(PT) A Biografia de Mao Tse-Tung, desde os seus tempos de inicio da luta armada, até à sua chegada ao poder e o tempo que ficou, quase 28 anos, até morrer, a 9 de setembro de 1976, aos 82 anos.

This is a comprehensive hatchet job on the Western myth of Mao's "making of modern China". It should be read by everyone who grew up in the post-war years, with the recurrent fascination our society had with the internal convulsions of the "People's Republic" and its growing influence on its neighbours.

It is well written - I noticed a few repetitions, but nothing annoying, and it kept my interest throughout.

I'm sure the passion that comes through the book's relentless examination of Mao's behaviour and its consequences comes from Jung Chang's experiences (read "Wild Swans"), and of course it makes for a one-sided picture. Maybe examples of statesmanship and concern for the welfare of the Chinese people, or even of individual colleagues, are to be found in Mao's past, and have been omitted because they didn't fit the picture. But after reading this book, frankly, I doubt it - there doesn't seem to have been any time for good deeds.

I am not a historian, and historians are divided on some of the claims (see Wikipedia), but the authors do give extensive references and have interviewed many participants in the events, some very close to Mao. The details are given in appendixes, which make the book look even longer than it is, and maybe give it a scholarly appearance that isn't borne out by its tone. But they do show the authors' seriousness of purpose and willingness to expose their work to examination and criticism.

This book lays out the case that Mao was probably the most evil men who lived in the 20th century. Murder was his answer to most problems (or rivals). It is estimated that Mao was responsible for over 70 million deaths in peacetime alone. He thought nothing of starving over 20 million of his countrymen in one year, so they could export food to pay for military equipment. Well written and very comprehensive book. Listen to this book (roughly 30 hours) on my way to and from Wyoming, and then finished it on trip to and from Grand Rapids.

Now that I've read all the books by Jung Chang I am a bit sad. They were all so good. And I have no idea when her next one will come or what it will be about. 

I was always put off on reading Mao's biography.  Of all historical leaders, there is no one I dislike more than Mao. Especially now after I read Jung Chang's bio on him.  As Jung Chang lived through Man's terror (please read her book Wild Swans) I was sure her book would speak the truth. And she did not disappoint. 

While it was dangerous to speak out againt Mao, some did just that. Even if it meant certain death. An example of someone who stood up to Mao was Liu Shaoqi (China's president under Mao) and his wife Wang Guangmei. It's a bitter sweet story. I hope that they will be the topic of Jung Chang's next book. 

I would recommend Jung Chang's books to anyone. They are all great reads. I especially love "Wild Swans" (the story of her family) and "Big sister, little sister, red sister" (the story of the soong sister's). And or course I you are going to read a book on Mao, make it this one.

Well written, well structured, and exhaustively researched, this one kept me very engaged all the way through.

The reviews of this book are somewhat astounding..."this was a character assassination," "only the bad parts of Mao were highlighted," "show me that Mao did atrocious things instead of just telling me..." Etc.

The coalition of subjective morality intellectuals is really rearing it's head here...this person is in the running for most despicable human ever to live, without a redeeming quality to be found. Ruthless, murderous, and willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to achieve his ends--it would be impossible to write any kind of biography about Mao that WOULDN'T come off as character assassination. When you are deliberately and unashamedly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, that's the way your story will sound.

The result of Mao's regime should be unanimous shock, disgust, and complete rejection of the foundation which shaped his worldview. Whether or not he "misrepresented" Marxism, this is the lense which has given rise to the most evil world leaders in history. The fruit it has borne has been nothing but evil, and it must be discarded wholesale.

