Mao: The Unknown Story/Sandbox

Mao: The Unknown Story is a 2005 biography of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), paramount leader of the People's Republic of China and chairman of the Communist Party of China. It was written by the husband and wife team of writer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday, and depicts Mao as being responsible for more deaths in peacetime than Adolf [...] or Joseph Stalin.

In conducting their research for the book over the course of a decade, the authors interviewed hundreds of people who were close to Mao Zedong at some point in his life, used recently published memoirs from Chinese political figures, and explored newly opened archives in China and Russia. Chang lived through the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, which she described in her earlier book, Wild Swans, and her experiences gave vividness to her writing and engagement to the analysis.

The book became a best-seller in the United Kingdom and North America. Initial reviews gave warm praise, later reviews from China specialists included both support of the book's general conclusions and, from others, criticism of the book's documentation and selective use of sources.

The book

Chang and Halliday do not accept the idealistic explanations for Mao's rise to power or common claims for his rule. They argue that from his earliest years he was motivated by a lust for power and that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, including some of his personal friends. During the 1920s and 1930s, they argue, Mao could not have gained control of the party without Stalin's patronage, nor were Mao's decisions during the Long March as heroic and ingenious as Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China claimed and thereby entered the mythology of the revolution. Chiang Kai-shek deliberately did not pursue and capture the Red Army because his son was being held hostage in Moscow.

Areas under Communist control during the Second United Front and Chinese Civil War, such as the Jiangxi and Yan'an soviets, were ruled through terror and financed by opium. Mao, they say, sacrificed thousands of troops simply in order to get rid of party rivals, such as Chang Kuo-tao, nor did he take the initiative in fighting the Japanese invaders. Despite being born into a peasant family, when Mao came to power in 1949 he had little concern for the welfare of the Chinese peasantry. Mao's determination to use agricultual surplus to subsidize industry and intimidation of dissent led to murderous famines resulting from the Great Leap Forward, exacerbated by allowing the export of grain to continue even when it became clear that China did not have sufficient grain to feed its population.

The Crossing of Luding Bridge

Chang and Halliday argue that, contrary to revolutionary mythology, there was no battle at Luding Bridge and that tales of a "heroic" crossing against the odds was merely propaganda. Chang found a witness, Li Xiu-zhen, who told her that she saw no fighting and that the bridge was not on fire. In addition, she said that despite claims by the Communists that the fighting was fierce, all of the vanguard survived the battle. Chang also cited Nationalist (Kuomintang) battleplans and communiques that indicated the force guarding the bridge had been withdrawn before the Communists arrived.

A number of historical works, even outside of China, do depict such a battle, though not of such heroic proportions. Harrison E. Salisbury's The Long March: The Untold Story and Charlotte Salisbury's Long March Diary mention a battle at Luding Bridge, but they relied on second-hand information. However, there is disagreement in other sources over the incident. Chinese journalist Sun Shuyun agreed that the official accounts were exaggerated. She interviewed a local blacksmith who had witnessed the event and said that "when [the troops opposing the Red Army] saw the soldiers coming, they panicked and fled — their officers had long abandoned them. There wasn't really much of a battle." Archives in Chengdu further supported this claim.

In October 2005, The Age newspaper reported that it had been unable to find Chang's local witness. In addition, The Sydney Morning Herald found an 85-year old eyewitness, Li Guixiu, aged 15 at the time of the crossing, whose account disputed Chang's claims. According to Li, there was a battle: "The fighting started in the evening. There were many killed on the Red Army side. The KMT set fire to the bridge-house on the other side, to try to melt the chains, and one of the chains was cut. After it was taken, the Red Army took seven days and seven nights to cross."

In a speech given at Stanford University, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski mentioned a conversation that he once had with Deng Xiaoping. He recalled that Deng smiled and said, “Well, that’s the way it’s presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation."''

Communist "sleepers"

Notable members of the KMT were claimed to have been secretly working for the Chinese Communists. One such "sleeper" was Hu Zongnan, a senior National Revolutionary Army general. Hu's son objected to this description and his threat of legal action led Jung Chang's publishers in Taiwan to abandon the release of the book there.

