I was remiss in not reading this book sooner. I knew it said terrible thing about Mao Zedong, and I assumed it was a right-wing screed. Far from it. When I finally got to it, I saw that The Guardian, a publication I trust, had reviewed it very favorably.

I came to it now because I had just read Jung Chang's new book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, which gave unvarnished portraits of Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kaishek. I thought that if she was objective about them, she might also be about Mao.

I studied Chinese history and government both as an undergraduate and in graduate school I thought about becoming a China watcher. I'm now so glad I didn't, because I would probably have unwittingly written many things that were false.

I never saw Mao as glorious. I knew that he was ruthless. I knew that he caused great suffering in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I did think he was a great leader. But after reading this dense, 600-plus page book crammed with references, I don't think he was even a Marxist. I think he was a sociopath, caring about nothing but his own power.

During the years of his rise to power, he was willing to send rival Communist leaders and their troops to slaughter. He was carried on the Long March on a litter. Far from being a champion of the peasants, he was indifferent to their suffering. He thought it was fine if they starved. When they were starving, he sent large amounts of food to Russia and countries in Eastern Europe that had far more food, to show that he was a leader.

He spoke of having a self-reliant China. I didn't think he desired world domination. But he did. He was willing to beggar his country to get an atomic bomb.

I also learned how much women, including Mao's third wife, suffered on the Long March, having to give up their babies along the way. Mao seemed to be indifferent to that.

You might not believe this. Read the book and see. I am sadder, but wiser.

برای من واقعا کتاب جذابی بود البته کتابهای مجموعه سرخ بیژن اشتری همشون جذاب هستن و مائو هم مثل بقیه کتابهای این مجموعه سرنوشت دیکتاتوری که کمتر اطلاعاتی ازش در دسترس هست

Mediocre as a piece of writing, but invaluable as an informational... Any nation that could endure the likes of Mao is one to watch out for. As Dorothy Parker used to say, "What fresh Hell is this?" There's at least one on every page of this book, and it's that morbid curiosity that keeps you turning the pages.

-Alimentemos todos los mitos desfavorables sobre el Timonel, cueste lo que cueste. Incluso si la frontera entre lo contrastable y los rumores es muy estrecha-.

Género. Biografía.

Lo que nos cuenta. Biografía del líder comunista chino Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung).

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

Extremely detailed and well-documented biography of Mao. The first half of the book might feel a bit slow but helps you to understand the context in which Mao grew up and everything he went through to reach his objectives. As someone living in Asia, it is important to understand Mao's geopolitical and military influence in the region. If you thought you knew how tough Mao was, you better read this book to see the whole picture of his determination and hunger for power.

I should clarify my review; I majored in Chinese modern history and did my thesis on historical revisionism and historiography of the Nanjing Massacre (from both Chinese and Japanese perspectives). I loved Chang’s book Wild Swans, but too much of this ‘biography’ is filled with personal invective with questionable evidence. Mao was certainly a monster, and a perpetrator of genocide, but too much of the author’s personal bias (and she does have some very serious personal tragedy relating to Mao’s rule) shows through that impedes her scholarship. There are many more genuine portrayals of Mao, as the genocidal, misguided, womanizing tryrant that he was without some of the more questionable and poorly documented atrocities that Jung Chang alleges. Let the evidence stand for itself.

Eine Biografie zu Mao. Chinas großer Vorsitzender. Ein Mann, der sich hochgearbeitet hat und am Ende mehrere Millionen Menschen auf dem Gewissen hat. Die Biografie zeichnet ein Bild von einem Mann, der nicht nur egozentrisch ist, sondern auch menschlich minderwertig. Ein Fremdgeher, schlechter Vater, schlechter Politiker, dessen Gesetze immer die ärmere Bevölkerung besonders hat getroffen hat. Die rechte Hand von Stalin.
Trotz seines unbeliebten Wesens im Laufe seiner Karriere und in seinem Privatleben, hat er es gegen Ende geschafft, dass die chinesische Bevölkerung ihn verehrt hat. Warum? Das ist ein großes Rätsel. Das Buch muss man gelesen haben.

I can't decide whether to keep going with this book, which is one of the most annoying biographies I've ever read. The tabloidish whiff of the subtitle -- The Unknown Story! -- is misleading: this book should have been called Mao: What a DICK! Its tone is bizarrely vitriolic and hysterical, as the authors take every single conceivable opportunity to spell out after each example that, see, look, Mao was a real DICK.

Here's the thing: we already know that Mao was a dick! And if we somehow didn't, simply giving us evidence of his dickishness -- e.g., the time he starved 38 million people to death? -- would do an infinitely more effective job of convincing us. This is really an instance where the hated writing advice to "show" and "not tell" should've been heeded, because somehow all the authorial raging about what a dick he was makes Mao seem almost sympathetic. More to the point, it makes him seem like a flattened cartoon character and cuts off any speculation about why he was such a dick. He's presented as a kind of Damian hellchild who just pops out of his seemingly very nice mother filled with all this bloodthirsty ambition, and there's no exploration of where his immense dickishness came from, or how it might have either derived or deviated from the society he lived in. This did the opposite of what a biography is supposed to do, and made the question of why Mao was who he was moot by just painting him as so inherently, insanely evil and awful and bad that there was no point trying to understand anything else about him. Of course I think it's perfectly reasonable to be astounded by the horrible acts and low character of a person responsible for so much death and suffering, but I still think you need to be able to modulate your tone when you're writing a book like this, or you just wind up undermining the power of all your points.

