Mao: The unknown story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
(Jonathan Cape)
Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao Zedong 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 was responsible, Mao, with some 70-million, exceeded both.
Far from being the first Chinese communist leader to stand up for the Chinese peasantry, Mao disdained them. He is shown, during his command of armed forces in the countryside in the late 1920s and early 1930s, to have lived off local peasants to the extent of leaving them destitute. He consciously used terror as a means to enforce his will on the party and the people who came under his rule. In the course of the Long March, Mao had no qualms in sacrificing thousands of scarce fighters in fruitless diversions serving no other purpose than his bid for leadership.
His callous disregard for life became more evident once he commanded China itself. He prolonged the Korean war in the expectation of tying down hundreds of thousands of United States troops, regardless of the disproportionate sacrifice of far greater Chinese casualties. The livelihood of China’s peasants was tightly squeezed through most of Mao’s rule, not simply to meet the needs of industry and the urban population, but also to pay the Soviet Union and the East Europeans for the weaponry they supplied.
The suffering of the peasants plumbed new depths during Mao’s hare-brained scheme known as the Great Leap Forward, which led to the starvation and premature deaths of 30 to 40-million people. To the end of his life, Mao continued to sacrifice the Chinese people in his search for superpower status.
Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao’s tumultuous life. Among the most significant of their discoveries are the lies of the Long March. The fabled crossing of the Dadu chain bridge, for instance, when, according to Mao, his heroic soldiers managed to cross the narrow bridge against heavy machine-gun fire, is shown to be a complete invention. The authors consulted many sources, interviewed local historians and even visited the scene. Mao is shown to have been completely dependent on Soviet support.
Some of the distortions of history perpetrated by Mao and the communist party have already been exposed by Western and Chinese scholars. They have had access to writings and documents released by Chinese party historians, and their studies have also been enriched by access to archives from the former communist bloc, notably those in Moscow.
Chang and Halliday have not only made full use of this literature, but judging from their notes, they have spent the past 11 years going through the archives themselves, some of them in countries whose records had not been examined for this purpose before. They have also used their contacts in China to interview an extraordinary array of people who were close to Mao and other leaders. These range from family members to friends, colleagues, secretaries, witnesses and even a woman who once washed Mao’s underwear.
Consequently, the authors are able to shed new light on virtually every episode of Mao’s life. Mao himself comes across as a uniquely self-centred man whose strength was his utter disregard for others, his pitilessness, his single-mindedness, his capacity for intrigue and his ability to exploit weakness. He neglected his wives, who he treated cruelly, and had no time for his children. He loved food and reading and had an infinite supply of young women. Mao lacked personal courage and had about 50 villas built for him in different parts of China, which were constructed to withstand even nuclear attack.
Mao had none of the skills usually associated with a successful revolutionary leader. He was no orator and he lacked either idealism or a clear ideology. He was not even a particularly good organiser. But he was driven by a personal lust for power. He came to dominate his colleagues through a mixture of blackmail and terror. And he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it. During the Cultural Revolution he watched films of the violence and of colleagues being tortured.
The use of terror typified Mao’s rule. Although he had his equivalent of the KGB, Mao’s distinctive form of terror was to get people to use it against each other.
This magnificent book is not without its blemishes. There is no discussion of the quality of the sources or how they were used. Nevertheless, it is a stupendous work and one hopes that it will be brought before the Chinese people, who have yet to come to terms with their own history. — Â