In the lead-up to Communist victory in 1949, the founding of the first Chinese Red State in Jiangxi province and the circumstances of the Long March encapsulate the systematic madness that would come to define Mao’s rule. In late 1930, Mao wanted to reassert his authority over the Red Army base in Jiangxi. Initially stymied, he claimed that wealthy peasants were in control of both the local party and the base’s troops, and he persuaded party leaders in Shanghai and Moscow to support actions he deemed necessary for maintaining ideological purity and full authority. In fact, he had already approved an array of sadistic tactics in order to extract confessions for these charges. Wives of Jiangxi leaders were singled out. According to one contemporary account, “their bodies, particularly their vaginas, were burned with flaming wicks, and their breasts were cut with small knives.” According to another report, male suspects would have a wire shoved through their penises; the other end was hooked around the ear of the victim, and the torturer then plucked at the wire.
In all, tens of thousands of people were eliminated in Jiangxi. Mao’s penchant for labelling opponents “counterrevolutionaries” as a pretext for their eradication started in earnest with the Jiangxi atrocities, Chang and Halliday contend, but the event holds wider historical importance: It was “the first large-scale purge in the party, and took place well before Stalin’s Great Purge.” When Mao was made chairman of the Red State in Jiangxi, in short order “a large square was cleared . . . to make room for the Communists’ staple activity: mass rallies.” Mandatory parades were held in the name of party greatness. In time party boss Zhou Enlai ran this Red fiefdom, “and under him the whole society was dragooned into an allencompassing, interlocking machine.”
Once the Long March was underway, Chiang allegedly manoeuvred the Red Army into areas where its presence would rein in the activities of local warlords. He also avoided opportunities to decimate Mao’s forces himself because he was seeking to placate Russia and also deflect Japan’s imperial designs on Chinese territory. In defiance of official Nationalist and Communist histories, as well as most modern scholarly accounts, Chang and Halliday argue that “the famed Long March was to a large extent steered by Chiang Kai-shek.” Thanks largely to Chiang, soon after the march was completed Mao reached the top of the ccp. Enter the magnificently gullible Edgar Snow, who penned Red Star Over China, which is based on interviews with the chairman and other communist leaders conducted in 1936. After Mao rewrote segments to make them more to his liking, the book was published in 1937 and influenced both international and native opinions.
At the heart of Snow’s fable and Mao’s mythology, Chang and Halliday explain, is “the crossing of the bridge over the Dadu River,” which occurred halfway through the Long March. The authors provide Snow’s breathless account of the Red Army making its way across a partially disassembled (and then a burning) bridge while facing enemy machine guns. Then they offer a curt dismissal of on Snow’s rendering: “This is complete invention.” To dispute the unblinkingly heroic version of the event, Chang and Halliday cite the testimony of a ninety-three-year-old local witness they interviewed in 1997. They combine her recollections with other piecemeal evidence, but only to produce a counter-history of the Dadu crossing as vehemently negative as the Snow/ccp version was positive. Here as throughout the biography, Chang and Halliday advance their iconoclastic attack on Mao by relying on source materials that resist independent verification, and through historical recreations that depend on questionable logic. But the force of Chang and Halliday’s chief argument — that an outsized egoist held a nation captive to his monomania and concealed it through a combination of saturating ideology and idolatry — counsels against the ready acceptance of a monolithic story, whether of good or evil.
The second half of Mao: The Unknown Story details Mao’s implacable appetite for power and creature comforts once the Communists had taken over China from the Nationalists. Having already gained decisive control of the ccp, from his ascent to power in 1949 until his death in 1976 “Mao would digest the rest of society gradually.” The trajectory is depressingly similar to the account of Mao’s rise, and even more troubling in that the three main features of Mao’s leadership — obsessive control, opaque decision-making, and aggressive expansion — describe the contemporary Chinese approach to governance just as readily. Among the numerous topics covered in grisly detail are Mao’s jockeying for support and position with Stalin and his Soviet successors; the brutal ironies of his Hundred Flowers campaign; his obsession with nuclear weaponry; the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1960 and its major achievement, widespread famine; the rise of the Little Red Book and the personality cult; his compulsion to best the United States; the countless and self-defeating purges that he presided over to hold on to power; his constant recalibrations of his cronies’ positions, responsibilities, and influences; his proto-Taliban approach to his nation’s cultural heritage; China’s military involvements across east and south Asia; and, climactically, the Cultural Revolution in all its horrific absurdity.
In addition to the public dimensions of Mao’s rule, Chang and Halliday catalogue his myriad imperial habits and private vices. Deluxe bunkers were built throughout the country based on the often unmet possibility that the chairman might visit; national railway schedules were overturned whenever Mao felt like travelling; and any number of functionaries and ordinary citizens had to abandon their families, practice abstinence, and take up faraway posts at the chairman’s bidding. Meanwhile, Mao officially plumped his self-image as “Serving the People” even as he enjoyed orgies at his villas, had his rice grains individually husked, and maintained a bulging bank account that let him play at noblesse oblige.
By the early 1970s, Mao’s health was deteriorating rapidly, and he was aware that he had a tenuous hold on power in the gory wake of the Cultural Revolution. And so, he looked beyond China for acclaim and validation. Most famously, he brought Richard Nixon calling in 1972. In Chang and Halliday’s scathing recreation of their meeting, the Chairman easily manipulated the unctuous US president into a neutered but widely followed summit that confirmed China’s superpower status. After this visit Beijing received wide diplomatic recognition, while the beaming, blacktoothed Chairman became “not merely a credible international figure, but one with incomparable allure.” With open distaste, Chang and Halliday note that, “World statesmen beat a path to his door. A meeting with Mao was, and sometimes still is, regarded as the highlight of many a career and life.”
Among the Western leaders whom this biography reveals to be dupes is Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Chang and Halliday briskly dismiss Two Innocents in China, the travelogue he co-wrote with Jacques Hébert based on their experiences in China in 1960, as “a starry-eyed book” because it ignored reports of famine the same year some twenty-two million died of starvation. Trudeau’s account of his post-Nixon meeting with Mao in his 1993 Memoirs is a gushing embarrassment unto itself:
I have vivid memories of meeting this former revolutionary, the son of a peasant, who now headed these vast armies of people. When I went back in 1973, I didn’t ask to see Mao, but my delegation rather hoped — and, to be honest, so did I — that I would have the opportunity. Would the Great Helmsman be in good health while I was there, and would I be received? That was the big question . . .
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