Мао Цзэдун: Белгісіз Тарих (Mao Tzedun: Belgisiz Tarih)

2005 biography of Mao Zedong

Mao: The Unknown Story is a 2005 biography of the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) that was written by the husband and wife team of the writer Jung Chang and the historian Jon Halliday, who detail Mao's early life, his introduction to the Chinese Communist Party, and his political career. The book summarizes Mao's transition from a rebel against the autocratic Kuomintang government to the totalitarian dictator over the People's Republic of China. Chang and Halliday heavily cover Mao's role in the planning and the execution of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In that capacity, they note that Mao is responsible for an unprecedented death toll during peacetime that ranged from 40 to 70 million people. In conducting their research for the book over the course of a decade, the authors interviewed hundreds of people who were close to Mao at some point in his life, used recently published memoirs from Chinese political figures, and explored newly opened archives in China and Russia. Chang had herself lived through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, which she described in her earlier book Wild Swans (1991). The book quickly became a best seller in Europe and North America. It received overwhelming praise from reviews in national newspapers and drew praise from some academics but mostly critical or mixed by others. Reviews from many China specialists were critical and cite inaccuracies and selectivity in the use of sources and the polemical portrayal of Mao.

Chang and Halliday do not accept the idealistic explanations for Mao's rise to power or common claims for his rule. They portray him as a tyrant who manipulated everyone and everything he could in pursuit of personal power. They state that from his earliest years he was motivated by a lust for power and that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, regardless of their relationship with him. During the 1920s and 1930s, they write that Mao could not have gained control of the party without Stalin's patronage, nor were Mao's decisions during the Long March as heroic and ingenious as Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China claimed and thereby entered the mythology of the revolution. Chang wrote this biography to debunk the myth of Mao as an emblem of Chinese government that survives into the 21st century. In October 2005, The Age newspaper reported that it had been unable to find Chang's local witness. In addition, The Sydney Morning Herald found an 85 year old eyewitness, Li Guixiu, aged 15 at the time of the crossing, whose account disputed Chang's claims. According to Li, there was a battle: "The fighting started in the evening. There were many killed on the Red Army side. The KMT set fire to the bridge house on the other side, to try to melt the chains, and one of the chains was cut. After it was taken, the Red Army took seven days and seven nights to cross." In a speech given at Stanford University earlier in March 2005, former U. S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski mentioned a conversation that he once had with Deng Xiaoping. He recalled that Deng smiled and said: "Well, that's the way it's presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation."

One of the allegations in the book against Mao was that he not just tolerated the production of opium in regions that the Communists controlled during the Chinese Civil War but also participated in the trade of it, in order to provide funding for his soldiers. According to Russian sources that the authors state they found, at the time the trade generated around $60 million a year for the Communists. This was stopped only due to overproduction driving down the price and Communist officials other than Mao deciding that the practice was immoral.

Mao is alleged to have exposed men under his command to unnecessary suffering just to eliminate his opponents. Zhang Guotao, a rival in the Politburo, was sent with his army in 1936 on a hopeless mission into the Gobi desert. When it inevitably failed Mao ordered that the survivors be executed. Chang and Halliday suggest that Mao used other underhanded means in eliminating opponents. Apart from general purges like the Hundred Flowers Campaign and other operations like the Cultural Revolution, he had Wang Ming (another Politburo rival) poisoned twice; Wang had to seek treatment in Russia.

Chang and Halliday write that in comparison to official history provided by the Chinese authorities that Communist forces waged a tough guerrilla war against the Imperial Japanese Army, in truth they rarely fought the Japanese. Mao was more interested in saving his forces for fighting against the Chinese Nationalists. On the few occasions that the Communists did fight the Japanese, Mao was very angry.

Notable members of the KMT were claimed to have been secretly working for the Chinese Communists. One such sleeper agent was Hu Zongnan, a senior National Revolutionary Army general. Hu's son objected to this description and his threat of legal action led Chang's publishers in Taiwan to abandon the release of the book there.

Rather than reluctantly entering the conflict as the Chinese government suggests, Mao is shown to have deliberately entered the Korean War, having promised Chinese troops to Kim Il Sung (then leader of North Korea) before the conflict started. Also, the book details Mao's desperation in needing economic and military aid promised by the Soviets, as the prime motivating factor in backing Kim Il sung's invasion of South Korea. Halliday had previously conducted research into this conflict, publishing his book Korea: The Unknown War.