List of Illustrations
List of Maps
List of Abbreviations in Text
Note about Spelling in Text

--Mao: The Unknown Story

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
List of Interviewees
Archives Consulted
Notes
Bibliography of Chinese-language Sources
Bibliography of Non-Chinese-language Sources
Index

Mao Tse Tung is unique among major 20th century dictators, in that his party is still in power, and his country still considers him mainly as a good guy who made some mistakes. Hence, appraising him is difficult. People who knew him are dying off from old age, many won't talk for fear of public censure, and incriminating archives and files are sealed. Writing about Mao is like writing about Stalin prior to 1993: more or less an exercise in speculation and interpretation. Until the Soviet files were opened, many otherwise well-informed people thought that Stalin was, like Mao said "70 percent right and 30 percent wrong", and that many stories about the Terror, collectivization, the Katyn massacre, purges and military invasions, were disinformation exercises by ideological enemies. The truth about Lenin and Stalin was so awful that many thought it couldn't be true, that it had to be an exageration.

Hence many of the negative reviews about this book being biased. Obviously, many readers would like to see also some of the "good things" that Mao did. But what if he didn't do much or anything that was positive? What if he was a narcissist who never loved anyone but himself, and a glorifier of violence, what if he was good at tearing apart rather than building up? What if all he cared about was power (his own)? What if his political discourse was mainly or solely an instrument in his bid for power? What if the consequences of his reign for his country were unspeakable? What if that country would have been much better off if he had never come to power, no matter what the alternatives? What if he was a catalyst for all that was foul in those that surrounded him?

Please observe that these questions are never asked about people like Hitler, or Franco, or Mussolini, or Pinochet. Paul Preston wrote a brick-like, 1000+ page biography of Spain's Franco in which he does not allow him any virtues at all. Yet, if you read the reviews on that book at the amazon.com website you will not see anyone who regards it us biased. People assume Franco had nothing positive about him (yet, when he died Spain was prosperous, peaceful and on the verge of joining the EU- compare that with Ceausescu's Romania). When Nicholas Farrell wrote a revisionist biography of Mussolini, where he highlights many positive traits of Il Duce, he was immediately accused of being a neo- or crypto-fascist. And when in the movie "Downfall" Hitler was portrayed as having some qualities (like being courteous to women and children), this generated a strong reaction, because it was assumed that it couldn't be true, and that it somehow attempted to "rehabilitate Hitler". But when Volkogonov's biography of Lenin came out and showed that he was (mainly) a violent thug, many criticized it because they assumed it reflected a negative bias on the author's part. Yet most of Volkogonov wrote has been confirmed by other sources and is now generally accepted to have happened. Similarly, when a book comes about Mao that is strongly critical of his actions, it is thought to be biased. It seems that many readers (and some "expert" historians) have already made up their minds. They want the "good" left out of the biographies of right-wingers, but kept in those of the left-wingers', and if possible emphasized. Hitler was a demon, but Mao was a flawed leader and nation-builder. Mussolini and Franco are laughable buffoons, but Lenin was an inspiration for both good and bad. And many people will say that Fidel Castro is a much better leader than Pinochet, in spite of the fact that Pinochet gave up his power willingly (something Castro would never do).

I don't know if all that Chang and Halliday write about Mao is truth or not. But their research is impressive. They interviewed practically anyone alive who knew Mao and who would talk to them. They had access to sources not previously generally known. Their picture is consistent and compelling. It is also a reasonable match for other evidence. Was Mao a great military leader? If so, why did he get himself and Stalin into the Korean mess? Was Mao an egomaniac? If not, why did he promote his demented and excessive personality cult? Was Mao a good father and husband? If so, then why was he married four times, why did he desert his first three wives and their children when it suited him, why did he first use and then desert the awful Jian Qing, his fourth wife? We already know that the Great Leap Forward erased some 30 million people from the Chinese statistics: read Jasper Becker's book "Hungry Ghosts" for that. We also know the social costs of terrorist campaigns like the Hundred Flowers or the Cultural Revolution. There are many sources. Was Mao an opportunist, who used communism to get to power and keep it? What would be so surprising about that? Don't we know that many such other such opportunists like Fidel Castro or Nicolae Ceasescu did precisely that? Isn't it possible that Mao was a deeply unattractive person, whose main virtues were a burning ambition, a strong intelligence and a total absence of scruples or empathy? He wouldn't have been the first such person. Think of Caligula and Nero, or Ivan the Terrible. Think of Hitler: do his quick intelligence or personal kindness to his associates diminish his crimes? What is the key component of Hitler's story: his crimes, or his personal attributes? Don't many revolutionaries prefer destroying to building? Here too one can quote many examples.

