This promises a sweeping biography of one of the most important people of the 20th century. It mostly achieves that, although it goes painfully deep into certain subjects and not deep enough into others. It’s an odd feeling to finish a book this long and feel like it didn’t tell you enough.

Short’s portrait of Mao is of a man who was radicalized young by his experiences in an unjust and collapsing society, and then slowly stripped of all humanity through decades of war and the isolation that comes with power. The first half of the book gives a meticulously detailed account of the military history of the Chinese civil war. This had to be a major part of the book — the thing went on for like 30 years! — and the sheer brutality the book describes helps explain how China gave rise to an era like Mao’s later rule. I feel like I learned things about military tactics and strategy. But that isn’t something I particularly care to learn about, and there are diminishing returns to trying to keep track of exactly who has formed a temporary alliance with which warlord and how those battles went.

Mao may or may not have been born as the brutal person he bcame. But he was clearly destroyed during the war. He had a taste for righteous violence from early in his political life, and gradually lost any sense of the righteousness part of it, as Short describes here:

“Terror, Mao argued (as he had in his report on Hunan in the winter of 1926), was indispensable to the communist cause, and Red execution squads must be formed ‘to massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction’. But the use of terror should be directed exlusively against class enemies. Notwithstanding such caveats, the distinction between enemy and friend gradually became blurred. Inevitably, sooner or later, the methods applied to one would be used against the other.”

As the book proceeds, it gives convincing accounts of China’s souring relationship with the Soviet Union (which comes off as quasi-colonial), and Mao’s behavior as he rises to total power, through campaigns like the ‘Hundred Flowers’ era (ostensibly designed to foster free speech and a dynamism that the Soviet Union lacked), the massive famine caused by the government’s rigid approach to collectivist farming, and the Cultural Revolution (an historically brutal purge of the government and society in an attempt to achieve pure Maoism.)

The descriptions of Mao’s increasingly futile attempts to live by any principle but the pursuit of his own power are illuminating. Here’s Short on the Hundred Flowers-era:

“The tragedy of the ‘Hundred Flowers’ was that Mao genuinely did want the intellectuals to ‘think for themselves’, to join the revolution of their own free will rather than being forced to do so….Yet that formula, in practice, proved utterly self-defeating. By the mid-1950s, Mao was so convinced of the essential correctness of his own thought that he could no longer comprehend why, if people had the freedom to think for themselves, they would think what *they* wanted, not what *he* wanted .... In practice discipline always won out; independence of mind was crushed. The uprooting of ‘poisonous weeds’ would lead to total stultification.”

I kind of expected the main event to be the Cultural Revolution. But if the war was overdescribed, the Cultural Revolution is the opposite. I did get a sense of the vast and meaningless brutality inflicted by Mao’s shock troops upon any Chinese people accused of straying from the path. But I didn’t come away with a strong understanding of how exactly Mao went down this path. This may be a result of a thin documentary record of an era that the government still tries to suppress. And, to be fair, the book isn’t entirely without analysis about this. Short writes that the Cultural revolution was a way for Mao to re-create the glorious struggle of his youth, even if instead of pushing against an oppressive system in search of new freedoms this one ended up pushing against any freedoms or unorthoxies that threatened the system they were defending. But this is arguably the most important era in recent Chinese history, and the account was the most unsatisfying part of the book.

All in all, this is a rich history of a country and a convincing description of how a person became a monster. It’s written dryly and probably could have been shorter without losing much. But the main points come across.

Do not waste your time reading this juvenile rubbish. If Mr. Short cannot be bothered fact checking the sources he uses - for example the fictitious testimony of 'Doctor Li' regarding Mao's alleged sexual proclivities - you cannot be bothered reading 600 pages of indulgent fan fiction. Perhaps you can though. If you are looking not to learn but to be lectured, by a man with no particular talent for writing and no honesty or integrity as an academic, and what you want to be lectured on is the terribly savage and autocratic Chinaman, and his predilection for rule by the lasviscous emperor, then you have found your book. One of your books - there's an entire industry dedicated to churning out this garbage.

Man this book was a Long March! Hey? Hey?

For serious, this is a thorough study of Mao's life, rich in detail and scope. It is also a well told story that provides insights into Mao's leadership style and how it fits within the larger story of Chinese imperial history. Readers that are less steeped in modern Chinese history may want to go for Jonathan Spence's much shorter work, but if you're ready to go deep, this is the best bio you'll find.

This is the best overview of Mao, but it is a hard read.

Too much detail and pretty slow at times

I wouldn't be the first to say there are times when objective equals boring but to Philip Short's unyieldingly neutral biography of Mao Zedong as a 650 page case in point, maybe. With no sides taken, there are no heroes in this book, only villains and victims, with the subject portrayed, depending on the chapter, as both. If that doesn't sound unattractive, don't let me fool you, the words read drier on the printed page with the hazard, on each, that your mind will wander or, better, shut down.

To my credit, my retention did not fail me completely. Before Mao settled into the role of aging solipsistic control freak he was a progressive campaigner for women's rights, though he would not extend them to his wives, and although he would prove uniquely unfit to run a country he was a brilliant military strategist. Short will beat you over the head with this early phase of Mao's rise to power before antiseptically bullet-pointing the better known atrocities resulting from the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward as, respectively, a failed attempt at diplomacy and an inadvertent genocide. Those horrors feel further diluted by liberal sprinklings of Mao's poetry which, I thought, weren't half bad.

