a scale similar to, or greater than, that committed under the rule of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

The eleven years of research for the book included interviews with hundreds of people who were close to Mao Zedong at some point in his life and reveal the contents of newly opened archives. Additional knowledge comes from Chang's personal experience of living through the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The book has generated large numbers of sales and been included on best-seller lists, but it is also controversial. Mao: The Unknown Story has received mixed reviews from academics and commentators alike, ranging from great praise to serious criticism.

The book

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According to Mao: The Unknown Story, "Mao Ze-Dong, 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" and claimed that he was willing for half of China to die to achieve military-nuclear superpowerdom.

Chang and Halliday argue that despite being born into a peasant family, Mao had little concern for the welfare of the Chinese peasantry. They hold Mao responsible for the famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward and claim that he exacerbated the famine by allowing the export of grain to continue even when it became clear that China did not have sufficient grain to feed its population. They also claim that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, including some of his personal friends, and argue that he was a more tyrannical leader than had previously been thought. Another claim is that Mao's decisions during the Long March were not really as heroic and ingenious as people have generally believed; Chang and Halliday state that Chiang Kai-shek deliberately "let Mao go" because Chiang Kai-shek's son was being held hostage in the Soviet Union.

They also claim that far from being ideal places to live and work in, areas under Communist control such as the Jiangxi and Yan'an soviets were ruled through terror and mass murder. There is also the claim that Mao willingly sacrificed thousands of troops simply in order to get rid of individual rivals from within the Communist Party, such as Chang Kuo-tao.

Chang stated that she and her husband were shocked at what they discovered during the 10 years they spent researching the book. Halliday said that he was greatly helped by accessing Russian archives on China that were inaccessible until recently. As of yet his more unexpected claims have not been examined by other historians. Chang travelled several times to China during the course of her research, interviewing many of those who were close to Mao, as well as alleged eyewitnesses to events such as the crossing of Luding Bridge.

Debate

While receiving worldwide fame, the book is not without controversy, and the content has been widely debated and discussed outside of China.

The Crossing of Luding Bridge

Chang argues that there was no battle at Luding Bridge and that the story was simply Communist propaganda. Most historians do not deny the incident took place, though other sources have questioned the event's true nature. Jung Chang named a witness to the event, Li Xiu-zhen, who told her that she saw no fighting and that the bridge was not on fire. In addition, she said that despite claims by the Communists that the fighting was fierce, all of the vanguard survived the battle. Chang also cited Nationalist (Kuomintang) battleplans and communiques that indicated the force guarding the bridge had been withdrawn before the Communists arrived.

In a speech given at Stanford University, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski mentioned a conversation that he once had with Deng Xiaoping, who commented that the taking of Luding Bridge had been extremely easy and was dramatised for propaganda.

At that point, Chairman Deng smiled and said, “Well, that’s the way it’s presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation."

Sun Shuyun (born in China, 1963) also wrote in her book, The Long March, that the Communists exaggerated what happened at Luding Bridge. She interviewed a local blacksmith who had witnessed the event and said that "when saw the soldiers coming, they panicked and fled — their officers had long abandoned them. There wasn't really much of a battle." A thorough search of archives in Chengdu revealed further documentation supporting this claim.

On the other hand, the diary of Yang Cheng-wu, who was reportedly at the battle, as well as non-Chinese sources such as Harrison E. Salisbury's The Long March: The Untold Story, Dick Wilson's The Long March 1935: The Epic of Chinese Communism's Survival and Charlotte Salisbury's Long March Diary, do mention a battle at Luding Bridge. However, none of these authors claimed they were present at the bridge when it was taken and relied on second-hand information.

In October 2005, The Age newspaper stated that it had been unable to find Chang's unamed local source used as the alleged Luding Bridge witness. In addition, The Sydney Morning Herald reported to have found an 85-year old eyewitness, Li Guixiu, aged 15 at the time of the crossing, whose account disputed Chang's claims. According to Li, there was a battle: "The fighting started in the evening. There were many killed on the Red Army side. The KMT set fire to the bridge-house on the other side, to try to melt the chains, and one of the chains was cut. After it was taken, the Red Army took seven days and seven nights to cross."