BUT! Except for this very annoying tic, the book is well-written, clear, interesting, and easy to follow for someone with almost no knowledge of any of the history being described. Maybe I'll return to it again at some point...?

The Horror...the Horror!

Mao Zedong is alone among the major tyrants of the 20th century never to have faced a historical reckoning. While the crimes of Adolf Hitler’s regime have been well documented and the Russians have at various times acknowledged the famines and purges under Josef Stalin, the full extent of the suffering inflicted by Mao remains uncertain. This is largely due to the degree to which the Communist government in China today zealously protects his image, as though to question it is to undermine the foundations of their state. As a result, many of the details about his life remain overlaid by myth, while his culpability in China’s misery during the quarter of a century he ruled it remains under-explored.

To rectify this, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday spent over a decade combing through archives and interviewing people who knew Mao. Their book embodies the sum of their efforts, offering an comprehensive examination of Mao, his rise to power, and his actions as the leader of the most populous nation on the planet. It’s an impressive work, but also a deeply flawed one that often reads more like a prosecutor’s brief than it does a historical study designed to illuminate the life of the man and how he came to exert such an outsized role in China’s history.

These flaws become evident early in the book when the authors set out to explain how Mao rose to power. As they make clear, Mao was hardly destined for greatness. Not only was his background relatively humble, but Mao lacked the oratorical or organizational skills that have been the path of many to power. Nor was he an energetic go-getter, as he preferred an indolent lifestyle. What Chang and Halliday demonstrate Mao possessed in abundance was an eye for the main chance and a ruthlessness in destroying anyone who he perceived as a competitor. Time and again Mao outmaneuvered more capable colleagues and competitors, steadily accruing power even at the cost of thousands of lives.

Mao did little to endear himself to his contemporaries or his superiors in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet as Chang and Halliday argue, their opinions mattered less than those of the Soviet advisers aiding the Communists in the 1920s and their superiors in Moscow. The authors’ description of the role the Soviet Union played in Chinese politics during this period is one of the main features of this book, and reflects their extensive work in Russian archives. Impressed with reports of Mao’s effectiveness, time and again they favored him over their rivals – and with Moscow’s continuing support for the CCP vital to its survival, their preferences could not be ignored. As Chang and Halliday demonstrate, their support was a key factor in Mao’s rise to the leadership of the CCP and the war against the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek.

Once in command, however, Mao hardly distinguished himself as a general against the Nationalists or the Japanese then occupying large portions of China, and by 1946 his forces were on the verge of being crushed by the Nationalists. Then how did the Communists ultimately triumph over Chiang’s forces? Here Chang and Halliday credit two factors: an untimely American intervention for a cease-fire, and the planting of moles within the Nationalist military command. The former gave Mao’s forces a much-needed breathing space and an opportunity to rearm with Soviet aid, while the latter often spared threatened Communist forces while leading their own men into traps. The result was Nationalist collapse and Mao’s victorious declaration of the People’s Republic in 1949, beginning his long and disastrous reign over China.

Yet ruling over China was not enough for Mao, as he aspired to nothing less than global domination. In this he was restrained by both the devastated condition of his country and Stalin’s reluctance to support the development of an indigenous arms industry. Mao sought to overcome both through a combination of adroit diplomacy and a callous exploitation of his people. Leveraging Nikita Khrushchev’s need for allies, Mao from him won the technical advice and resources he needed to develop an atomic bomb program. This he paid for by requisitioning enormous amounts of agricultural produce from the peasantry, beggaring the populace in order to support his ambitions. When others in the CCP leadership pushed back against the cost of this, Mao solidified his power with the Cultural Revolution, which threw the nation into chaos and inflicted yet further trauma upon the people. Their suffering continued largely unabated until Mao’s death in 1976, at which point his successor Deng Xiaoping soon began to reverse his policies and launch China onto the path that has brought it to the present day,

Chung and Halliday’s book is a damming indictment of its subject. Yet in painting such a uniformly negative portrait of Mao what they produce is a caricature. Nowhere in it do they consider why many people chose to follow him absent some form of compulsion, or why his second and third wives – the former of whom refused to renounce Mao even under torture, the latter a capable guerrilla leader in her own right – fell in love with him. Equally problematic is the authors’ overreliance on Soviet sources, which results in a very Russian-centric view of Mao’s life that, in the absence of similar materials from Chinese archives, likely exaggerates the Soviet Union’s influence in Communist Party politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Not that the authors allow the absence of archival material to prevent them from engaging in speculation about some of the shadowier aspects of Chinese history (such as the possibility of Nationalist moles sabotaging their war effort), provided that it fits their interpretation of Mao. Taken together, these issues make Chang and Halliday’s book one that should be treated with caution, and that for all of its research should not be regarded as the final word on Mao’s life and career.

An excellent read - thorough, painstaking research and incisive insight presented in a manner that tells the story of one of the leading historical figures of the twentieth century. Even readers with little or no knowledge of Chinese history will conclude this book with a thorough understanding of how we got to where we are today in the Far East, and of the inside life of this most evil of men. Like Hitler and Stalin, he not only wiped out entire communities in their millions, but also tended to exert a highly destructive influence on anyone unfortunate enough to get close to him.

Full marks to Juang Chang! RTC