The Real Mao

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MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY

By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Knopf, $35, 814 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY STEVEN W. MOSHER

Thirty years a China hand, I was pretty sure I had Mao Zedong pegged. The serial butcheries that the late chairman of the Chinese Communist Party had visited on his own people were well-known to me. I had visited the graves of peasants who died in Mao's famines, interviewed survivors of the prison system he had established, and witnessed forced abortions by his communist cadres. My opinion of this brutal and tyrannical ruler could sink no lower -- or so I thought -- but I was wrong. And so, it turns out, are the standard biographies.

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story" is so chock full of revisionist bombshells that almost every chapter left me shaking my head in surprise. Yet it is so meticulously researched that its groundbreaking conclusions are unlikely to be seriously challenged in the future. Critical to this success is the unparalleled access the authors enjoyed inside of China. Not only did they interview dozens of individuals close to Mao about every detail of his personal life and rise to power, they had privileged access to party archives still closed to other researchers, and of course to the Chinese people themselves. Myths and lies that even today continue to prop up Mao's image -- and the People's Republic of China itself -- fall one-by-one before a no-holds-barred indictment of the man who is arguably the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.

Take the tale of the Long March. PRC history books recount how Mao, guns blazing, fought his way out of encircling Nationalist armies and through hostile provinces to reach the red base of Yenan. But this heroic epic is a complete fabrication. In reality Chiang Kai-shek, who had encircled the Red Base with a 500,000-man army and four lines of blockhouses bristling with machine guns, allowed them to decamp. He opened "one side of the net," thereafter using his superior forces to herd the increasingly pitiful Red forces along like sheep until they reached his intended destination. Chiang made absolutely sure that the Reds would flee to Yenan by allowing the communist base there to flourish, while others elsewhere in China were vigorously stamped out. The so-called Long March should be remembered in the history books as the "Forced March."

Why did Chiang "relocate" the Red Army instead of simply destroying it? Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday argue convincingly that the generalissimo was afraid that Stalin would execute his only son, Ching-kuo, who had been held hostage in the USSR for nine long years. The Confucian-minded Chiang did not want to betray his ancestors by leaving no male descendants. He herded the Reds to the north to please Stalin, knowing that the Soviet supremo wanted them where he could control them, arm them and use them against the looming Japanese threat. Chiang's hopes for the return of his son went unfulfilled, however, and the Red Army was fatefully able to "link up" with Moscow.

Mao famously claimed that he was fighting with "only millet plus rifles," but research in the Soviet archives convinced the authors that "a huge secret program of action and subversion for China" was already underway by 1919. Young Mao was in Moscow's pay from 1921 onward, and the book includes a receipt for US$300,000 (worth about US$ four million today) signed and sealed by none other than "Mao Zedong." Without this generous and continuing support from his Soviet "older brothers," which included, after World War II, the entire arsenal of the surrendered Japanese Army in Manchuria, Mao would have remained a minor bandit on China's periphery.