Communist "sleepers"

In the book some notable members of the KMT were claimed to have been secretly working for the Chinese Communists. One such "sleeper" was Hu Zongnan, a senior National Revolutionary Army general. Hu's son objected to this description, the subsequent threat of legal action resulting in Jung Chang's publishers in Taiwan abandoning the release of the book there.

Number of deaths under Mao

Chang claims that 70 million people died while Mao was in power, many of which occurred during the 'Great Leap Forward'. Estimates of the numbers of deaths during this period vary.

Analysts and historians, both Chinese and non-Chinese, mostly put the death toll from the Great Leap Forward at around 30 million people, the majority of the deaths arising from starvation. Ping-ti Ho has stated his belief that he believed "missing" Chinese from the 1950s census records never existed in the first place. Wim F. Wertheim has questioned the validity of data from that period.

In contrast, Professor R.J. Rummel published updated figures on world-wide democide in 2005, stating that he believed Chang and Halliday's estimates to be mostly correct. Other academics and writers have argued that similar numbers of deaths occurred during Mao's rule of China.

Response to the book

Mao: The Unknown Story became a bestseller, with UK sales alone reaching 60,000 in six months. The book has received mixed reviews from academics and commentators alike, ranging from great praise to serious criticism. In describing the criticism the book drew, Jonathan Fenby (editor-in-chief of the investment intelligence service Trusted Sources) wrote that "some of the world's leading China experts united to unleash a barrage of criticism of the book in general, and, in particular, of its sourcing."

Praise

Simon Sebag Montefiore lauded the book in The Times, calling Chang and Halliday's work "a triumph" which "exposes its subject as probably the most disgusting of the bloody troika of 20th-century tyrant-messiahs, in terms of character, deeds — and number of victims... This is the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all — the Red Emperor of China."

In The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof referred to the book as a "magisterial work". Kristof said that it did a better job demonstrating that Mao was a "catastrophic ruler" than anything else written to date. In his words Mao's "ruthlessness" was "brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book".

Gwynne Dyer praised the book for documenting "Mao's crimes and failures in unrelenting, unprecedented detail" and stated he believed it would eventually have a similar impact in China as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago did in the Soviet Union.

Michael Yahuda, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, also expressed his support in The Guardian. He referred to it a "magnificent book" and "a stupendous work" which cast "new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao's tumultuous life."

Professor Richard Baum of the University of California said that "it has to be taken very seriously as the most thoroughly researched and richly documented piece of synthetic scholarship yet to appear on the rise of Mao and the CCP." Though it was "not a sufficiently rich or nuanced interpretive scaffolding to support the full weight of the Chinese experience under Mao," Baum still believed that "this book will most likely change forever the way modern Chinese history is understood and taught."

Sinologist Stuart Schram, while criticizing certain aspects of Mao: The Unknown Story, argued in a review in The China Quarterly that Chang and Halliday's book was "a valuable contribution to our understanding of and his place in history."

Princeton University Professor of Chinese literature Perry Link praised the book in The Times Literary Supplement and emphasized the effect the book could have in the West.

"Part of Chang and Halliday's passion for exposing the 'unknown' Mao is clearly aimed at gullible Westerners..... For decades many in the Western intellectual and political elites have assumed that Mao and his heirs symbolize the Chinese people and their culture, and that to show respect to the rulers is the same as showing respect to the subjects. Anyone who reads Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's book should be inoculated against this particular delusion. If the book sells even half as many copies as the 12 million of Wild Swans, it could deliver the coup de grace to an embarrassing and dangerous pattern of Western thinking."

Criticism

Chang and Halliday's book has been strongly criticized by a number of academic experts. While generally agreeing with the authors that Mao was "a monster", scholars who specialize in modern Chinese history and politics have questioned the factual accuracy of a number of Chang and Halliday's conclusions, pointed out their selective use of evidence, and called into question their objectivity, among other criticisms.

Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia University published an extensive evaluation of the book in the London Review of Books. While he was complementary of the book in some respects — noting for example that it "shows special insight into the suffering of Mao’s wives and children" — and acknowledged that it might make real contributions to the field, Nathan's review was largely negative. Concerned that much of the authors' research was very difficult to confirm or simply unreliable, he noted that "many of their discoveries come from sources that cannot be checked, others are openly speculative or are based on circumstantial evidence, and some are untrue." Nathan suggested that Chang and Halliday's own anger with the Chinese leader caused them to portray "a possible but not a plausible Mao" or a "caricature Mao" and to eschew a more complex explanation of modern Chinese history in favor of "a simple personalisation of blame." Similarly, Professor Jonathan Spence of Yale University argued in the New York Review of Books that the authors' single focus on Mao's vileness had undermined "much of the power their story might have had."

David S. G. Goodman, Professor of Contemporary China Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, wrote a sharply critical review of Chang and Halliday's book in The Pacific Review. He suggested that there is an implied argument in Mao: The Unknown Story that there has been "a conspiracy of academics and scholars who have chosen not to reveal the truth" - an argument which he likened to the conspiracy theorizing of the The Da Vinci Code. Goodman argued that "the 'facts' in The Da Vinci Code are about as reliable as those to be found in...Mao: The Unknown Story." Goodman argued that the style of writing was "extremely polemic" and that the book could even be thought of as a "form of fiction" where "a strong narrative" is "a substitute for evidence and argument." Like other reviewers Goodman was highly critical of Chang and Halliday's methodology and use of sources as well as several of their specific conclusions. He also noted that their focus on vilifying Mao led them to write "demonography" rather than objective history and biography. Overall Goodman viewed Mao: The Unknown Story as an example of a book that had "sacrificed intellectual reputation on the altar of instant celebrity."

Professor Thomas Bernstein of Columbia University referred to the book as "... a major disaster for the contemporary China field..." because the "scholarship is put at the service of thoroughly destroying Mao's reputation. The result is an equally stupendous number of quotations out of context, distortion of facts and omission of much of what makes Mao a complex, contradictory, and multi-sided leader."

A detailed examination of Mao: The Unknown Story was published in the January 2006 issue of the The China Journal. The editors divided Mao's life into four periods and had expert scholars on these various periods review the relevant portions of Chang and Halliday's book while also evaluating the work overall. Each reviewer pointed out a significant number of factual errors and examples of misuse of sources en route to concluding that the book was too flawed to be considered a valuable scholarly work. For example, Professors Gregor Benton (Cardiff University) and Steve Tsang (University of Oxford) argued that the book was "bad history and worse biography" which made "numerous flawed assertions." Chang and Halliday "misread sources, use them selectively, use them out of context, or otherwise trim or bend them to cast Mao in an unrelentingly bad light." They discuss a number of specific errors and problematic sourcing practices before concluding that the book "does not represent a reliable contribution to our understanding of Mao or twentieth-century China." Timothy Cheek (University of British Columbia) argued in his review that "Chang and Halliday's book is not a history in the accepted sense of a reasoned historical analysis," rather it "reads like an entertaining Chinese version of a TV soap opera." Cheek found it "disturbing...that major commercial Western media can conclude that this book is not only history, but terrific history."

Authors' response to criticism

In December 2005, an article by The Observer newspaper on the book contained a brief statement from Chang and Halliday in regards to the general criticism.

"The academics' views on Mao and Chinese history cited represent received wisdom of which we were well aware while writing our biography of Mao. We came to our own conclusions and interpretations of events through a decade's research."

The authors also responded to Andrew Nathan's review in a letter to the London Review of Books.

English language publication

File:Mao Unknown Story US cover.jpg
Cover of the American edition
  • Publisher: Random House
    • Publication date: June 02, 2005
    • ISBN 0-224-07126-2
  • Publisher: Knopf
    • Publication date: October 18, 2005
    • ISBN 0-679-42271-4

Mao: The Unknown Story was on the Sunday Times bestseller list at number 2, in July 2005.

References

  1. John Walsh (2005-06-10). "Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday". Asian Review of Books. Retrieved 2007-08-27.
  2. John Pomfret (2005-12-11). "Chairman Monster". Washington Post. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  3. Zbigniew Brzezinski (2005-3-9). "America and the New Asia" (PDF). Stanford Institute for International Studies. Retrieved 2006-12-02. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. Shuyun, Sun (2006). The Long March. London: HarperCollins. p. 161. ISBN 000719479X.
  5. Shuyun, Sun (2006). The Long March. London: HarperCollins. pp. 161–165. ISBN 000719479X.
  6. "Throwing the book at Mao". The Age. 2005-10-08. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  7. ^ Hamish McDonald (2005-10-08). "A swan's little book of ire". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  8. Jung Chang: Mao launched land reform to make the peasants obedient. Renminbao (2006-10-11). Retrieved on 4 April 2007. (in Chinese)
  9. Henry C K Liu (2004-4-1). "The Great Leap Forward not all bad". Asia Times Online. Retrieved 2006-10-16. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. R.J. Rummel (2005-12-01). "Stalin Exceeded Hitler in Monstrous Evil; Mao Beat Out Stalin". Hawaii Reporter). Retrieved 2007-04-09.
  11. Various (2005-11-01). "Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm". Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  12. "Mao: The Unknown Story". FMCM UK. 2005-12-11. Retrieved 2007-11-19.
  13. ^ "Storm rages over bestselling book on monster Mao". Guardian Unlimited. 2005-12-04. Retrieved 2007-11-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  14. Kristof, Nicholas (2005-10-23). "'Mao': The Real Mao". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-10-04. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  15. John Pomfret (2005-12-11). "Chairman Monster". Washington Post. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  16. "Jonathan Fenby". Trusted Sources. Retrieved 2007-11-19.
  17. Simon Sebag Montefiore (2005-05-29). "History: Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday". The Sunday Times. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  18. Kristof, Nicholas (2005-10-23). "'Mao': The Real Mao". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-10-04. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  19. Gwynne Dyer (2005-06-21). "Mao: Ten Parts Bad, No Parts Good". Trinidad & Tobago Express. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  20. Michael Yahuda (2005-06-04). "Bad element". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  21. Sophie Beach (2005-09-05). "CDT Bookshelf: Richard Baum recommends "Mao: The Unknown Story"". China Digital Times. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  22. Schram, Stuart (2007-03). "Mao: The Unknown Story". The China Quarterly (189): 208. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  23. Perry Link (2005-08-14). "An abnormal mind". The Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  24. "Storm rages over bestselling book on monster Mao". Guardian Unlimited. 2005-12-04. Retrieved 2007-11-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  25. Andrew Nathan (2005-11-17). "Jade and Plastic". London Review of Books. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  26. Jonathan Spence (2005-11-03). "Portrait of a Monster". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  27. Goodman, David S.G. (2006-09). "Mao and The Da Vinci Code: conspiracy, narrative and history". The Pacific Review. 19 (3): 361, 362, 363, 375, 376, 380, 381. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Kaz Ross of the University of Tasmania expressed a similar point on the style of the book, deeming Chang and Halliday's work "'faction' – history told by fictional narrative means." See Ross, Kaz, "Mao, the all-too familiar story"
  28. Benton, Gregor (2006-01). "The Portrayal of Opportunism, Betrayal, and Manipulation in Mao's Rise to Power". The China Journal (55): 96, 109. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  29. Creek, Timothy (2006-01). "The New Number One Counter-Revolutionary Inside the Party: Academic Biography as Mass Criticism". The China Journal (55): 110, 118. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  30. Jonathan Fenby (2005-12-04). "Bad element". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-07-18.
  31. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (2005-12-04). "A Question of Sources". London Review of Books. Retrieved 2007-11-14.

External links

  • Kueh, Y., Agricultural Instability in China, 1931-1990. (Oxford University Press, 1995)
  • Yao, S., "A Note on the Causal Factors of China’s Famine in 1959–1961", Journal of Political Economy, (1999, vol. 107, no. 6)
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