Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Random House of Canada, 2005
814 pp., $50
Chinese Shadows
by Simon Leys
(a.k.a. Pierre Ryckmans)
Penguin Books Canada, 1977
220 pp. Out of print
Dear Censor,
Wait a moment before you tear out these pages. Aren’t you at least curious about this new Mao biography and why it’s been banned from China, along with any material discussing it? The Americans’ War on Terror seems to have grown passé; the pressing questions seem to be Whither China? and How will the United States respond? In fact, a series of top-shelf foreign policy venues devoted significant space to this very topic this past fall. Writing in The American Interest, neo-conservative guru Francis Fukuyama proposed a new containment policy modelled on America’s Cold War approach. In The National Interest David M. Lampton, on the other hand, advocated “hedged integration,” gradually bringing China into “an interdependent international system in which it hopefully will develop shared responsibility for system maintenance.” It’s obvious that the Americans, and Westerners in general, are thinking a lot about your country these days. But with your nation enjoying billions in global trade, basking in America’s long-delayed recognition of its might, and preparing to host the 2008 Olympics, an 800-page gorilla shows up to ruin, well, the party. Dear Censor, Wait a moment before you tear out these pages. Aren’t you at least curious about this new Mao biography and why it’s been banned from China, along with any material discussing it? The Americans’ War on Terror seems to have grown passé; the pressing questions seem to be Whither China? and How will the United States respond? In fact, a series of top-shelf foreign policy venues devoted significant space to this very topic this past fall. Writing in The American Interest, neo-conservative guru Francis Fukuyama proposed a new containment policy modelled on America’s Cold War approach. In The National Interest David M. Lampton, on the other hand, advocated “hedged integration,” gradually bringing China into “an interdependent international system in which it hopefully will develop shared responsibility for system maintenance.” It’s obvious that the Americans, and Westerners in general, are thinking a lot about your country these days. But with your nation enjoying billions in global trade, basking in America’s long-delayed recognition of its might, and preparing to host the 2008 Olympics, an 800-page gorilla shows up to ruin, well, the party.
Jung Chang came to international prominence in 1991 with her enraged and personal account of women’s lives in twentieth-century China. Wild Swans sold in the millions and led authorities to ban the book. Chang’s new work, a sprawling biography of Mao Zedong (Tse-Tung) entitled Mao: The Unknown Story, written in collaboration with her husband, Jon Halliday, will not win over her antagonists in the Politburo. Researched and written over the course of nearly two decades, Chang and Halliday’s governing premise is simple and wholly damning: Mao Zedong was a calculating thug of titanic proportions, obsessed with gaining total power in China and beyond, at any cost, and by whatever means were necessary. The Great Helmsman’s achievements were born of a near-reptilian view of his fellow man and a tyrannical disregard for the value of any human life save his own. Mao makes Stalin and Hitler look like mediocre tyrants, as Chang and Halliday’s opening statement suggests with characteristic bluntness: “Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.”
Born to peasant stock in Hunan province in 1893, Mao took a middling road to national greatness. He seems to have never progressed beyond the slouchy habits of a wayward teenager. Throughout his life, Mao was fickle, lazy, and lecherous, prone to petty chicanery, and congenitally self-involved. He first converted these adolescent vices into political virtues when he joined and then bashed his way through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. From the beginning of his party involvement in the early 1920s, the authors suggest, Mao viewed the possibility of a Chinese proletarian revolution only as the means to a higher end — personal advancement. He had no abiding commitments to Marxism or to the ccp, nor did he display intellectual tendencies of note, unless one counts a lifelong habit of writing bad poetry. Nor, for that matter, did Mao possess any leadership skills — eloquence, bravery, self-sacrifice — that might account for his sway over so many. Mao’s talents lay in exploitation, manipulation, and spreading terror; he capitalized on cohorts’ loyalties and fervour by encouraging wide mistrust, blind obedience, and vicious behaviour. He was also adept at manoeuvring the ccp’s rigid command structures and bureaucratic armature to entrench his position, often relying on hacks to do the necessary dirty work and then distancing himself from the outcomes through exiles, torture, and executions.
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