The book opens with the sentence: "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." He referred to the peasants as "two shoulders and a bum" because at any given time they could be killed but even more would be left alive. China scholars agree that the famine during the Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions of deaths but disagree on the exact number, which may be significant lower or higher but within that same range. Chang and Halliday write that this period accounts for roughly half of the 70 million total. An official estimate by Chinese Communist Party's high ranking official Hu Yaobang in 1980 put the death toll at 20 million, whereas Mao's biographer Philip Short in his 2000 book Mao: A Life found 20 to 30 million to be the most credible number. Chang and Halliday's figure is 37.67 million, which historian Stuart Schram indicated that he believes "may well be the most accurate." Yang Jisheng, a Communist party member and former reporter for Xinhua, puts the number of famine deaths at 36 million. In his 2010 book Mao's Great Famine, Hong Kong based historian Frank Dikötter, who has had access to newly opened local archives, places the death toll for the Great Leap Forward at 45 million, and describes it as "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history." Dikötter's historical revisionist work has been criticized by mainstream China scholars for his problematic use of sources, including criticism by Short. In 2005, political scientist Rudolph Rummel published updated figures on worldwide democide, stating that he believed Chang and Halliday's estimates to be mostly correct, and he had revised his figures for China under Mao accordingly. While Rummel's general conclusions remain relevant, his estimates of democide remain on the high end of the spectrum and have been criticized by scholars as biased, inflated, or otherwise unreliable, and his methodology has been questioned.

Mao: The Unknown Story became a bestseller, with United Kingdom sales alone reaching 60,000 in six months.

The book has received praise from a number of commentators and academic experts. Popular history author Simon Sebag Montefiore lauded the book in The Times, calling Chang and Halliday's work "a triumph" which "exposes its subject as probably the most disgusting of the bloody troika of 20th century tyrant messiahs, in terms of character, deeds — and number of victims. This is the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all — the Red Emperor of China." In The New York Times, journalist Nicholas Kristof referred to the book as a "magisterial work"; Kristof said that it did a better job demonstrating that Mao was a "catastrophic ruler" than anything else written to date. In his words, "Mao's ruthlessness was brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book ." Journalist Gwynne Dyer praised the book for documenting "Mao's crimes and failures in unrelenting, unprecedented detail", and stated he believed it would eventually have a similar impact in China as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago did in the Soviet Union. Historian Max Hastings said the book is a "savage indictment, drawing on a host of sources including important Soviet ones, to blow away the miasma of deceit and ignorance which still shrouds Mao's life from many Western eyes." Its weakness is that "it attributes Mao's rise and long rule entirely to repression, and does not explain why so many of his own people remained for so long committed to his insane vision." Michael Yahuda, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, also expressed his support in The Guardian. He referred to it as a "magnificent book" and "a stupendous work" which cast "new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao's tumultuous life." Professor Richard Baum of the University of California, Los Angeles, said that "it has to be taken very seriously as the most thoroughly researched and richly documented piece of synthetic scholarship yet to appear on the rise of Mao and the CCP." Even if "not a sufficiently rich or nuanced interpretive scaffolding to support the full weight of the Chinese experience under Mao", Baum still believed that "this book will most likely change forever the way modern Chinese history is understood and taught." While criticizing certain aspects of the book, Stuart Schram wrote in a review in The China Quarterly that Chang and Halliday's book was "a valuable contribution to our understanding of Mao and his place in history." Perry Link, then a Princeton University Professor of Chinese literature, praised the book in The Times Literary Supplement and emphasized the effect the book could have in the West, writing: "Part of Chang and Halliday's passion for exposing the 'unknown' Mao is clearly aimed at gullible Westerners. For decades many in the Western intellectual and political elites have assumed that Mao and his heirs symbolize the Chinese people and their culture, and that to show respect to the rulers is the same as showing respect to the subjects. Anyone who reads Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's book should be inoculated against this particular delusion. If the book sells even half as many copies as the 12 million of Wild Swans, it could deliver the coup de grace to an embarrassing and dangerous pattern of Western thinking." Professor Jonathan Spence of Yale University said in the New York Review of Books that the authors' single focus on Mao's vileness had undermined "much of the power their story might have had."

