Mao: The Untold Story
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
By: Lyle J. Morris
It is impossible to understand modern China and its role in the world without dealing with the life and legacy of its supreme leader, Mao Zedong. The extent to which China was and continues to be shaped by his legacy cannot be overstated. Mao retains an almost demigod status in the consciousness of many Chinese born before his death in 1976 and has been the topic of myriad biographies from Western scholars hoping to add their unique perspective on China’s larger-than–life leader. Thus, adequately explaining this extremely complicated figure in the context of his times remains a vitally important necessity, now that China has reemerged on the world stage.
That is precisely why “Mao: The Untold Story” is such a supreme disappointment. In the interest of full disclosure, I knew going in that Jung Chang would not be friendly towards Mao. Her previous book, “Wild Swans” - which recounts the evocative and unsettling story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century - did not hold back its disdain towards the man. I have no problem with this; a biographer is not required to like his or her subject. It is common knowledge, for instance, that Stephen Ambrose abhorred Richard Nixon. However, a biographer owes it to his or her subject, and most of all to their readers, to present an objective account of the person’s life, as Ambrose achieved. In this regard, the authors wholeheartedly fail. They present a wooden, one-dimensional picture of an enormously complex life, and readers could be forgiven if they came away from the book believing Mao was Lucifer incarnate. It is bad history, shoddily written, poorly edited, with a story that moves along in an agonized, plodding manner.
In this book, Mao appears more as caricature than human being, and the central thesis of the authors seems to be that Mao “meaned” his way to the top, being a man without a single redeeming quality. Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, wrote a tell-all book about his infamous patient, “The Private Life of Chairman Mao”, that portrays a more vivid, realistic, and interesting picture of the Chairman, warts and all. Li makes no secret of the fact that he believed Mao was a despot, but even he acknowledged Mao’s contributions to the Revolution, and what’s more, he presented Mao as a believable human being. Chang and Halliday would have us believe the Revolution succeeded in spite of Mao.
The authors cite a panoply of sources and interviews to back up their controversial claims. This includes over 300 interviews in 38 countries, with the list of interviewees running the gamut from ex-Prime Ministers to Mao’s ex-girlfriends, sons and daughters, nannies, and even laundry workers. More often than not, the authors rest their most controversial claims on anonymous interviews or unpublished documents, making it next to impossible to verify their authenticity. For example, the authors make their most controversial assertions – that the most famous battle of the Long March, at the Dadu Bridge in 1935, never took place; or that the Communists lost the battle of Tucheng; or that Mao rose to be party leader not because he was the favorite of his fellow Chinese, but because Moscow chose him – on interviews with “ex-girlfriends”, “90 year-old local cadres” and “Russian insiders” respectively. The paltry subterfuge of these anonymous citations makes Chang’s claims extremely difficult to believe, let alone subject to academically rigorous and certifiably sound substantiation. More to the point, such liberal use of seemingly unverifiable sources all but deflate any expository power.
Throughout the book the authors draw several questionable conclusions in their attempt to shatter the Mao myth. For instance, they argue that practically every CCP leader, including those in the Soviet Union, despised Mao. This does not stand to reason. First of all, in the days before Mao’s rise to the top, the CCP disciplined Mao on several occasions precisely because he often used passive aggressive tactics to avoid carrying out CCP directives from Moscow, believing them to be unsuitable for conditions in China. Second, if all Moscow desired was a bootlicking sycophant that fawned over every new directive from the Kremlin, there were several other candidates it would have chosen, including those who had actually lived in Moscow. Why would Stalin choose someone like Mao to head the CCP who had a demonstrated history of opposition to Moscow, and, if the authors are correct, was such an unpopular figure in his own party?
In their attempts to demonize their subject, the authors make the fatal error of propping up his opponents. In particular, they give kid glove treatment to Chiang Kai-shek, glossing over his own brutality and incompetence and the atrocities of the Nationalist government. For instance, in their account, the 1927 Shanghai White Terror purge of April 12th resulted in the deaths of “some’ trade union leaders” and “probably” more than 300 communists. They neglect to inform the reader that the actual number of dead in the city approached 40,000 and the criminal gangs allied with Chiang sold the wives and daughters of slain workers by the thousands into the city’s teeming brothels.
Throughout the book they continually explain away Chiang’s shortcomings, failures and disastrous generalship as due to the treachery or ineptitude of others. His coterie was comprised of moles, secret agents, or outright traitors. Using apocryphal claims, they allege that one of Chiang’s most trusted generals, Hu Zongnan, was a Moscow agent, who deliberately lost scores of key battles to the CCP. Yet he inexplicably accompanied Chiang to Taiwan in 1949 and remained there the rest of his life.
