Lanka Citizen

Although responsible for 70 million deaths, Mao also succeeded in rebuilding a nation, and many retain a nagging suspicion that this could not have been achieved, by Mao or anyone else, without strong-arm tactics. For many Chinese, an intense pride in that achievement overshadows revulsion at Mao’s crimes.

Indeed, Chinese history and folklore are replete with tyrants. It is taken as a commonplace among many Chinese that their country, with its size and population, is somehow uniquely chaos-prone and difficult to rule. So the corollary notion that anyone hoping to bring order would need to twist a few arms is entrenched in Chinese minds, and even people with direct and painful knowledge of Mao’s cruelty grant him a degree of grudging respect.

By KENNETH MURPHY

A Book Review: Mao: The Unknown Story, By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

‘Tyranny is a habit, wrote Dostoyevsky, it has a capacity for development, it develops finally into a disease.”

In 1919, a young essayist named Mao Zedong urged his fellow Chinese to cast off their oppression. Nothing extraordinary in that, as China’s last emperor had been dethroned almost a decade earlier. What was extraordinary is that Mao also asked his countrymen to have sympathy for their oppressors, who were, after all, human beings like ourselves. Their tendency toward oppression, he wrote, was merely “an infection or hereditary disease passed on to them from the old society and old thought.”

As ruler of the People’s Republic of China three decades later, such sympathy, if it ever really existed, had clearly been abandoned, for Mao had long since been afflicted with the disease of despotism.

Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s biography Mao: The Unknown Story is the tale of the progress of that disease, tracing Mao’s rise from provincial pamphleteer to the Luciferian head of state of the world’s most populous nation. Co-writer Chang is the author of the best-selling Wild Swans; this is the first full-length biography of the Great Helmsmen by a Chinese writer.

Mao’s Confucian upbringing in a well-to-do peasant family in Hunan; early dabbling with radical politics; the cunning, ruthlessness and duplicity that allowed him to triumph both in the political infighting with his Communist comrades and as a military commander against the superior armies of Japan and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists; a mythically large personality; remarkable charisma; the unrestrained flights of hubris that created a New China and then plunged it into chaos — all of this bears retelling and re-examining, because, unlike Hitler and Stalin, Mao retains a patina of respectability in the West.

Today, even China’s heavily doctored official accounts, while straining to gloss over the rough edges of Mao’s legacy, cover the basic outline, blaming Mao’s “errors” for the ensuing chaos. Jung Chang and British writer Jon Halliday bring us the full magnitude of the catastrophe Mao inflicted on China: China does not accept Western estimates of 20 million to 30 million deaths from famine caused in the early 1960s by the rash economic policies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In fact, the official histories shun the word “famine” altogether, and refer to the period instead as the “Three Difficult Years.” Also obscured by party historians, out of obvious self-interest, are the varied deeds of Mao’s colleagues, including his eventual successor Deng Xiaoping, who did some of Mao’s worst dirty work while he lived but began undoing his policies the moment Mao died.

Such crimes and drama make Mao an irresistible subject. But Jung and Halliday are primarily interested in the Great Helmsman as a form of political epidemiology: How did Mao contract “oppressor’s disease,” and how was it able to progress so far as to ravage him and China both?

Although responsible for 70 million deaths, Mao also succeeded in rebuilding a nation, and many retain a nagging suspicion that this could not have been achieved, by Mao or anyone else, without strong-arm tactics. For many Chinese, an intense pride in that achievement overshadows revulsion at Mao’s crimes.

Indeed, Chinese history and folklore are replete with tyrants. It is taken as a commonplace among many Chinese that their country, with its size and population, is somehow uniquely chaos-prone and difficult to rule. So the corollary notion that anyone hoping to bring order would need to twist a few arms is entrenched in Chinese minds, and even people with direct and painful knowledge of Mao’s cruelty grant him a degree of grudging respect.

Chang and Halliday have no truck with this. Chiang Kai-shek could, for instance, have restored the country’s unity, and perhaps held off the Japanese more effectively, they say, were it not for Mao’s betrayals and rebellion.

In Western minds, views of Mao have not so much blended the good parts with the bad as evolved according to how much and what kind of information was coming out of China at the time Mao was being analyzed. Much of what dribbled out during Mao’s earlier years was filtered through sympathetic chroniclers such as Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, and tended to show him as a romantic and heroic rebel. As it emerged that Mao’s victims numbered in the tens of millions, damning comparisons with Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot have become harder for supporters to fend off. Yet somehow that grudging admiration for creating New China never went away entirely.

It is, of course, China’s current leaders who ought to have the clearest view of Mao. Their judgment, tellingly, has been to reverse his most basic policies by putting China on the road to a market economy. So why, Chang and Halliday wonder, do they continue to give his portrait pride of place in Tiananmen Square?

No book has come as close to unravelling the mystery of Mao’s character as this one. The authors combine scholarship (their use of the Soviet archives to reveal Mao’s actions is groundbreaking) with the narrative drive Chang brought to her Wild Swans, sweeping the reader effortlessly back to the bizarre and deadly world created by Mao and his circle of disciple-accessories. There is no cheap psychohistory. This is a book about what is really knowable.

Inevitably, in a book that covers the most calamitous years in China’s long history in more than 800 pages of text, there are gaps. Sources are inadequately noted. Military history in general gets shorter shrift than it deserves for a leader so obsessed with playing the warlord. The argument raised here, that Mao became a victim of his self-imposed isolation, neglects the close watch Mao kept on technical and economic issues. The record shows a man much more in touch with what was happening in the economy than this book sometimes lets on.

Indeed, if Mao had left such details in the hands of competent managers and interfered less, catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward, when peasants were encouraged to build mini steel mills in their villages, might have been abandoned sooner.

The Mao that emerges from this book was the overseer of state terror that left an indelible scar on the Chinese economic powerhouse that is now emerging. To understand Mao’s long march with the Devil, there can be no better starting point than Mao: The Unknown Story, for Chang and Halliday grapple with the fundamental questions of history. Do leaders shape great events and great evils? Or is it events that are in the saddle? To this old question, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday give a definitive answer where Mao is concerned.

Kenneth Murphy’s Unquiet Vietnam: A Journey to the Vanishing World of Indochina, was recently published in London. Currently a senior fellow at Smolny Collegium, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia, he is at work on a cultural and political history of postwar Italy.

Courtesy, The Globe and Mail, October 29, 2005