MAO: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Vintage, £9.99; 814pp
WITH THE LAWS AGAINST Holocaust denial in seven countries, perhaps there should also be a penalty for those who hold Hitler to have been the most ruthless dictator of the 20th century.
A rebuke might also be delivered to those who cannot tell the Long March from the Great Leap Forward, let alone do not realise that even today Mao Zedong’s portrait beams down from the gate of Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in still-communist China.
In 1991, Jung Chang’s phenomenally successful Wild Swans gave the Western public its first clear glimpse of the suffering under Chairman Mao. She wrote about her life as a young Red Guard and as the daughter of parents who were broken by the Cultural Revolution (more aptly called the Great Purge) launched in 1965-66.
In Mao: The Unknown Story, published last year, with her historian husband Jon Halliday, Chang gave the historical and social background to the Mao horror. Their biography, now out in paperback, is a readable and fast-paced narrative of the life of a leader who, they claim, was responsible for 70 million deaths. They calculate that Mao’s regime directly killed 27 million through public executions and maltreatment in prison and labour camps. The remaining millions perished through starvation, maltreatment or suicide.
It was not only in numbers murdered but in ruthlessness that Mao outranks Hitler. He set the Chinese against each other, exposing so-called spies and counter-revolutionaries, cowing the masses by making them watch the torture and execution of the accused.
Although a farmer’s son — born in Hunan, Central China, in 1893 — Mao, who became a convert to communism in 1920, was no lover of the Chinese peasantry.
In the name of the Great Leap Foward, his drive to overtake the capitalist countries in industrialisation, he caused, between 1958 and 1961, the greatest famine in history. The emaciated millions died producing grain, pork and vegetable oil exported to the Soviet Union. Mao wanted to ingratiate himself with the Soviet Government and Eastern Europe for industrial and nuclear knowhow.Thanks to food sent from China, East Germany lifted food rationing in May 1958. Mao laughed when told that his people were driven to eat leaves from the trees. “Half of China may well have to die,” he said. With a population of 550 million, China was better off without a few million. The cruel irony is that, unlike Hitler, Mao died in his own bed — from natural causes in 1976.
Although Wild Swans was banned in China, Chang, who moved to Britain in 1978, and her husband, a specialist on Soviet archives, were allowed into the country in a decade of work on this book. Many who knew Mao were still alive, including a 90-year-old woman who washed his underwear (a noble task, as he never took a bath or shower for a quarter of a century). They claim to have unearthed many new documents, including eight outpourings of love written by Mao’s second wife Kai-hui before her execution in 1930.
Their list of interviewees is phenomenal in itself: 363 people in 38 countries, including two former American presidents, the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the former Prime Minister Edward Heath, one of Mao’s daughters, several of his grandsons, the Dalai Lama and the actor Sir Michael Caine (who served in the Korean War).
They set about exploding some cherished myths. The Long March (from October 1934 to October 1935), was no heroic journey but a miserable failure. Of the 80,000 communists who moved to escape the encirclement of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, only 10,000 reached safety. And these survived, the claim continues, only because Chiang Kai-shek created a safe passage so that the Communists might subdue the warlords in the northwest.
The authors report that Mao, who always gave himself privileges denied to others, was carried most of the 6,000 miles in a litter, wearing underwear of fine material. The celebrated battle of the march, in 1935 over a gorge at the Dadu bridge, they declare, never took place. Chiang’s incompetence, not Mao’s cleverness, is offered as an explanation for the defeat of the Nationalists.
From Russian archives, more-over, there are records showing that Mao encouraged the opium trade to subsidise his hold on northern China. These show that the trade — for which the Chinese despised 19th-century British — brought $6 million in revenue.
When it first appeared in 2005, Mao: The Unknown Story received a warm, if qualified, reception. In The Independent, Jonathan Mirsky, a veteran China-watcher, claimed that it finished Mao’s reputation as “a great man”.
The Observer’s Jonathan Beckman saw it as “an act of political defiance”, attacking “the myths on which Chinese communist identity rests today”. In The Sunday Telegraph, Max Hastings welcomed its demolition of the foolish Western left-wing enthusiasm for Mao but found it lacking an explanation for why so many Chinese remained “for so long committed to his insane vision”.
But there has been a cooler welcome from scholars of Chinese history. Some find the authors’ professed unique sources and interviewees poorly attributed and hard to track down. They point out that little psychological evidence was produced to show why Mao was so devoid of human feeling. A more sweeping criticism is that the book ignores the wider political context of China and the interplay of the superpowers of the Cold War in its effort to pin everything on Mao.
“If ever Mao’s picture comes down from Tiananmen or his mausoleum is destroyed, and it is demonstrated that this biography was the key factor, I shall cheer the authors,” one Ivy League academic acknowledged. But he thought the book’s “total negativity” nullified its purpose.
Maybe. For the experts, Mao: The Unknown Story may be history as hatchet-job. But can you demonise a monster? The book is a revelation of the savagery to which the human race can sink and the extent to which a huge population can be controlled through terror. Required reading for the non-sinologist — but not for holidays.
MAO - MAN OR MONSTER?
Mao Zedong was born in 1893 into a peasant family as the Qin dynasty was fading. He later said that the dismemberment of China was then imminent and heroic action by youth was needed.
At the age of 19 he wrote an essay protesting against the ancient Chinese laws, saying: “At the beginning of anything out of the ordinary, the mass of the people always dislike it.”
He became a headmaster by 1920, marrying a teacher’s daughter with whom he had two sons. He had more children with later wives, and may have fathered illegitimate children.
RISE TO POWER
He attended the first meeting of the Chinese Commmunist Party in 1921, and, after the split with the Kuomintang (KMT), began building a guerrilla army. It took 22 years to defeat the KMT, during which time his wife died and he remarried. He left his second wife for the actress Jiang Qing, who, in the 1960s, masterminded much of the Cultural Revolution He came to power in 1949. In 1957 he dismissed claims of famine, saying: “How could we possibly kill 20 million people?” The cult of Mao spread worldwide in the 1960s, fuelled by his “little red book”, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. His face was immortalised by Andy Warhol in 1972, a portrait that sold for $17.4 million last year.
THE PRIVATE MAN
In his spare time, he wrote poetry in the traditional Chinese style, with revolutionary themes. “We have reclaimed part of the golden bowl/ And land is being shared out with a will,” he wroter in 1929 after Red Army clashes with the KMT.
He also swam daily, telling floundering friends: “Maybe you are afraid of sinking. Don’t think about it. If you don’t think about it, you won’t sink. If you do, you will.”