One of the author’s most unique assertion is that Chiang intentionally held back and permitted the CCP to escape to north China during the Long March, because of a secret deal he made with the Russians to guarantee the safety of his only son Chiang Ching-kuo, who was living in Russia as an exchange student and worker. Again, the authors can offer no evidence to back this up, except for the fact that Chiang failed to eliminate the Red Army on the Long March. Since he failed to do so, the authors aver, it must be because he had an ulterior motive. By this logic, one wonders what his ulterior motive was in the Civil War of 1947 to 1949. The authors employ this tactic numerous times throughout the book, claiming that what they are revealing was “secret” at the time and “remains so today” - a mighty convenient way to avoid proving their assertions.
That is perhaps the greatest tragedy of “Mao: The Untold Story”: for such a tremendous effort in scope and research, the authors make the fatal mistake of setting out on a preordained path – in this case with the singular mission of destroying the image of Mao Zedong – before even typing the first word. The result is that it renders what must have been years of painstaking work - collecting interviews, looking through archives and visiting sites – utterly useless and hampered by an unambiguous bias towards the author’s subject. And conveniently, by using unnamed sources and interviews, the authors succeed in couching their most controversial claims in an impenetrable veneer of “scholarship”, making it all but impossible for serious scholars to fact check and scrutinize. The only takeaway is a book in which the authors fail to entertain any other version of Mao that has been alluded to by even his most harshest critics - his multifaceted personality, his genuine struggles over how and in which direction to lead China, even his indisputable contribution to guerrilla warfare – to portray Mao as the evilest of tyrants worthy of an 800-page smear campaign.
Mao: A Life
Philip Short
Just as “Mao: The Untold Story” could be likened to emotionally-charged testimony given by a witness in a courtroom – devised to portray the defendant as the reincarnation of the devil by way of grandstanding and apocryphal accusations – Philip Short’s “Mao: A Life” could be seen as a cold, calculated account by a discerning judge, laying the facts out on the table and letting the jury decide for themselves.
To those brought up under a western-inspired education system and worldview, Mao seems like a capricious despot and a heartless monster. In Philip Short’s treatment, however, Mao comes across as a man of stark contradictions. He was an astute military strategist – leading an initially disorganized, weak Communist revolutionary army to victory over a more powerful and Western-supported Nationalist army. He was a fiendishly clever politician – wielding his power at will and playing his subordinates off each other for political gain. He was a visionary – taking China from an agrarian, backward country to a second-tier developing country with nuclear weapons, UN Security Council membership and a strategic alliance with the United States. He was also a severely flawed man with even more flawed policies – bringing death and hardship to the millions he sought to lead.
So which person was he? The diabolical despot who brought incalculable hardship upon his people, or a politically shrewd leader, uniting China and bringing hope and purpose to a country in chaos? According to Short, he was all of the above. And thankfully, Short makes it his duty to illustrate these contradictions in their entirety, giving the reader a more holistic and humanistic picture of the man.
Short’s approach is essentially chronological and the first two thirds of the book take us up to 1949 and into the Korean War. Short deals with Mao’s Confucian childhood and proceeds through the national and Hunanese political and military developments in the 1920s, weaving in the growing complexity of inter and intra-party politics and politico-military rivalries. He lays out the evolution of Mao’s ideological and moral perspective and his military baptism; leads us through the emergence and triumph of Mao’s contentious military strategy in the 30s; looks in illuminating detail at the loss of innocence in the factional bloodbath of the Futian incident; and covers the construction of dominance over the Party and the emergence of the cult of the personality in the 40s. A majority of the book is dedicated to Mao’s political maneuvering and military tactics. It is overwhelmingly an account of what Mao did and what he experienced, and its focus is Mao’s relationship with the Chinese revolution.
That said, it is a careful, erudite work which lays out the facts of Mao’s childhood and the conflicts inherent within early twentieth-century China and then charts a way through Mao’s complex involvement in the unfolding of those conflicts and the bitter, and often unforgiving, machinations of the Party itself. In particular, it is Short’s ability to draw on Stuart Schram’s enormously valuable definitive editing and translating of Mao’s writings, Tony Saich’s work on the history of the Communist Party, official and unofficial publications from within China itself (particularly the Nanliu collection), as well as his own personal contacts as a journalist that enables him to provide us with a more complete and detailed knowledge of Mao’s life.
