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Mao: The Unknown Story is an 832-page book written by the (married) historians Jung Chang and Jon Halliday after ten years of research. It was published in 2005 and paints Mao Zedong, Mao Tse-Tung in Wade-Giles, 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 Hitler or Stalin.

The ten years of research for the book includes interviewing literally hundreds of people who were close to Mao Zedong at some point in his life and revealing the contents of newly released secret Chinese archives. Additional knowlegde comes from their personal experience of living through the madness of the Cultural Revolution in China.

According to the book "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 twentiethcentury leader" and boasted 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.

Some historians have criticised their portrait of Mao. British author Philip Short, whose own biography of Mao was published in 1999, has argued that Chang and Halliday have reduced Mao from a complex historical character to a one-dimensional "cardboard cutout of Satan" and that Chang is guilty of "writing history to fit her views".

Chang has responded to the criticism by arguing that nothing positive came out of Mao's rule, and that she and her husband were shocked at what they discovered during the 10 years they spent researching the book. Halliday is an historian specializing in the Soviet Union, and he said that he was greatly helped by accessing Russian archives on China that were inaccessible until recently. Despite being highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party, 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.

Authors

Main articles at Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

The author Jung Chang, 张戎, (born 1952) is a British (Chinese-born) writer, best known for her autobiography Wild Swans, which became the biggest grossing non-fiction paperback in publishing history, selling over 10 million copies worldwide, except in mainland China, where it is banned.

Jon Halliday is a Russian historian who was a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, University of London.

English language publication

• Publisher: Random House
  • Publication date: June 02, 2005
  • ISBN: 0224071262

• Publisher: Knopf
  • Publication date: October 18, 2005
  • ISBN: 0679422714

"Mao: The Unknown Story is in the Sunday Times Bestseller list this week at number 2" July 2005

Reviews

"It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research" says Simon Sebag Montefiore of The Times.

"Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have not, in the whole of their narrative, a good word to say about Mao. In a normal biography, such an unequivocal denunciation would be both suspect and tedious. But the clear scholarship, and careful notes, of The Unknown Story provoke another reaction. Mao Tse-tung's evil, undoubted and well documented, is unequalled throughout modern history." says Roy Hattersley of The Observer.

"The book is an indictment both of the political and the personal Mao that is so unrelenting and comprehensive that it invites disbelief-but the documentation is overwhelming" says Gwynne Dyer of Trinidad & Tobago Express.

Extract

A few paragraphs from a much longer extract at Randon House:

"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-tan (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' - Shi san ya-zi. 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?'" Random House extract

Sources

• "This book will shake the world" by Lisa Allardice, The Guardian, May 26, 2005
• "Mao: 10 parts bad, no parts good" by Gwynne Dyer, Trinidad & Tobago Express June 21, 2005
• "The long march to evil", by Roy Hattersley, The Observer, June 5, 2005
• "Too much hate, too little understanding", by Frank McLynn, The Independent on Sunday, June 5, 2005
• "History: Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday" by Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Times, May 29, 2005
• "Bad element" by Michael Yahuda, The Guardian, Saturday June 4, 2005
• The Independent

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