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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 (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 interviews with hundreds of people who were close to Mao Zedong at some point in his life and reveals 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

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.

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.

Authors

File:Jung Chang.jpg
Jung Chang
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 specializing in the Soviet Union and was a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, University of London.

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. 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. In addition, The Sydney Morning Herald reported to have tracked down a 85-year old eyewitness, Li Guixiu, aged 15 at the time of the crossing, who disputed Chang's claims.

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.

In contrast, 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. The median of 7 estimates that post-date 1980, when the famine during the Great Leap Forward become known in the West, is 58 million deaths under Mao.

Critical views of the book

Various authors and academics have criticised the book for a variety of reasons. Generally complaints centred around the nature of many of the book's sources, specifically that they were either inaccessible or unreliable. Another point repeatedly 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.

British historian Philip Short 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:

"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."

Andrew Nathan 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." Nathan stated "Her anger, deeply justified, shapes this new book.". He also felt that the authors had focused their attention too closely on Mao. Rather than the "caricature" of Mao that he felt Chang and Halliday had presented, he said that "it would have been more useful, as well as closer to the truth, had we been shown that there are some very bad institutions and some very bad situations, both of which can make bad people even worse, and give them the incentive and the opportunity to do terrible things."

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.

Professor Thomas Bernstein of Columbia University referred to the book as "... a major disaster for the contemporary China field... Because of its stupendous research apparatus, its claims will be accepted widely... Yet 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."

Support for the book

Some academics have publicly given credance to some of Chang and Halliday's points. Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii stated that he agreed with Chang and Halliday's estimates over the number of deaths that can be attributed to Mao's rule of China. In addition, Willy Lam supported their argument that the CCP spent more time fighting the KMT than the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Perry Link, Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, has written a positive review in The Times Literary Supplement.

English language publication

File:Mao Unknown Story US cover.jpg
Cover of the American edition
  • Publisher: Random House
    • Publication date: June 02, 2005
    • ISBN 0224071262
  • Publisher: Knopf
    • Publication date: October 18, 2005
    • ISBN 0679422714

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

Sources

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