In sum, it seems to me that many of the objections to this book are quibbles. It is 800 pages long. It may contain errors. But it does provide a complete, consistent and compelling image of Mao. It is a ground-breaking work full of primary sources. It should be seen as the starting point for a further evaluation of this historical figure (rather like Volkogonov's biography of Lenin). And we should keep in mind that some is his henchmen are still in power. Regardless of whether this brought stability to China, it must be qualified as a bad thing. Japan, which was often thought to be as collectivist and unsuitable for democracy as China, did manage in a generation to create both democracy and prosperity, which China hasn't achieved by a long way. Ditto for Taiwan. And let's not talk about size or heterogeneity of the population being a justification for a Communist dictatorship. India's population is almost as large as China's and far more varied, and yet is has managed to survive for 60 years as a democracy without mass terror, Cultural Revolutions, purges and the starvation of millions.

Having Mao's photo and dessicated corpse in Tiananmen Square is as great an insult to decency, as would be having Hitler's picture and mausoleum in Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Let's hope that the old monster meets the fate of his pupil Pol Pot: incinerated along with old mattresses and other rubbish, and discarded. China didn't need him then, and does not need him today.

Hace ya un lejano lustro cuando caminaba por los hutongs y estrechas calles peatonales del más tradicional y ancestral Beijing, bajo las aún frías tardes de principios de primavera entre olores, colores y visiones de otras épocas, de otros mundos, era común toparme con multitud de retratos del "timonel" Mao Zedong en medio de improvisados altares taoístas. Entre hutong y hutong y mi mente inmersa en visiones de una Beijing más cercana a la capital imperial de la dinastía Qing, terminé desembocando en la Plaza de Tiananmén a tan solo un par de cuadras de la entrada principal de la Ciudad Prohibida, adornada con un gigantesco cuadro del presidente Mao como expectante vigía a pesar de haber muerto hacía 39 años.

Para la época de mi viaje, conocía particularidades del régimen comunista impuesto por Mao Zedong a China luego de ganar la guerra civil contra el Kuomintang del general Chiang Kai-shek. “La Gran Hambruna China”. “El Gran Salto Adelante” o la “Revolución Cultural” eran aspectos de la historia China del siglo XX que conocía desde la universidad y de los cuales había leído directa o indirectamente, así como de la cantidad de muertos y vejaciones de todo tipo a la que fue sometida la población durante el mandato de Mao. Lejos de encontrar al dictador defenestrado y casi que exiliado de la memoria colectiva (caso Stalin), mayor fue mi sorpresa cuando encontré la pervivencia de un culto a la personalidad de “el presidente Mao” como uno de los grandes líderes de la historia de China, un noble patriota, un heraldo de los campesinos más pobres y un aceptable tirano; no sólo en ciudades como Beijing, Changsha y la “revolucionaria capital” Yan’an, sino en provincias completas como Hunan (de donde es originario Mao), Jiangxi, Sichuan o Saanxi. Un culto casi que divino para alguien que – según la mayoría de estimaciones- causó a lo largo de su régimen y gracias a sus políticas económicas, sociales y purgas, la muerte de casi 70 millones de chinos.

De la escritora, periodista y doctora en lingüística china Jung Chang, autora de esa belleza llama “Cisnes salvajes” y la biografía de Cixi la emperatriz, en compañía de su esposo Jon Halliday nos llega una monumental obra de más de 1000 páginas (en la edición que leí -Taurus- incluye un maravilloso apéndice fotográfico); titulada .“Mao: La Historia Desconocida”.. Una biografía de “el gran timonel” que discurre desde su infancia en Shaoshan en 1893 hasta su muerte en Beijing en 1976 mientras tenemos como trasfondo los mil y un eventos que ocurrieron en China durante los convulsos años de su vida, desde la caída de la dinastía Quing (última dinastía imperial), la invasión japonesa, la guerra civil contra los nacionalistas, la llegada al poder del Partido Comunista Chino (PCCh), la fundación de la República Popular China y el sinnúmero de desastres y horrores que llegaron después.