So, where does Short take us? What are the major conclusions about Mao’s life and his contributions to the Chinese and world stage? Here the book is a little disappointing. Short provides us with an epilogue rather than a conclusion. Short devotes a relatively small section to the post-Liberation period and intertwines China’s relationship with the West - and with the USA in particular - with the internal dramas of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. After a brief survey of the short-term political consequences of Mao’s death the focus is widened to encompass China’s own difficulty in assessing Mao. Here, Short offers a rather brief attempt to balance the achievements and costs of Mao’s life and ultimately takes cover behind the point that it is still too early to place Mao in his full historical context.
On the positive side, Short sees Mao’s talents – “visionary, statesman, political and military strategist of genius, philosopher and poet” – combining with a “subtle, dogged mind, awe-inspiring charisma and fiendish cleverness” to produce remarkable achievements for China. Short endorses the first of the two achievements which Mao himself identified as significant (the victory over Chiang Kai-shek) but seeks to qualify the second (the Cultural Revolution) on the grounds that while Mao might have succeeded in smashing the old order, he failed to put a viable alternative in its place. Mao certainly did not recognize, as the “Asian Tigers” have done, that the old Confucian virtues could be harnessed in a way that made them not merely relevant to economic transformation but integral and indispensable. Moreover, the overdose of ideological fervor that Mao repeatedly injected into Chinese society actually served a counter-productive purpose and, ironically, made the desired vision of a revolutionary society more difficult to achieve. Yet, while China has been able to abandon the Maoist ideology with ease, the myth of its founder has proved more durable.
Mao was, like Hitler, Stalin and Napoleon, a canny provincial whose sentiments held sway over his intellect, and who fell badly out of touch with reality once his power became so great that his advisors were no longer able to reel in his fancies. He was also one of an odd and, it appears, specifically Asian variety of bloodstained dictator. Like Pol Pot, Mao doesn’t seem to have really meant anybody any harm. It was doctrine, stifling of dissent and a childishness of mind that grew out of a complacent over-reliance on doctrine, that made him the architect of the most fatal period of misrule that China has ever seen: Once he got an idea in his head – like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution — he simply couldn’t be persuaded to let it go.
That extreme tenacity is what carried him, and the Communist Party into whose forefront he slowly moved, through decades of struggle against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, against Japan and other foreign powers and against warlords and bandits of every stripe — all of whom were contending, in ever-changing combinations, for the power left behind by the Qing dynasty, which was deposed at the turn of the century. By the time the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed, in Beijing in 1949, Mao was 56 and had been conducting a military campaign for twenty-two years. But, as becomes clear in both Short’s and Chang’s biographies, the character traits that can lead a revolutionary army to victory aren’t necessarily the ones that make for a good head of state.
While Short acknowledges that Mao’s rule “brought about the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history”, he goes on to separate Mao qualitatively from the two other tyrants who were his contemporaries. For Short, the “overwhelming majority of those whom Mao’s policies killed were the unintended casualties of famine and bad policy”, and that puts Mao in a different category from Hitler and Stalin. Just as there is a distinction between murder, manslaughter and death caused by negligence there are gradations of political responsibility for deaths deriving from of the intent that lay behind them. Moreover, while Stalin “cared what his subjects did and Hitler who they were, Mao cared about what they thought about”. And not only were landlords eliminated as a class in China rather than the Jews as a people in Germany, but Mao never lost his conviction that thought reform could lead to redemption and incorporation into the masses.
In the end, “Mao: A Life” is a welcome and significant addition to the literature on the Chinese revolution over the twentieth century. It is hugely rich in detail and encyclopedic in scope. It gives a vivid portrayal of Mao in his early years and the events that helped shaped his eventual rise as supreme leader of China. More importantly, its gives a human face to a man long thought in the West to be an evil tyrant. As Short adroitly narrates, Mao had reasons behind his actions, and one gets the strong sense that his overarching goal was to build China into a great power worthy of every citizen’s admiration. The means to that end, however, brought untold hardship and death upon the Chinese people, and in the end, were tragically counter-productive.
Short succeeds in synthesizing and extending our knowledge of Mao and of Mao’s central, often determining, role in that revolution, but in a calculating, analytical fashion that does not foist preconceived bias or opinion upon the reader. The book is both accessible for the general reader interested in China and sufficiently rigorous for it to find a place on academic reading lists. Any reservations about the lack of concern for Mao’s private life, about the limited treatment of the economic issues and the interpretation of the costs of Mao’s life do not undermine that achievement. And if it stops short of being the definitive biography of Mao, it is at least the most up to date and comprehensive survey of Mao’s political and military life on the market.
December 12th, 2010 | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment
