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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. Various East Asian scholars have questioned the authors' use of these sources and the conclusions drawn therefrom, making the book controversial. At the same time, the book has also drawn praise from other academics and commentators.

The book

According to Mao: The Unknown Story, "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" 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.

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, a far less contentious writer than Chang, also wrote in her book, The Long March (London: Harper, 2006), 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." (161) A thorough search of archives in Chengdu revealed further documentation supporting this claim (161-165).

On the other hand, the diary of Yang Cheng-wu, who was 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

The book has received mixed reviews, with academics and commentators disagreeing on fundamental aspects as to the book's conclusions and reliability.

Support

Some academics and commentators have publicly given credence to issues raised by Chang and Halliday, as well as expressed support for the book itself. Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii has amended his estimates of the number of deaths that can be attributed to Mao's rule in line with Chang and Halliday's, expressing his belief in the credibility of Mao: The Unknown Story.

Professor Perry Link of Princeton University, wrote a positive review in The Times Literary Supplement.

Part of Chang and Halliday's passion for exposing the "unknown" Mao is clearly aimed at gullible Westerners. Mao entranced Edgar Snow, Zhou Enlai charmed Henry Kissinger, and in both cases the consequences for Western understanding of China were severe... 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."

Professor Michael Yahuda of the London School of Economics, also expressed his support in The Guardian, calling it a "magnificent book" and "a stupendous work". In his opinion, "Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao's tumultuous life" through the years they had spent researching in various archives and interviewing those close to Mao and other senior politicians.

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", he still believed that "this book will most likely change forever the way modern Chinese history is understood and taught."

Military historian Gwynne Dyer praised the book for documenting "Mao's crimes and failures in unrelenting, unprecedented detail", stating he believed it would eventually have a similar impact on China that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" did on Russia.

Journalist and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore called Chang and Halliday's work "a triumph".

Mao: The Untold Story 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. Using witnesses in China, and new, secret Chinese archives, the authors of this magisterial and damning book estimate that Mao was responsible for 70m deaths.

Criticism

Other authors and academics have criticised or questioned the book for a variety of reasons. One issue was the nature of many of the book's sources, specifically that they were either inaccessible or unreliable. Another point raised was that the image of Mao presented by Chang and Halliday was too superficial, or that too much focus was placed on him and too little on the Chinese Communist Party itself.

Professor Jonathan Spence of Yale University critized the book in the New York Review of Books stating that their single focus on Mao's vileness had undermined "much of the power their story might have had."

British writer Philip Short, author of Mao: A Life, was one of the first to respond, stating his belief that Chang was being one-sided in her views that Mao was alone to blame for China's ills.

Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, published an extensive evaluation of the book in the London Review of Books. Concerned that much of the authors' research was very difficult to confirm or simply unreliable, he stated 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."

However he did also say that the book made "the most thorough use to date of the many memoirs that have emerged since Mao’s death, written by his colleagues, cadres, staff and victims, and shows special insight into the suffering of Mao’s wives and children". Generally even though their various points could not be accepted as "established conclusions" at that time, it was certainly necessary to examine them in the future.

Writer John Pomfret wrote in his review in the Washington Post's Book World, "when it pretends to tell us what the chairman is thinking and feeling, the book veers toward magical realism" and that its "tendency toward hyperbole damages its otherwise persuasive case against Mao." "In short, if you're hoping for staid, balanced scholarship, don't read this book. It's not history; it's a screed...when Chang and Halliday depart from their Chinese and Soviet sources and engage in historical guesswork, the book borders on the unbelievable..."

He also commented that despite the book's faults "their central point -- that Mao was a monster and should be remembered as one of history's great villains -- is right on the money."

Professor Thomas Bernstein of Columbia University referred to the book as "... a major disaster for the contemporary China field..." because "their 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."

At a 2006 conference on the Cultural Revolution, during a seminar on distortion of History and representations of Mao, Professor Kaz Ross of University of Tasmania stated that "the Chang—Halliday book was only the latest in the genre of 'faction' - fiction with a cloak of facts."

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. 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)
  2. "Throwing the book at Mao". The Age. 2005-10-08. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  3. ^ Hamish McDonald (2005-10-08). "A swan's little book of ire". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  4. Jung Chang: Mao launched land reform to make the peasants obedient. Renminbao (2006-10-11). Retrieved on 4 April 2007. (in Chinese)
  5. 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)
  6. ^ R.J. Rummel (2005-12-01). "Stalin Exceeded Hitler in Monstrous Evil; Mao Beat Out Stalin". Hawaii Reporter). Retrieved 2007-04-09.
  7. Various (2005-11-01). "Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm". Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  8. Perry Link (2005-08-14). "An abnormal mind". The Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  9. Michael Yahuda (2005-06-04). "Bad element". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  10. Sophie Beach (2005-09-05). "CDT Bookshelf: Richard Baum recommends "Mao: The Unknown Story"". China Digital Times. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  11. Gwynne Dyer (2005-06-21). "Mao: Ten Parts Bad, No Parts Good". Trinidad & Tobago Express. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  12. Simon Sebag Montefiore (2005-05-29). "History: Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday". The Sunday Times. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  13. Jonathan Spence (2005-11-03). "Portrait of a Monster". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  14. Andrew Nathan (2005-11-17). "Jade and Plastic". London Review of Books. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  15. John Pomfret (2005-12-11). "Chairman Monster". Washington Post. Retrieved 2007-04-04.
  16. "Reflections on the June 9-10, 2006 Hong Kong Conference: "The Fortieth Anniversary: Rethinking the Genealogy and Legacy of the Cultural Revolution"". Monthly Review. 2006-01-07. Retrieved 2007-04-04. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

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