En “Mao…” no nos vamos a encontrar con una biografía apologética a Mao, el comunismo o su obra (como la mayoría de biografías occidentales, en especial esa atosigante y horrible oda a la zalamería y la lisonja titulada Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism de Edgar Snow). Por el contrario, y si conocemos el contexto personal y la obra previa de la autora (Antigua Guardia Roja, su familia fue víctima de la “Revolución Cultural” y tuvo que exiliarse en el Reino Unido) entenderemos que vamos a enfrentarnos a una obra de denuncia y cuyo mayor objetivo es desmontar ladrillo por ladrillo cada uno de los mitos erigidos alrededor de la figura de Mao, en especial aquellos que lo consideraban el adalid de los campesinos y pobres; el de su genio militar a lo largo de la “Larga Marcha” y su triunfo sobre el ejército de Chiang Kai-shek; y el de su papel como noble patriota en la guerra contra Japón. En su lugar, los autores retratan a Mao como un oportunista, un conspirador y un intrigante manipulador maquiavélico cuyo único objetivo era el poder absoluto sin importar los medios; un amante irrestricto de la violencia y un sociópata a quien le eran indiferentes el hambre, el sufrimiento y la muerte por millones de sus compatriotas. Una cultura de traición, perfidia y violencia que lo acompaña desde el momento mismo en que se unió al Partido Comunista Chino (en un lugar desmontando incluso el mito fundacional del propio PCCh en el que Mao no tomó parte en realidad), y cuyos métodos taimados pero contundentes se dejan ver desde las primeras peleas políticas por escalar en la pirámide de poder en el PCCh.

A través de cientos y cientos de entrevistas desarrolladas durante más de 10 años, Chang y Halliday recurren no sólo a personas que hicieron parte del círculo más intimo de Mao tanto en el partido como en el ejército, también se escucha la voz de múltiples sobrevivientes de horrores como La Larga Marcha, la purga de Yan’an, la gran hambruna, la campaña del acero o la Revolución Cultural. Y si algún mito se desmiente con mayor contundencia aquí es el de la heroica “Larga Marcha”, que no fue más que un teatro perfectamente elaborado por Mao para construir su propio ascenso como el líder del Partido, descartando rivales durante la marcha. La aniquilación del Ejército Popular de Liberación no se dio gracias al genio militar de Mao sino por una circunstancia más simple: Chiang Kai-shek permitió la pervivencia controlada del Ejército Popular por razones pragmáticas, pues requería de dichos soldados para controlar las provincias de Guizhou y Sichúan, las cuales nunca habían entrado bajo dominio de los nacionalistas y se mantenían independientes. La famosa y celebrada batalla del Río Dadu, fue una farsa.

Tal vez el aspecto más importante de esta biografía sea el acceso de los autores a documentos desclasificados soviéticos, donde se demuestra la compleja relación que tuvo Mao con Stalin y la enorme influencia soviética en el ascenso no sólo de Mao en el PCCh, sino también en el establecimiento de la propia República Popular China. No se trató simplemente de armamento y tecnología… la influencia de Stalin en China es un aspecto que se menciona de manera superflua en la mayoría de libros y biografías sobre la época y sus protagonistas, y que resultó mucho más determinante de lo que la historia oficial China y los historiadores oficiales pretender hacer creer. Desde la forma en que Stalin usó al Ejército Popular de Liberación para tener distraídos a los japoneses de sus ambiciones en territorio soviético; el papel del ejército chino en las guerras de Corea y Vietnam e incluso la derrota misma del ejército nacionalista tiene como cerebro tras bambalinas a Stalin y no a Mao. Dependencia de la cual Mao no pudo desprenderse sino hasta tiempo después de la muerte del Zar Rojo.

