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Mao: The Unknown Story is a book authored by writer Jung Chang and her historian husband Jon Halliday. It was published in 2005 and challenges many established views about Mao Zedong.

Review of the book

Philip Short, a British author and journalist who published a book on Mao in 1999, says that Chang and Halliday have come close to a hatchet job. Speaking by telephone from northeastern China, where he is lecturing and conducting further research on Mao, Short says it does nobody any good to exaggerate the obvious monstrosities of Mao.

"I fear this is a case of writing history to fit their own views; doing what the Chinese call cutting the feet to fit the shoes," Short says.

"Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there's no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan. Do we really gain in understanding by denying his complexity, his perversity, his genius and reducing him to a one-dimensional caricature?

"Mao was a tyrant, but much more than that. He was the reverse of a one-dimensional man. He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius. He had great skills and enormous failings. Let's not oversimplify and pretend he was just a monster. The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Mao who cooked it up; almost every other Chinese leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain."

The book is occasionally hyperbolic; it describes, on flimsy evidence, one communist spy in the nationalist camp as perhaps “single-handedly” changing the course of world history; sometimes weird - actor Michael Caine pops up as a primary source for the “human wave” attacks by the Chinese in the Korean war; and also at times unconvincingly conspiratorial.

The authors argue that the nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, “to a large extent steered” the “Long March”, deliberately holding back from attacking the fleeing communists in order to use them to subdue warlords that he would otherwise have had to fight himself. This is a claim that excludes a ton of evidence to the contrary. But the book is for the most part gripping, racing along in an almost potboilerish style that made Chang’s first book, Wild Swans, the story of her family during the Cultural Revolution, equally readable.

There is no discussion of the quality of the sources or how they were used. The motives of people in general and of Mao in particular are asserted rather than evaluated. There is no introduction or concluding chapter to bring together the key themes of the book.

In some respects, the book’s weakness is the flip side of this. It may seem a little eccentric, even obscene, to complain about a lack of “context” in a book about a man directly responsible, by the authors’ count, for 70 million deaths. But the ceaseless focus on Mao, and the blame attached to him and him alone for every atrocity that took place during his rule, is overwrought.

We don’t just need more about the times and less about the man. We know that countless Chinese suffered under Mao. But we also need to understand why so many enthusiastically joined in the violence that Mao unleashed and the imperial traditions he exploited to manipulate the masses. Sheer terror is not a sufficient answer.

References

A review

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