Who was the most wicked tyrant of the 20th century? Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot could all lay claim to the devil’s horns and tail. But readers of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s
Mao will surely reckon that they have made a convincing case for handing the indictment to the deeply wicked former chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
Ever since the spectacular success of Chang’s Wild Swans we have waited impatiently for her to complete with her husband this monumental study of China’s most notorious modern leader. The expectation has been that she would rewrite modern Chinese history. The wait has been worthwhile and the expectation justified. This is a bombshell of a book.
The only thing that makes me carp is its scale. Sometimes when you read long biographies you feel that they contain a rather good but much smaller book seeking to escape. With Mao, it is the opposite. There is a much longer book trying to get in. I suppose the publishers were right to refuse a two-volume life, although it would certainly have been worth it. The wealth of footnotes and sources, and the occasional feeling that you are having to leap like the Swiss chamois from one peak of otherwise unused material to another, made me reckon that at least another couple of hundred pages would have been worth the tree-felling required.
Despite that, this formidable husband-and-wife team — whose fortitude in living with so much horror for so long has to be admired — has given us a storming account of what the subtitle calls “The Unknown Story”. It gains from being written on the whole in a clipped, matter-of-fact style that leads you mercilessly from one glimpse of hell to another.
I am not sure whether all monsters start as monsters, pulling the wings of flies, but Mao certainly seems to have done so. As a 24-year-old student, he wrote long commentaries in a book by a minor late 19th-century German philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen. “I do not agree,” he wrote, “with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others. People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.”
Mao lived this philosophy, coming to violence through his character, not through any ideology, bereft of any sense of social justice or of egalitarianism. For him, for example, the Long March was the long carry; he smoked and read in his litter while his “comrades” staggered along beneath the weight of their leader and his books.
In these early years Mao had to manoeuvre this way and that to stay on the right side of Stalin and the Comintern. Moscow had created the Chinese Communist Party and used it ruthlessly to pursue its own interests, for example in relation to Japan and its possible designs on the Soviet Union’s far eastern territories. Mao also subordinated military strategy to his tactical needs as he jockeyed for position in the party’s hierarchy, seeking to discredit his rivals or weaken their own military resources.
The authors shred the myths on which Mao’s national and international reputation rested. It was only with reluctance that the party’s then principal leaders allowed him to tag on to their Red Army as it began its long trek north. The Communists were allowed by General Chiang Kai-shek to escape the Nationalist trap in which they had been caught because he hoped that by driving them into Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces his own armies would be welcomed there by the local warlords without a fight. He was also anxious to trade the improbable escape of the Communists for the return of his son held hostage by Stalin.
Much of the detail of this epic march was simply fabricated for Mao’s greater glory; for example, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday produce a wealth of evidence — all carefully documented in the excellent notes appended to the book — showing that the fabled fight to cross the raging torrent of the Dadu River never happened. The fabrication was sedulously copied out as the truth by the journalist Edgar Snow. Mao was lucky in the schmucks such as Snow who wrote about him; their number naturally included France’s leading female fathead, Simone de Beauvoir. Her own book on China, The Long March, famously contains one entry in the index for the word violence: “(Mao) on violence, avoidance of”.
Others, who should have known a lot better, were equally wrong about him. George C. Marshall, one of the greatest Americans of the past or any century, pressed Chiang Kai-shek not to pursue the fleeing Mao into Manchuria, which allowed him to regroup there. This helped his final military victory over the Nationalists, who put a series of generals into the field against him who were almost certainly Communist sleepers.
Mao could not have survived and prospered among the ruins of his policies and the death of his people — almost 38 million were estimated to have died during the Great Leap Forward — without the craven complicity of those he terrorised from the early years in Yenan to the end of his life. Chou En-lai was always regarded as the suave, handsome and acceptable face of Mao’s China. In reality, he was Mao’s stooge, a charming if sometimes reluctant partner in his wickedness. The heroes were the President of China, Liu Shao-chi, his brave wife Wang Guang-mei, and the stalwart old Communist General Peng De-huai. They had earned Mao’s wrath by seeking to call a halt to the insanities of the Great Leap Forward. They died long and painful deaths during the Cultural Revolution.
Is there a case to be made for the defence? Henry Kissinger (whose finest hour this was not) paid humiliating court to Mao, and has described him as a “philosopher” pursuing a “quest for egalitarian virtue”. That is, I suppose, one way of describing a career that was responsible for well over 70 million deaths. In the long run, we are, indeed, all dead, and Mao recognised the virtuous equality of mass graves.
One of the best arguments against him is what has happened in China since he died. Spurred on initially by the reforms of Deng Xiao-ping, China has enjoyed a real Great Leap Forward, without the death, cannibalism and destruction of the economy that accompanied the first. Manic tyranny was not necessary to keep China together; and vainglorious and blind attachment to stupidity — remember the sparrows that were supposed to be eliminated through fatigue before they could peck up the harvest — and Stone Age economics were never going to put the country on the road to economic power.
There is much talk of the necessity for Chinese leaders to re-examine what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Far more important will be for China to review honestly the years of Chairman Mao. No country can be at ease with itself that does not look its own history straight in the eye. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have done this extraordinary country a huge service with this book, which will one day be read as widely inside China as it will deservedly be in the coming months in the world outside.
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday is published by Jonathan Cape, £25; offer £20, from Books First on 0870 1608080
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