Mao: The Unknown Story (Paperback)

In the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, "Today, Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." For Chang, author of Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to history, but to decency. Mao: The Unknown Story does not contain a formal dedication, but it is clear that Chang is writing to honor the millions of Chinese who fell victim to Mao's drive for absolute power in his 50-plus-year struggle to dominate China and the 20th-century political landscape. From the outset, Chang and Halliday are determined to shatter the "myth" of Mao, and they succeed with the force, not just of moral outrage, but of facts. The result is a book, more indictment than portrait, that paints Mao as a brutal totalitarian, a thug, who unleashed Stalin-like purges of millions with relish and without compunction, all for his personal gain. Through the authors' unrelenting lens even his would-be heroism as the leader of the Long March and father of modern China is exposed as reckless opportunism, subjecting his charges to months of unnecessary hardship in order to maintain the upper hand over his rival, Chang Kuo-tao, an experienced military commander.

Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao's ascent to power and subsequent grip on China in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon's visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao's unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao's ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors' consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. --Silvana Tropea --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

That Mao was one of the most despicable individuals ever to exert significant influence in the world is now undeniable. The Chinese government may still publicly peddle the line that Mao was “seventy percent right, thirty percent wrong,” but as present-day China continues its great free-market leap, the current crop of more mild-mannered Beijing tyrants must know that Mao led their country on a egomaniacal adventure that almost destroyed it. There was a time when Mao had his defenders in the West; Jean Paul Sartre, for instance, praised Mao’s use of violence in the 1960s as “profoundly moral”. All of the earnest faces of the 1960s have now melted into history. That was then. These days, instead of falling at the feet of tyrants, the Western left, for the most part, prefers to believe in nothing at all.
So much has been written about Mao. Long before this book appeared we knew that he was a terrible man. The most obvious question hovering over this biography is, what does it tell us that we didn’t already know? The answer lies mostly in the new forensic detail Chang and Halliday provide; they put flesh on the bones of the Mao story, from the Communist Seizure of power in 1949 to China’s opportunistic rapprochement with United States in 1972. But they also tell us a great deal about Mao’s early involvement in politics.
In 1911, when Mao was seventeen years old, the Republican Revolution brought an end to over two thousand years of imperial rule. In the spring of 1913, the nineteen-year-old Mao entered teacher training college. In the open-minded atmosphere in the aftermath of the fall of the Manchu monarchy, Chinese youth experienced real political freedom:

“The students were exposed to all sorts of new ideas and encouraged to think freely and organise study groups. They turned out publications about anarchism, nationalism and Marxism, and for a while a portrait of Marx hung in the auditorium.”

Far from being any sort of oppressed proletarian, Mao was a typical student radical.

“Mao had earlier come across the word ‘socialism’ in a newspaper. Now he encountered ‘communism’ for the first time . . . Mao was not a loner, and, like students the world over, he and his friends talked long and hard . . . On summer evenings they climbed the hill behind the school and sat arguing deep into the night on the grass where crickets crooned and glow-worms twinkled, ignoring the summons of the bugle to bed.”