Si bien es cierto no es una biografía objetiva en el sentido estricto de la palabra (y ninguna lo es, desde Suetonio, Tácito y Plutarco hasta nuestros días); tampoco hay un trato objetivo hacia algunos de los personajes secundarios, donde unos quedan mejor parados que otros de acuerdo con su oposición en algún momento a Mao (caso Liu Shaoqi o Peng Dehuai); en mi humilde opinión resulta ser una titánica biografía, grandiosamente documentada y magistralmente estructurada cronológicamente, que ayuda a entender el devenir, la vida y la dolorosa obra de uno de los peores tiranos que parió el terrorífico y miserable siglo XX, así como los acontecimientos que ayudaron a forjar la China moderna.

EPÍLOGO
Mientras dialogaba con el dueño de un hostal en Lhasa - lejos de la influencia de la figura de Mao que pervive en otras provincias y donde se respira recuerdos más bien hostiles por sus sangrientas persecuciones al pueblo tibetano - y quien vivió de adolescente las atrocidades del Ejército Chino en el Tíbet soportando lejos de su provincia natal la “Revolución Cultural”; ante la impertinente pero imprescindible pregunta de por qué Mao era aún visto por algunos como una figura digna de admiración que la historia oficial China sólo había permitido desacreditar parcialmente, su respuesta fue tan clara y contundente que bastó una sola palabra para ello: Nostalgia. Nostalgia de un timonel victorioso, inteligente, impredecible, sabio y que surgió como el padre fundador de una nueva dinastía y ganador de dos guerras – una civil y otra contra los japoneses-. Incluso si Deng Xiaoping hubiese denunciado a Mao como lo hizo Jrushchov con Stalin en el ’56 aún perviviría en los chinos ese espíritu de nostalgia y veneración por lo pasado … ese que hace parte de su tradición milenaria de culto a los ancestros tan propia del confucianismo y el taoísmo arraigado en sus genes. Algunos mitos también están construidos sobre mentiras.



P.D. Y para quien quiera profundizar más en el contexto de los horrores perpetrados por Mao y sus políticas, siempre quedará recomendar la trilogía de Frank Dikötter (La tragedia de la liberación: Una historia de la revolución china 1945-1957; La gran hambruna en la China de Mao y The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976); o el pormenorizado estudio de la Revolución Cultural hecho por Roderick MacFarquhar en su Mao’s Last Revolution

At first, I was put off by the heavily polemical style and constant sneers at Mao. But I pushed on, and I'm glad that I did. Read the book, not as academic history or as a scientific investigation, but more as a bill of indictment. Chang and Halliday spent ten years digging up an extraordinary wealth of material, and I doubt anyone will ever match what they have done. They had access to Russian archival material and various aging eye-witnesses in China that have not been available to previous historians. Of course, it's possible that the authors'
attitude to their subject impaired their ability to work, but I think that the sweep of their narrative, combined with the details that they have uncovered, make the whole work compelling. Adding up the plusses and minuses, I would still give it a strong recommendation.

I read Spence's book on Modern Chinese History, which I liked very much. His NYRB review was guardedly critical of the Chang & Halliday work, mostly because of their negative
attitude, but he didn't seem to criticise specific elements for their veracity.

Overall: a must read.

“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 was born into a peasant family in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China. The date was 26 December 1893. His ancestors had lived in the valley for five hundred years. This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic age…”
-tJung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao Tse-Tung – popularly known as Chairman Mao – was one of the titanic figures of the twentieth century, if not all of history. From humble beginnings, he rose rapidly in a time of chaos, war, and revolution, taking control of the Chinese Communist Party, wresting one of the world’s great nations from Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, and birthing the People’s Republic of China, which is today the most populous – and one of the most powerful – countries on earth.

This accomplishment did not come without costs. Mao was a brutally-focused leader who pursued his superpower goals without regard to human lives. He is responsible for tens of millions of deaths, many from enforced famines that came not from bad harvests, storms, or droughts, but because he was willing to trade needed food for weapons and technology that would allow him to achieve his dreams of global force projection.

