Long march to the real Mao Tse-tung

Mao

The Unknown Story

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Alfred A. Knopf: 704 pp., $35

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MAO TSE-TUNG still is worshipped widely in China as the greatest leader of modern times, admired as a powerful ruler who stood up to Confucian tradition and foreign domination, and heralded as a champion of the poor farmers who remain the majority of the nation’s 1.3 billion people. In the years since Mao’s death in 1976, many Chinese and even some Westerners have clung to the notion that he was a noble patriot, an acceptable kind of tyrant.

In “Mao: The Unknown Story,” Jung Chang and Jon Halliday take apart, brick by brick, the towering myths surrounding Mao: that he was a voice for China’s peasants, a military genius who masterminded the “Long March” of his Red Army to safety, then led it in a war to repel Japan.

Instead, Chang and Halliday portray Mao as a conniving, backstabbing, relentless schemer whose motivation was power. It drips with tales of betrayal and treachery on an almost unimaginable scale. It also is a powerful narrative about China’s sorrow, about a country wrecked by his malevolent methods. Chang wrote “Wild Swans” (1991), a best-selling history of her family that also lyrically rendered China’s beguiling culture and violent past. For “Mao,” Chang and her husband, Halliday, conducted a decade of exhaustive research, interviewing members of Mao’s inner circle and hundreds of others.

Mao emerges in these pages as a restless rebel in Hunan with a passion for literature who rose to power by outfoxing countless rivals to rule the Communist Party. He engaged in spectacular political fights, was responsible for a famine that killed more than 30 million and led a “Great Purge,” the authors’ name for Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s that devastated Chinese society.

It is a book full of juicy characters. Lin Biao, who was so afraid of water that he didn’t bathe, promoted Mao as a god and the Little Red Book of Mao quotations as a Bible, only to consider assassinating him and then, once discovered, was killed trying to escape to the Soviet Union. Chou En-lai, the polished diplomat who covered up decades of Mao’s worst acts, was betrayed by Mao in the end. Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife and shrill attack dog, said at her trial, “Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.”

The myths that fall are numerous. One is that Mao’s empathy with China’s farmers put him at the helm of an agrarian-led revolution. In fact, the authors demonstrate, the “peasant uprisings” Mao claimed to have led were actually sophisticated power-grabs in which he relied on bandits and used elaborate trickery to gain access to soldiers and power. Another is that the Red Army won the people’s support by being upright, never looting or taxing the poor. The book shows persuasively that he stole aggressively from the rich, the poor and the in-between, and always insisted on luxuries for himself -- eating delicacies, residing in palaces, bedding young women -- even in the direst moments of war.

Chang and Halliday portray the Long March as a series of makeshift steps, each intended to further Mao’s own ascension, and they contend that his climactic battle at the Dadu River, intricately told in Edgar Snow’s classic book “Red Star Over China,” was entirely made up. They describe his treatment of his wives and children, whom he cast aside when they became inconvenient, and of his enemies, whom he exiled, poisoned or executed.

The authors use newly available Soviet documents to illuminate Mao’s complex relationship with Josef Stalin, how Mao begged for and depended on Stalin’s aid in the 1940s, and may not have been able to defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army without it. They cite cable traffic between the two men to show how eagerly Mao welcomed the Korean War and sent millions of Chinese soldiers to death to serve his other purposes.

In some places, Chung and Halliday go too far, effectively diluting the force of their argument: that Mao was a sophisticated thug who bullied his way to the top and stopped at nothing to hold power. They allege that he was responsible for more than 70 million deaths, but their calculations are rife with guesses and worst-case suppositions. Many of their “revelations” have been published in bits and pieces in a recent gush of Chinese-language histories and memoirs. Some items are unreliable, others implausible.

But the book’s main flaw is excess. The authors seem so set on demolishing Mao’s reputation that they overreach. In one place, they imply that Mao’s comments precipitated the erecting of the Berlin Wall. In another, they suggest that Mao caused Stalin’s death because of a document found at Stalin’s bedside about Josip Broz Tito, the troublesome Yugoslavian communist leader whom Stalin once compared to Mao -- as if the mere thought of Mao were enough to trigger a stroke.

One of Mao’s genuine achievements was to promote the rights for Chinese women after centuries of repression. Yet the authors argue that by mandating equal manual labor for men and women, Mao “felt little tenderness” for women.

The authors also portray Mao’s rivals as compassionate humanitarians, evidently to make Mao look more evil. Peng Dehuai, a war hero and defense minister purged by Mao, is described as someone who “cared about the poor and downtrodden.” They write that Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s deputy until 1967, was “patriotic” and upset to learn about starvation.

The authors’ haphazard method of spelling Chinese names seems to reflect a disregard for accuracy. Most readers won’t care, but anyone familiar with Chinese history will find it strange that Mao’s third wife, He Zizhen, is referred to only by a nickname, Gui-yuan.

In their efforts to demonize Mao, the authors fail to reflect on why Mao is still so admired in China today. Part of that phenomenon is an intense nostalgia that rests on Mao’s perceived victories, his cleverness, his unpredictability. Although information about Mao’s sordid past is emerging, many Chinese insist on seeing him as the founding father of communist China, as the embattled winner of its civil war and fight against Japan, the rough equivalent of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt wrapped into one.

At the same time, Mao clearly stood for poverty and totalitarian control, now completely discredited in China. Mao also went against many so Chinese ideals -- respect for authority, concern for appearances -- that he seems to represent everything that Chinese people ordinarily despise.

In a repressive culture, it may be that the Chinese people yearn for a hero who rebels against all the traditional restrictions that they themselves willingly suffer. The authors do not mull this possibility.

Their epilogue is two sentences long, noting that Mao’s portrait still hangs alone at the main gate of Tiananmen Square and that the Party “fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao.”

In saying this, Chang and Halliday miss the complexity and subtlety of today’s China and fail to explain why Mao still has such a hold.

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Seth Faison, a former correspondent for the New York Times in China, wrote “South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China.”