Regarding Mao's one great nemesis, the story takes an (improbably) anticlimactic turn. That Mao was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese has been unanimously propagated but Chiang Kai-shek, the anti-communist Generalissimo of the Chinese Nationalist Party, was no less barbaric. This is unless you play a game of body counts, which Chiang did in the form of collecting heads, though, Short mentions, he perspicaciously settled for just the ears once the heads became too weighty. Despite this sparkling prelude, most of Short's history concerning Chiang occurs before Mao is in a position of real power and, less satisfactorily, once the Generalissimo packs his bags and abjectly flees to Taiwan he is never, in the book, heard from again.

Approaching its conclusion, then, the loss of Mao's capacity for intransigence is made no more apparent than in the description of his thrice self-repealed attempts at choosing a successor, one of which, the young buck, Wang Hongwen, comes off as uncomfortably Palin-esque while the rest are unworthy of mention, even if I could remember their names.

This is an excellent book. Long, detailed -- there are passages where one has to let one's eye skip over the surface like stones on a pond... but for someone who has not read much about his period, I couldn't ask for a better introduction.

The author, focusing on the narrative, manages brilliantly to take the reader -- and seamlessly, from Mao the idealistic, romantic, visionary poet and revolutionary to... A quote near the end says: Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have placed him among the gods; had in died in 1966, he would still have been considered a great man; but since he died in 1976, alas..., what can one say....

Tragic, riveting, and expertly told.

Seems to be well-written and well-researched, but somewhat apologetic.

Extraordinary work.

So many things happened in China's past century. Yet readers interested in learning more about this period are faced with a difficult situation. Most sources have a heavy political filter through which a truthful picture or anything in its resemblance no longer exists. Works published in China are censored. Works published in the West are often biased, some to one side and some to the other.

This biography, however, brings out a fresh view. Just reading up the foreword shows how much Philip understands the Chinese mentality, not just on a level of ordinary individuals, but on a political level of those in the system, all of these in many nuanced but highly important ways. Short's more than 2 decades of reporting experience in China speak to it.

This draws a contrast even with those seminal works on China by well regarded scholars. Short's understanding of the Chinese psyche is strikingly deep. I cannot stress its importance more in gaining a clear picture to someone as complex and contradictory as Mao.

The reading experience was a pleasure, despite its length.

What moved me more was the afterword. It shows Mr. Short's rigorous and careful research process, the depth of his knowledge on Mao and history of modern China to the standard of a scholar, and most touchingly his earnest intentions in taking up this huge project, which is to provide a balanced picture as close to truth as possible, to both readers in the West and in China. This goal may seem cliche where consensus are obvious. But to Mao, a figure so important yet so controversial, it is a significant and courageous uptaking. Thank you, Mr. Short.

Whew! That was one heck of a read...

So, I feel that this was far more of a kind of a combination history of China during Mao's life / a rather cursory biography of Mao. I think I learned more about the Chinese Civil War than I actually did about Mao. And I don't really feel that the author was too sympathetic nor critical of Mao, but I also don't really feel like I got a good look into Mao, aside from the fact that he loved to foster contradictions - and that I'm probably supposed to think that this is a bad thing - but I don't, because I kind of agree with Mao that setting two fundamentally opposed forces at odds with one another is sometimes the best way to find a new / different / better path forward.

I know that this will not be the only book I ever read about Mao Zedong, and I trust that other authors will have different takes, which I would recommend really for just about anyone a person wants to learn about. Multiple sources give the best information, and as objective as someone tries to be, there will always be elements of bias. It's nearly unavoidable.

If this subject matter interests you, go ahead and give it a read. I think, maybe someday, I'll have to revisit this title and provide running commentary on it.

Although, I will say this, one thing that always strikes me is that leftist leaders are typically known for being voracious readers, writers, and consumers of knowledge, and Mao is no exception - my work office, were I ever to be a world leader, would probably resemble his, covered in books...this is something which is often, if not always, lacking, from right-wing leaders.

An excellent biography. It has enough background for someone with little or no familiarity with this era of Chinese history to understand the forces at play. Yet its focus never leaves its subject--Mao himself. Some have grumbled about Short's neutrality on Mao's life. It is true he neither tries to praise the man or demonize him, yet the unvarnished facts are more than sufficient to highlight Mao's remarkable achievements and chronicle their horrific costs.

If I have any complaints, they would be 1) descriptions of battles and military movements are somewhat cursory. That's understandable since this isn't a military history, yet it was an area where my curiosity was whetted but not sated. And 2) Short begins his book with a vivid description of pivotal events leading up to and through the Long March. It does a good job of engaging the reader. Short then turns to Mao's upbringing. He proceeds in a chronological manner from there. However when he reaches the events of the Long March, he skips over them quickly. While these events were covered earlier, I felt I would have been better able to connect them had I heard them again in context.

Yet these gripes are hardly worth mentioning compared to the pleasure and information I derived from this volume.

Friends of the HHI library Find. I read this in the summer of 2010. It is well written and helps to understand the thinking of the Chinese people and accordingly the Chinese government.