The consequences of his actions – not just deaths, but enslavement, imprisonment, and the destruction of historical and cultural artifacts – puts Mao in certain rarefied and dubious company. Nonetheless, despite being comparable to only Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in terms of grave-making, Chairman Mao lived a charmed life, and has enjoyed an equally-charmed afterlife.

During his reign, Mao had a broad base of international support, from the American journalist Edgar Snow, to the French writer Jean Paul Sartre, who called Mao’s “revolutionary violence” a thing that was “profoundly moral.”

Today, at a time when even revered historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Mohandas Gandhi are being critically reinterpreted, Mao remains startlingly impervious. He stares eternally out from his famed portrait on the Tiananmen Gate, a strange Mona Lisa smile on his lips, guarding the entrance to Beijing’s Forbidden City.

In Mao, authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday try to change all that on their own, and all at once. The result is a vigorous attack on the Chairman that works better as a polemic than as a biography.

***

Structurally speaking, Mao is superb. Having never read about the man before, and having only just begun studying Chinese history, I found this incredibly user-friendly. The authors employ the Table of Contents as an outline, dividing the book into 6 parts, further subdivided into 58 chapters, many of them quite short, assuring that the reader never gets bogged down. Most of the chapters have pedantic names that tell you exactly what you are about to read. For example, there is no mystery about what’s to come in a section called “Takeover Leads to Death of Second Wife,” or “Chiang Kai-Shek Kidnapped.”

Providing further assistance, each chapter has a date-range, and provides Mao’s ages during that particular period. This allows Chang and Halliday to intersperse strictly chronological chapters, with those that are more thematic, without risking confusion.

Judged as a purely literary artifact, Mao is forgettable. The best that can be said of the prose is that it’s clear and grammatically sound. While this isn’t nothing, it would have been nice – at some point in this doorstopper – to have come across an evocative scene or passage.

***

In terms of scope, this is a literal cradle-to-grave bio. On the first page, Mao is born, and on the last page, Mao finally dies. Between those two markers, Chang and Halliday tend to stay very close to their subject.

The advantage of this tight focus is that Chang and Halliday can streamline the material a bit, condensing ten volumes’ worth of coverage into 617 pages.

The downside is that a lot of context is lost. Little effort is made at explaining the bigger picture. The authors also assume a lot of foreknowledge, so that instead of properly introducing the “Long March,” they just jump right into revising it. Additionally, fascinating supporting actors – such as Chou Enlai – never become definable personages in their own right. The authors spend an entire chapter discussing the worldwide failure of Maoism, without ever defining Maoism in the first place.

Depending on how much you already know about Mao and China, this might not be a big deal. As a newcomer, I probably should have started elsewhere.

***

Chang has a PhD in linguistics, and Halliday is a historian, and together, they compose a charming husband-and-wife team.

It’s worth noting that Chang was born in China, and her parents were Communist officials, meaning that for her, this is personal. This background gives her an advantage over western historians looking outside-in. Throughout Mao, the authors correct – or at least alter – certain translations, mention speaking to many Chinese men and women who lived through Mao’s rule, and personally consulted Chinese-language sources.

***

The research here seems enormous. The authors claim to have worked on this for ten years, and it’s believable. There is a fourteen-page list of interviews, and eighty-five pages of notes.

For all that work, Mao was sharply criticized and quite controversial when it was published in 2005. I started to explore this aspect, then quit, realizing that much of the tempest is lost behind internet paywalls and dead links, while some of it seems like sour-grapes from professors upset that Chang and Halliday made the bestseller lists, while their monographs languish in library basements.

As best I can tell, most of the contretemps has to do with certain specific allegations, such as Chang and Halliday’s argument that Chiang Kai-Shek allowed Mao to escape during the Long March, as part of a longer game. While they have cited numerous sources for this contention, the authors fail to specify what each source actually provided, making it hard to verify.

I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion either way, but as an attorney, I’m not unfamiliar with arguments. To that end, I found Chang and Halliday to be irritatingly certain of their conclusions, and frustratingly peremptory in their deductions. There were times I wanted to believe what they were saying, but found myself unable, without better evidentiary support.

