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Mao: The Unknown Story

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Mao: The Unknown Story, Chang's biography of Mao

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 Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin.

The ten years of research for the book includes interviewing hundreds of people who were close to Mao Zedong at some point in his life and revealing the contents of newly released secret archives. Additional knowledge comes from Chang's 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 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.

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.

File:Jung Chang.jpg
Jung Chang

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.

Reviews

"Mao: The Unknown Story is a bit of a misnomer. Mao’s crimes are not unknown to anyone who has tried to find them. But Chang and her husband and co-author, British academic Jon Halliday, have laid out the case for the prosecution in bestial, and at times excruciating, detail unrivalled by other biographies."
"A major new biography-more than a decade in the making-portrays Mao as having been even more ruthless and bloody than was previously believed... Ms Chang's and Mr Halliday's informants include several Mao intimates, but some of the most revealing details come from non-Chinese sources, including the archives of the former Soviet Union, which played such an important role in the rise of the Chinese Communist Party."
"So what made Jung Chang then devote 10 years of her life to researching a hefty political biography of Chairman Mao? Chang aims to expose the true character of the man responsible for so much misery - Chairman Mao. He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did, Chang says. And yet the world knows astonishingly little about him."
"The book is Mao: The Unknown Story, a massively researched biography of the Great Helmsman that strips all the flattering myths away and reveals the founder of China's Communist regime as a monster with no redeeming qualities whatever. The authors, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, spent ten years traveling through previously untapped archives and interviewing literally hundreds of people who were close to Mao Tse-tung at some point in his life, and the picture they draw of the man is as definitive as it is repellent."
"A compelling study of China's red emperor from Jung Chang and Jon Halliday exposes the true scale of Mao's oppression and genocidal manias"
"I imagine most people would accept it as axiomatic that a good biography (never mind a great one) of a towering political figure cannot be written from a stance of pure hatred. As we know from Jung Chang's Wild Swans, she suffered grievously during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. But that in itself does not establish one's credentials to be a Mao biographer. The problem with this book is that it is an 800-page polemic, along the lines of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, but unconscionably prolix, and a sustained polemic does not a biography make."
"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 study, by Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, is a triumph. It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research."
  • "Bad element" by Michael Yahuda, The Guardian, Saturday June 4, 2005
"The author of Wild Swans and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao and the Communist party of China to this day have hidden the true picture of Mao the man and Mao the ruler. Mao now stands revealed as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible, Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both."
"Mao: the Unknown Story is not so much about toppling the myth of Mao as the benevolent creator of modern China, as setting it aflame. Based on painstaking and often dangerous work in archives in places ranging from Albania to Washington, the book uses sources they have unearthed that reveal Mao as a psychopathic leader, responsible for the deaths of 70 million, and driven by a hunger for power. "I was constantly shocked by how evil he could be," says Chang. "Mao was very, very shrewd but he didn't have human feeling."

Controversy

While receiving worldwide praise, the book is not without controversy, and several points have been disputed.

Chang argues that there was no battle at Luding Bridge and that the story was simply Communist propaganda. Jung Chang is currently amongst a minority of sources that deny the incident took place. She 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. But diaries of several veterans of the Long March, 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.

In October 2005, The Age newspaper claimed that it had been unable to track down Chang's Luding Bridge witness.

Chang claims that the KMT did the majority of the fighting, whilst the Red Army did not attempt to engage the Japanese. American generals such as Joseph Stilwell did mention the relative combat efficiency and good leadership of the Red Army compared to the KMT army, though Stilwell had a poor relationship with Chiang Kai-shek over many issues concerning the Chinese war effort - Stilwell was eventually replaced in 1944. Also people like Willy Lam and Hans van de Ven have argued, as well as Chang, that the KMT contributed far more to the Chinese war effort than the Communists and that Red forces spent at least as much time fighting the KMT as they did the Japanese.

Chang states that China pushed back American forces by 'swamping' them with hordes of 'human waves', sourced by the actor Michael Caine. However, declassified American sources indicate that this belief was partly wartime propaganda and that Chinese forces were never deployed in numbers as large as was previously believed.

  • 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'. It has been argued that she failed to take important factors into consideration, such as reports of poor weather that contributed to the famine - it has also been argued that average Chinese death rates dropped during Mao's rule. Estimates of the numbers of deaths during this period vary, people such as Wim F Werthheim suggesting inaccurate data to be the main cause. Analysts and historians, both Chinese and non-Chinese, mostly put the death toll at around 30 million people during the Great Leap Forward, with the majority of the deaths due to starvation. Dr Ping-ti Ho stated his belief that he believed "missing" Chinese from the 1950s census records never existed in the first place.

Chang says that Mao deliberately violated a treaty concerning the Sino-Indian border, even though it had been rejected by all Chinese factions, including the KMT.

British historian Philip Short stated his belief that Chang was being one-sided in her views that Mao was alone to blame for China's ills:

"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. Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there's no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan... He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius... It was not just one man who caused all this pain."

Extract

A few paragraphs from a much longer extract at Random 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

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

Sources

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