The truth about Mao.(Mao: The Unknown Story)(Book review)

• Author: McIntyre, Andrew
• Position: 143722962
• Pages: 49(7)

To much fanfare and international recognition, Jung Chang, author of the all-time best selling non-fiction work Wild Swans, has co-authored with her British husband Jon Halliday a definitive history of Mao Zedong. The book has already been flagged as the best political history published this century and is certainly already a best-seller. In spite of the fact that other detailed books have been written on the brutality of Mao, Mao: The Unknown Story (published by Jonathan Cape) may claim to be the definite corrective on just exactly how monstrous a tyrant Mao was. Relentless in its depiction of the biggest mass murder of the twentieth century--more than 70 million deaths in peacetime--it focuses very much on Mao the man.

Although just over 800 pages and with copious notes and documentation, this book is for a general public. It reads as a compelling narrative and is told in the accessible style of Wild Swans. One of its strengths, notwithstanding the grim picture it paints, is that there is no facile moralising. The authors simply describe a man according to the lights of the people who knew him and who met him. Nevertheless, this has not stopped the inevitable apologists making surprising attempts to support Mao. So Thomas Bernstein, of Columbia University in New York, an apologist for Mao, states of the authors, "their scholarship is put at the service of thoroughly destroying Mao's reputation. It has to be said that, after all, Chang's very own family were victims, so this must be her 'revenge'". But Chang has been at pains to point out that the book overwhelmingly rests on documented facts and primary sources. "It is indisputable that Mao did misrule and was a ruthless tyrant", she explained in one Melbourne interview: "The book is not a polemic. It is a straightforward story with facts. Readers can draw their own conclusions."

Arthur Waldron, in a recent piece in Commentary, whilst acknowledging the central import and impact of this new book--"Like Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, it delivers a death blow to an entire way of thinking"--flags that there are certain historical facts reported in the book that are hotly disputed by sinologist adherents of Mao. Whilst the importance of these disputed facts will be the subject of heated and ongoing debate at the margins, the moral impact of the book--placing Mao, at long last, completely beyond the pale--will be its lasting legacy.

Between them, the authors travelled through China and interviewed over 150 family relatives of Mao, his friends, colleagues, personal staff, and members of the top echelons of the party. These people had never before talked about Mao on the record. Whilst the authors give the reader little alternative explanation or a wider historical context for his actions, it is not possible to resist the picture put before us. The compelling conclusion is simply worse that anything one could imagine: Mao was unimaginably cynical, amoral and vicious. He survived precisely because he was more ruthless than anyone else he encountered, including Stalin. Mao, from these direct accounts, had a seamless life of cruelty, waged against friend, foe and family alike. What is worse, according to the authors' account, his behaviour was not even mitigated by ideological belief. His actions were sustained by neither Marxist or communist beliefs, nor idealism of any sort.

Mao himself is quoted from his own diary, written at the age of 24 in 1918. It gives the clearest and most lucid account of the philosophical basis of his depraved actions:

 "I do not agree with the view

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