Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Jung Chang, author of the popular book Wild Swans, and historian Jon Halliday, her husband, have been promoting their new book about Mao Zedong, just in time for the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square violence.

Writing for the South China Morning Post, Alister McMillan begins a review of Mao: The Unknown Story by quoting the book’s pithy opening line:

Mao Zedong, 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 20th century leader.

That staggering number of 70 million deaths happens to perversely correlate with the official PRC formulation that Mao was 70% “right” and 30% mistaken—in other words, at least ten million lives were lost for each quotient of Mao’s correctness.

This book, obviously, will be banned in the PRC, just as Chang’s popular Wild Swans has been.

The London Times gives the new book a rave review here.

The Independent’s review, available here, is also positive. It sounds amateurish and overwrought, however, when it states that, “Chang and Halliday have solved the mystery of Mao’s motives for igniting [the Cultural Revolution]: it was a simple case of revenge.” The idea that the Cultural Revolution was launched in order for Mao to extract political revenge from Party adversaries who siphoned off some of his power after the disastrous Great Leap Forward has been around a long time. Indeed, I’d say that explanation for the origins of the Cultural Revolution is the conventional wisdom. It would be a “discovery” if some new explanation were uncovered. (Perhaps the book presents newly-discovered evidence that confirms the conventional hypothesis?) Also, while the revenge/power-reclaiming hypothesis explains much of Mao’s motivation for starting the Cultural Revolution, can one really comprehend how Mao affected China without talking seriously about ideology? Reviewers indicate this book paints Mao only as a tyrant, not as a thinker. He was not a conventional Marxist, and tyrant surely is a fair label, but it seems to me you must take seriously the ideological dimensions of the story. Mao’s thought, no just his power lust, shaped China. I look forward to reading the book to see how they really treat this aspect of the story.

Writing for the Guardian, Michael Yahuda calls the book “stupendous” and reports that, “Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao’s tumultuous life[.]” This apparently includes an answer to the American question “who lost China?” Yahuda notes, in a review available here:

The American General Marshall, who had attempted to mediate in the civil war, had unwittingly saved the communist armies by imposing a truce in the summer of 1946 that lasted for four months. It was this truce that prevented Chiang’s armies from crushing the retreating Reds. The ceasefire enabled the latter to be massively replenished by the Soviet side and then reverse the tide to win in Manchuria and then gain the rest of China.

It will be interesting to see what other reactions the book gets from foreign academics specializing in China. Some senior people who may be called on to review the book may have done their own formative work in periods more sympathetic to Mao. (Indeed, the professor who first ignited my China interest was a 1960s quasi-socialist; I imagine he would be more inclined to assign Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China than this new tome.) The academy still has its proletarian tendencies. Plus, academics tend to savage popular works. I am thinking of the curt dismissals I’ve heard of the late Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanjing or Barbara Tuchman’s oeuvre. Wild Swans sold 10 million copies (according to many of the reviews of this new book–the figure must be in the press kit), so this is like a Star Wars sequel, not the typical product of a university press hoping for library acquisitions.

Amazon is now taking orders, but the book’s U.S. edition is not scheduled to appear until mid October. This late sequencing, relative to the European and and Asian editions, must be intended to allow more time for marketing.

As a graduate student I read Stuart Schram’s The Thought of Mao Tse-tung. His conclusion was basically that Mao was a great (in the sense of important, though perhaps not in the normative sense of good) figure, a complex person about whom we cannot yet draw conclusions. In contrast, Chang and Halliday seem willing to call a murderous tyrant who wrecked China a murderous tyrant who wrecked China.

Some will argue that while Mao erred in important respects much of the economic take-off of the last 25 years is built on the foundation he engineered. I am skeptical of such claims. Clearly, a state too lacking in capacity cannot abet economic growth, but China’s take-off happened when the Chinese Communist Party substantially gave up on Communism. Was there no way to create a strong state in China without the tragic excesses of Mao’s revolution?

One day, this book will be avidly and I hope openly read in China. Underground copies will be circulating in China sooner, even before the Hong Kong translations are finished, as the SCMP reviewer predicts. But will this book’s harsh revaluation of Mao gain wide acceptance within China? I doubt it.