Number of deaths under Mao

The book opens with the sentence "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." Chang and Halliday claim that he was willing for half of China to die to achieve military-nuclear superpowerdom. Estimates of the numbers of deaths during this period vary, though Chang and Halliday's estimate is one of the highest. Sinologist Stuart Schram, in a review of the book, noted that "the exact figure... has been estimated by well-informed writers at between 40 and 70 million".

China scholars agree that the famine during the Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions of deaths. Chang and Halliday argue that this period accounts for roughly half of the 70 million total. An official estimate by Hu Yaobang in 1980 put the death toll at 20 million, whereas Philip Short in his 2000 book Mao: A Life found 20 to 30 million to be the most credible number. Chang and Halliday's figure is 37.67 million, which historian Stuart Schram indicated that he believes "may well be the most accurate." Yang Jisheng, a Communist party member and former reporter for Xinhua, puts the number of famine deaths at 36 million.

Professor R. J. Rummel published updated figures on worldwide democide in 2005, stating that he believed Chang and Halliday's estimates to be mostly correct and that he had revised his figures for China under Mao accordingly.

Response to the book

Mao: The Unknown Story became a bestseller, with UK sales alone reaching 60,000 in six months. Academics and commentators wrote reviews ranging from great praise to serious criticism. The review aggregator Metacritic report the book received an average score of 64 out of 100, based on 24 reviews from major English language media press.

Academic experts and historians, such as Gwynne Dyer who praised the book felt that it revealed new light on Mao. Simon Sebag Montefiore lauded the book in The Times, calling it "the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all — the Red Emperor of China." Perry Link, then Princeton University Professor of Chinese literature, made a similar point, stating that the book could "inoculate"" gullible Westerners" in both the intellectual and political elites who wrongly believed that "Mao and his heirs symbolize the Chinese people and their culture, and that to show respect to the rulers is the same as showing respect to the subjects".

Other praise for the book, such as that from Professor Richard Baum of the University of California, suggested that it was well researched, richly documented and that the book would lead to a change in how modern Chinese history is taught and understood.

Chang and Halliday's book has also been strongly criticized by a number of academic experts. The primary criticism was highlighted by Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, that the facts relied on in the book were were speculative, based on circumstantial evidence of simply untrue. Chang and Halliday responded to Andrew Nathan's review in a letter to The London Review of Books. Professors Gregor Benton (Cardiff University) and Steve Tsang (University of Oxford) similarly argued that Chang and Halliday had misread sources, or manipulated them to cast Mao in an "unrelentingly bad light".

Other criticisms included allegations that the book was generally fiction instead of a biography and that the authors had sought to demonise Mao. This was a position adopped by David S. G. Goodman, Professor of Contemporary China Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.

In December 2005, an article by The Observer newspaper on the book contained a brief statement from Chang and Halliday in regards to the general criticism, stating that "the academics' views on Mao and Chinese history cited represent received wisdom of which we were well aware while writing our biography of Mao. We came to our own conclusions and interpretations of events through a decade's research".

English language publication

  • Publisher: Random House
    • Publication date: June 2, 2005
    • ISBN 0-224-07126-2
  • Publisher: Knopf
    • Publication date: October 18, 2005
    • ISBN 0-679-42271-4

Mao: The Unknown Story was on the Sunday Times bestseller list at number 2, in July 2005.

Chinese language publication

  • Publisher: Open Magazine Publishing (Hong Kong)
    • Publication date: September 6, 2006
    • ISBN 962-7934-19-4

See Also

Index of China-related articles (0–L)

The following is a breakdown of the list of China-related topics. See also: List of China-related...

Index of China-related articles (123-L)

The following is a breakdown of the list of China-related topics. See also: List of China-related...

Index of China-related articles (M–Z)

The following is a breakdown of the list of China-related topics. See also: List of China-related...

Index of China-related articles (M-Z)

The following is a breakdown of the list of China-related topics. See also: List of China-related...