Chang and Halliday's book has been strongly criticized by various academics. In December 2005, The Observer stated that many knowledgeable academics of the field have questioned the factual accuracy of some of Chang and Halliday's claims, notably their selective use of evidence, questioning their stance in the matter, among other criticisms; the article also said that Chang and Halliday's critics did not deny Mao's monstrous actions. Professor Thomas Bernstein of Columbia University referred to the book as "a major disaster for the contemporary China field" because the "scholarship is put at the service of thoroughly destroying Mao's reputation. The result is an equally stupendous number of quotations out of context, distortion of facts and omission of much of what makes Mao a complex, contradictory, and multi sided leader." Timothy Cheek (University of British Columbia) said that the book is "not a history in the accepted sense of a reasoned historical analysis", and rather it "reads like an entertaining Chinese version of a TV soap opera." University of California at Berkeley political scientist Lowell Dittmer added that "surely the depiction is overdrawn" but what emerges is a story of "absolute power", leading first to personal corruption in the form of sexual indulgence and paranoia, and secondly to policy corruption, consisting of the power to realize "fantastic charismatic visions and ignore negative feedback ." Geremie Barmé (Australian National University) stated that while "anyone familiar with the lived realities of the Mao years can sympathize with the authors' outrage", one must ask whether "a vengeful spirit serves either author or reader well, especially in the creation of a mass market work that would claim authority and dominance in the study of Mao Zedong and his history." The 2009 anthology Was Mao Really a Monster: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story", edited by Gregor Benton and Lin Chun, brings together fourteen mostly critical previously published academic responses, including the reviews from China Journal. Benton and Lin write in their introduction that "unlike the worldwide commercial media, most professional commentary has been disapproving." They challenge the assertion that Mao was responsible for 70 million deaths, since the number's origin is vague and substantiation shaky. They include an extensive list of further reviews. Gao Mobo, of the University of Adelaide, wrote that the book was "intellectually scandalous", saying that it "misinterprets evidence, ignores the existing literature, and makes sensationalist claims without proper evidence." Writing for the Marxist New Left Review, British historian Tariq Ali criticized the book for its focus "on Mao's conspicuous imperfections (political and sexual), exaggerating them to fantastical heights, and advancing moral criteria for political leaders that they would never apply to a Roosevelt or a Kennedy"; Ali accused the book of including unsourced and unproven claims, including archival material from Mao's political opponents in Taiwan and the Soviet Union whose reliability are disputed, as well as celebrity interviewees, such as Lech Wałęsa, whose knowledge of Mao and China are limited. Ali compared the book's sensationalist passages and denunciations of Mao to Mao's own political slogans during the Cultural Revolution. Historian Rebecca Karl summarizes: "According to many reviewers of [Mao: The Unknown Story], the story told therein is unknown because Chang and Halliday substantially fabricated it or exaggerated it into existence."

In December 2005, an article by The Observer newspaper on the book contained a brief statement from Chang and Halliday in regards to the general criticism. Nathan replied to the authors' response, below their letter in the same issue of that journal, his letter including the following points: "Most of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's complaints fall into two overlapping categories: I did not check enough sources; I misinterpreted what they or their sources said. Chang and Halliday's method of citation makes it necessary for the reader to check multiple sources in order to track down the basis for any single assertion. There were many passages in their book which I had doubts about that I could not check because the sources were anonymous, unpublished, or simply too hard to get. It's true that I did not visit the Wang Ming papers in Russia or telephone the Japanese Communist Party. Is Chang and Halliday's invitation to do this a fair substitute for citations to the documents they used – author, title, date, and where seen? I limited my published criticisms to those for which I was able to get hold of what appeared to be all the sources." About some of the critics of the book, sociologist Paul Hollander said: "While some of the critiques of Chang and Halliday were reasonable—especially of the over emphasis on personality at the expense of other factors and the neglect of competing scholarly sources—the vehemence of the critics' indignation calls into question their scholarly impartiality. It cannot be ruled out that the great commercial success of such a supposedly flawed book also interfered with its dispassionate evaluation by some of these authors. Most problematic has been the argument repeatedly made that Mao's defects, or crimes, must be weighed against his accomplishments. Can they balance the loss of millions of lives as a result of profoundly wrongheaded policies (such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution), regardless of their supposed objectives?"