MAO: The Untold Story
by Jung Chang and Jon HallidayCape £25 pp814
For generations, Mao Tse-tung was the acceptable, even fashionable face of communist tyranny. Since the 1930s, those who wished to know have been aware that Stalin was a homicidal monster. Since 1945, nobody has doubted Hitler’s genocidal evil. But as I sit here, I am looking at the Little Red Book (the Quotations of Chairman Mao) that I proudly bought as a 10-year-old schoolboy without much comment from my elders, and also at the bestselling, sympathetic biographies of Mao by Edgar Snow (1938) and Han Suyin (1972). Why was Mao so fashionable that Warhol could choose him as an icon? Perhaps it was because China remains a distantly obscure country, because Mao was a master of propaganda and secrecy, and, finally, because his party still rules China.
Ever since the Soviet archives started to reveal the intimate story of Stalin’s tyranny, people have been tempted to compare Hitler and Stalin. Who killed more people? Who was more depraved? These ghoulish questions have also given rise to another silly but sinister argument: “Stalin was worse than Hitler. Why have we heard so much about the Holocaust, so little about the Gulags? ” Mao is never mentioned — but he will be now.
Mao: The Untold Story 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 study, by Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, is a triumph. It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research. This is the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all — the Red Emperor of China. Using witnesses in China, and new, secret Chinese archives, the authors of this magisterial and damning book estimate that Mao was responsible for 70m deaths. He boasted he was willing “for half of China to die” to achieve military-nuclear superpowerdom.
Nikita Khrushchev said: “I look at Mao, I see Stalin, a perfect copy.” Their attitudes, even their style of dress, their refusal to earn money or work on anything except their own power, their obsessional reading of imperial history, poetry writing, swaggering disdain for human life, their worship of violence, their loathing of peasants, their superpower ambitions, their jealousies, their self-belief, secrecy and paranoia, their loathing of their fathers, respect for their mothers and their destruction of their own wives and children were almost identical. The authors point out two key differences: they believe that Mao was never a Marxist, simply an opportunistic egomaniac. They record his frenzied womanising: Stalin was far less of a sensualist.
Mao was born in 1893 in Hunan. His father was outraged by his young son’s reading and refusal to work. In a revolutionary China dominated by warlords (the emperor had been overthrown in 1911) Mao soon joined the Communist party, partly to get money to avoid working. After Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, had slaughtered the communists in 1927, Mao emerged as a Red lead er. At 24, he recorded his amoral philosophy: “People like me only have a duty to ourselves.” He worshipped “power like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, like a sex-maniac on heat . . . We adore times of war . . . We love sailing the sea of upheavals . . . The country must be destroyed then re formed . . . People like me long for its destruction”.
Mao was happy to murder, blackmail and poison his rivals. He had the same political gifts as Stalin: a will for power, ruthlessness, addiction to the drama of turmoil and an ability to manipulate. In his communist enclaves, between 1931 and 1935, he oversaw the killing of 700,000 people. Like Stalin, Mao poisoned everyone whose lives he touched: many went insane.
By the late 1930s, using gullible writers such as Snow, Mao had created his legend as a peasant leader and a guerrilla-maestro — the hero of the Long March. Jung Chang and Halliday shatter these myths, revealing military ineptitude and deliberate wastage of whole armies to discredit his communist rivals. The greatest heroics of the Long March were invented; the suffering was unnecessary. As the Japanese advanced into China, Mao persuaded historians that, while he fought the invaders, Generalissimo Chiang was cowardly and corrupt. Actually, it was Mao who refused to fight Japan. His sole obsession during the second world war was persuading Stalin to bankroll and arm his conquest of China. In 1945, Stalin entered the war against Japan, providing assistance to Mao. Nonetheless, Mao had virtually lost the civil war — and was saved only by colossal Stalinist aid. The authors also reveal how many Nationalist generals were communist sleeper-spies. In 1949, aided more by Russia and these moles than by his own devices, Mao conquered China, embarking on an imperial reign of wilful caprice, messianic egotism, vast incompetence — and mass-murder.
The myth claims that there was no Great Terror in China: the authors show Mao constantly declaring: “Too lenient, not killing enough.” In 1949 alone, 3m people were murdered. While Mao lived like an emperor on 50 private estates using military dancing-girls as “imperial concubines”, he drove China to become a superpower. He deployed Chinese troops against America in the Korean w ar as a way of persuading Stalin to give him military (especially nuclear) technology. After Stalin’s death, he regarded himself as peerless.
Emulating Stalin with his manmade 1932-33 famine, Mao in his Great Leap Forward of the 1950s sold food to buy arms, even though China starved in “the greatest famine in history”: 38m people died. The famine caused a political crisis, and his deputy Liu Shao-chi stole power from him in 1962.
Mao waited, and avenged himself by taking control of the army through the talented, neurotic and sinister Marshal Lin Piao, and of the state through the craven, brutal, sophisticated premier, Chou En-lai. Then he launched a Terror, the “Cultural Revolution”, in which he attacked the party and the state using gangs of students, secret-policemen and thugs to humiliate, murder, destroy lives and culture, a nightmare that Jung Chang experienced and recounted in Wild Swans: another 3m were killed between 1966 and 1976.
The ageing Mao fell out with Lin Piao, his chosen successor, the creator of the Little Red Book, who died fleeing in 1971. The authors found Mao’s orders that denied his veteran premier Chou En-lai medical treatment for cancer — to ensure Chou would not outlive him. This left Mao with his grotesque, vicious wife, Chiang Ching (whom he loathed), the leader of the Gang of Four, whom Mao used to enforce the Cultural Revolution. Having fallen out with Moscow, Mao pulled off one final coup: Richard Nixon visited China. But Mao was disappointed: America would not intervene against Russia. Dying, he restored, then again purged the talented, formidable Deng Xiao-ping, who outmanoeuvred the Gang and Mao and started reversing Maoist insanity. Mao died in 1976 and is still worshipped in China.
DEATH MARCH
One of the authors’ charges against Mao is incompetence. For instance, on the Great March Mao failed for months in 1935 to make an obvious move into Sichuan. The blunder, claim Chang and Halliday, cost 30,000 men — half his entire force.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £20 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585
READ ON...
websites:
www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/mao.html
All about Mao