One gets the impression that had things been different, after his initial dabbling with radical politics, Mao might have settled down to become just another jaded professorial type, who once believed in the Revolution but discovered it had no practical application in the real world.
The book does have its flaws: Chang and Halliday tend to portray the young Mao as if he never really believed in anything and his whole involvement in the Communist movement was just a play for personal power. That’s surely not possible. Who in his right mind-and whatever else Mao was, he was no fool-would join a fringe political group, which is precisely what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was when Mao joined it in 1921, purely for personal advancement? To characterise Mao’s decision to join the CCP-28 years before it came to power-as being just another example of his opportunism is stretching credibility. No doubt the young Mao was an arrogant little swine, as many student activists are. But political idealism must have played some role in his early life. He couldn’t have known then that things would go so dramatically in his favour, and that he would grow up to become the all-powerful Chairman Mao.
I have long thought that inside many student leftists lurks a little Mao Tse-tung. For better or worse, most of them grow up to be accountants or software engineers. By dealing with Mao as a three-dimensional human being, we can apply the lessons of his hideous legacy to the everyday in our private and social lives. By painting him as a monster, a being of pure evil, as Chung and Halliday occasionally do, we turn him and his regime into something that is entirely removed from us. One of the crucial lessons of 20th-century history is precisely that the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Maos, and the Pol Pots have everything to do with us.
That said, the chapters on the Cultural Revolution (1966-72) are a brilliant exposé of what was perhaps the most ruthless political manoeuvre in all of human history. Like most decisions in his mature political career, its aim was to strengthen Mao’s grip on power. Mao used his wife, the former actress Jiang Qing, to whip school children up into a frenzy, turning them first on teachers, academics and artists, and then on Mao’s opponents in the state apparatus. The Cultural Revolution was made possible because of a deal Mao made with former Defence Minister, Lin Biao, a powerful figure in the regime and someone to whom Mao often turned when a dirty job needed doing. The upshot was that army Chief of Staff, Lou Ruiqing, a long-time ally of Mao’s, but a man against whom Lin Biao bore a longstanding grudge, would face the entirely fabricated charge of high treason; in return, Lin would enthusiastically endorse Madame Mao’s “Kill Culture” manifesto. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, which had led to famine instead of the promised prosperity, Mao’s position was weak. His opponents within the Communist Party were real as well as imaginary.
Only when Lin’s support was secured did Mao feel confident enough to let Jiang Qing off her leash. On August 18th, Mao stood next to Lin Biao on Tiananmen Gate while Lin told the self-styled student ‘Red Guards’ to go throughout the country and “smash old culture”.

“But Mao wanted something much more vicious. On 23 August he told the new authorities that ‘. . . Peking is too civilised’ . . . That afternoon groups of teenage Red Guards descended on the courtyard of the Peking Writers Association . . . Red Guards rained blows with their heavy belts on some two dozen of the country’s best known writers. Large insulting wooden plaques were hung on thin wire from the writers’ necks, as they were thrashed in the scorching sun . . . One of the victims was the sixty-nine-year-old writer Lao She, who had been lauded by the regime as ‘the people’s artist’. The following day, he drowned himself in a lake.”

During this period, deluded young people in the Western world began carrying pictures of Chairman Mao in political demonstrations; but someone like Jean Paul Sartre should have known better. Under General De Gaulle, who was President of France at the time, French writers like Sartre enjoyed freedoms their Chinese contemporaries would never have dreamt of because they were too busy begging their torturers to stop.
The next targets were “capitalist roaders” within the regime itself. As ever, the charges against those jailed, tortured and executed were born of paranoid fantasy or barefaced lie. It was the Chinese version of Stalin’s 1930s show-trials. The methods were very different:

“Stalin had carried out his purges using an elite, the KGB who swiftly hustled their victims out of sight to prison, gulag or death. Mao made sure that such violence and humiliation was carried out in public and he vastly increased the number of persecutors by getting his victims tormented and tortured by their own direct subordinates.”

But the result was similar: Mao’s power became absolute. Mao’s particular genius was that he co-opted discontent among the youth, and used it for his own savage ends. During this period China broke decisively with the Soviet Union, and pursued an aggressively independent foreign policy, even cultivating its own satellite states. The two most notable of these were Enver Hoxha’s Albania and Pol Pot’s Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. The unadulterated madness of these regimes made even Mao seem mild in comparison.
The ironic twist to all of this is the Cultural Revolution led China not towards some purer version of socialism, but to an alliance of convenience with the USA from 1972 onwards, and to its current free-market leap forward. The computer I am writing this review on bears the inscription “made in China”. However, Internet users in China probably won’t be able to read this review when it goes online. In many ways the story of Mao’s tyrannical regime endures. It is a ghastly Machiavellian tale on to which this beautifully written biography throws some sharp new light.
Kevin Higgins (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.