Still, none of the criticisms I saw of Mao ever challenged the notion that he did really bad things.

And that’s why my main issue with this book is hard to explain.

***

The devastation that Mao wrought is vast. Chang and Halliday do a good job of finding ordinary people caught in the bloody churn of his wake. His spirit should not be allowed to float free and unencumbered by the psychic weight of his self-created calamities. Western academics who think the deaths of a few tens of millions of people is okay, as long as it’s for a good cause, need to recalibrate. College students – including my sophomore-year roommate – should probably think deeper about what it means to celebrate Mao and the CCP, because that’s a tenuous ethical position.

With that said, the battering tone that Chang and Halliday employ actually undercuts their position. They are so relentlessly negative – Mao was a sexual predator; Mao was a bad husband; Mao was a hypocrite; Mao had terrible hygiene and probably stank – that it becomes distracting.

Meanwhile, they never settle on who Mao was, or what drove him to his ends. They often contradict themselves, sometimes stressing Mao’s imbecilic ideas, other times treating Mao as the grand puppet-master, denying others any agency while they dance on his string. Though I spent six-hundred pages with the man, I have little notion about his motivations, his personality, or why so many willingly followed him. Before he got to the top, he had to get to the top, and nothing in Mao demonstrates why this happened.

In short, Mao is probably one of humanity’s alpha criminals, yet Mao is somehow too harsh to be entirely credible.

***

When Mao finally passed from the scene, Deng Xiaoping undid many of his works, leading China to superpower status not by toppling monuments or giving away its grain, but by introducing a socialist market economy, where private ownership exists alongside state enterprises.

In that sense, Mao’s legacy is being left behind. But while current President Xi Jinping is unlikely to revert to the Chairman’s crude economic system, he shares Mao’s love for the concentration of power into fewer hands, and in his belief of a globally-influential nation. Thus, one cannot understand China without attempting to understand Mao, just as one cannot understand our modern world without understanding China.

A remarkable accomplishment... This book sorts out a lot of below the surface stuff that had been covered over by deliberate distortions, and the story is even more shocking than many of us might have thought.

The greatest puzzle historically remains how come the Chinese were not able to capitalize more on the amazing history of inventions and high culture which are woven throughout their long history, and that answer is likely to be closely related to the question why a sadistic, Macchiavellian hack like Mao Tse Tung could emerge as such an apparent force in history, uniting the country at the expense of destroying the traditions that made it what it is, by directly killing 70 million of them as part of his systematic terror campaigns which make Stalin and Hitler seem amateurish in the terror department.

The style of writing of the book makes it very readable, and the source material is extensive, but it has the freshness and intensity of someone who clearly has heard many first hand accounts, from people whose voices often were drowned out by the din of history, not to mention the noise of the torture and murder of the Maoist Revolution.

The only good that seems to come out of this much death and destruction is that some people were unbowed to the end. Regardless of the totality of totalitarianism, it never ever works in the end. One wonders how long it will take China to free itself from this legacy and recover its rich culture. The first signs are in evidence.

One redeeming feature of this quite massive book is that the publisher has made it a quality production - it is a paperback, sewn in signatures, and therefore less likely to fall apart, and capable of being glued back together if the back ever breaks.

It took me a long time to write this review but in all honesty, I still don't know what to say. Judging from the way Mao is portrayed in this book, he was worse than the devil himself. The question I kept asking myself while reading was: Can a single man unite all the evilness of this world within himself? If so, then that man was Tse-tung Mao. If no, then this book does not provide an accurate picture of Mao. I tend to say that there is more to Mao's persona than what Jung and Halliday show us. It’s hard to believe that there are people out there who would do what Mao did. He didn’t spare anybody – not even friends or family. Half of the time, I wanted to jump into the book to strangle him - that's how angry he made me. The suffering, misery and pain he inflicted on people is far beyond what words can say. For this reason alone, I want to read another biography of Mao. I want to get a more objective look at this life. This biography seemed a bit too emotional and subjective, although I appreciated the accessible language. 3,5 Stars. A good, interesting read.