Mao: Unearthing a monster

Hartoyo Pratiknyo, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Mao: The Unknown Story
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Jonathan Cape, June 2005
832 pp (hardcover)

Just when it seems there is nothing left of interest to say about Mao Zedong, a bombshell of a book emerges to lay bare the life and actions of the founder of modern China in rich and devastating detail.

The extensive biography Mao: The Unknown Story, by Wild Swans author Jung Chang and her historian husband Jon Halliday, distinguishes itself from earlier studies about the redoubtable red dictator, not only in presenting the reader with a plethora of formerly unknown intimate details, but also in its smooth story-telling style, which renders it eminently readable.

Based on more than a decade of painstaking research and interviews with many of Mao's inner circle and minions in China, and virtually everyone outside the country who had had anything of significance to do with the Chinese leader -- including the sole survivor of the Indonesian Communist Party politburo, Jusuf Adjitorop, who has resided in China since the failed coup d'etat in 1965 -- Mao can justly lay claim to being a groundbreaking biography of one of the most influential and powerful dictators of our time.

The abundance of detail the book provides, ranging from the already known to the surreptitious, does much to bring the person of the Great Helmsman to life, but this is certainly not your usual "nothing but good about the dead" biography. In fact, although they claim to have "bent over backward" to be fair to Mao, the authors said in a recent interview with TIME magazine that they could find nothing good to say about him. Nor do they seem to be in any mood to let the grass grow under their feet to let the reader know.

The very first sentence of the book proclaims that over the decades that he exerted absolute power over the lives of one- quarter of the world's population, Mao "was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any twentieth century leader", foreshadowing what is to follow. And there is plenty to come.

"Mao's attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, `I', above everything else," the authors assert, citing excerpts from a commentary that Mao, as a 24-year-old student, had written on a book by a minor late-19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen.

He shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty, they say, explicitly rejected any responsibility toward future generations and did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally. He schemed, poisoned and blackmailed his adversaries and was not averse to extorting impoverished local peasant populations to suit his ends, the book declares.

In short, Chang and Halliday present Mao as a self-centered man completely devoid of morals, although at the same time, he was also "very smart."

To list just some of the many charges the authors level against him:

* Mao was no fervent believer in communism. He managed to reach the pinnacle of power within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the state by murder, scheming and trickery, driven neither by idealism nor ideology, but personal power only. "There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots any social concerns, much less that he was motivated by a sense of injustice," the authors state.

* Mao neither led nor organized the epic 9,600-km Long March from the scattered Red Army bases in southern China to Yenan in the north in 1934-35. In reality, his colleagues almost left him behind to face either capture or death at the hands of the encircling Nationalist forces. And about 10,000 of the initially 100,000-strong Red Army survived the march not because of any act of heroism on Mao's part, but only because Chiang Kai-shek let them, in exchange for his the freedom of son, Chiang Ching-kuo, whom Stalin was holding hostage in Moscow.

* He did not put up a heroic fight against the Japanese in the prelude to the Second World War in the 1930s, as claimed, but welcomed them instead in the hope that the Japanese would destroy the Nationalist forces for him.

* He grew opium to fund the Red Army in the 1940s and to turn China into a military superpower to "control the earth," and stopped only after overproduction drove down prices and other Party officials condemned the practice as unbefitting.

* Between 1958 and 1961, 38 million Chinese were starved and worked to death as Mao brought about the greatest famine in modern history by exporting food to the Soviet Union in order to buy nuclear and conventional arms industries. Mao's calculated policy was that "half of China may well have to die" to fulfill his dream of making China a world superpower.

* An untiring womanizer dedicated to self-gratification, he had more than 50 private estates built for himself, complete with luxurious villas and swimming pools. He forced the entire population to buy his books while preventing the vast majority of writers from being published, thereby making a fortune from royalties for his writings. Mao was the only millionaire to emerge in Communist China.

Considering the staggering mass of intimate details that the book divulges, the authors have, to their credit, properly anticipated any doubts that might arise in readers' minds as to the trustworthiness of their sourcing: No fewer than 128 pages at the end of the 832-page book are devoted to listing the hundreds of people they interviewed, including Mao's family and relatives, old friends, colleagues and underlings, as well as diplomats and politicians both inside and outside China.

The list of countries whose witnesses, leaders, politicians and historians they interviewed runs from Albania to Russia in Europe, from Hong Kong, India, Indonesia and to the Philippines in Asia, and Zaire in Africa. Innumerable documents, records and publications, too many to mention, were unearthed and consulted in China, Russia and elsewhere. Of great help to the reader, too, is the detailed index that fills the last 24 pages of the book.

Nevertheless, the authors' obsession with the darker side of Mao Zedong's personality is unmistakable -- and at the same time, understandable. Chang and Halliday have reason to be bitter.

In fact, readers who are familiar with Jung Chang's moving memoir of life in Mao's Red China, the phenomenal best-seller Wild Swans -- which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide since it was published in 1991 and has been translated into more than 30 languages -- may be tempted to see in Mao: The Untold Story a fitting sequel: a settling of scores, as it were, with the man who devastated Chang's own life and that of her family.

Not even a former Red Guard can easily forget her dedicated communist family being falsely denounced as class traitors during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and her father driven insane and forced to work to his death in a labor camp.

In spite of this apparent predisposition, however, or perhaps because of it, Mao: The Untold Story makes for fascinating reading. The question is how the authorities in Beijing might react in the improbable case that the book comes into the hands of the Chinese public. The danger is certainly there. Already, Chang is reported to be working on a Chinese-language version of the volume.

Perhaps the best answer to this possibility may be for the Chinese authorities to relax their iron grip on the media somewhat and gradually start putting an end to the personality cult that continues to cloak Mao in his decades-old, benign public persona.

With the advances that are being made in the sphere of information technology, it is difficult to see how so emotive a tome can be denied an entire nation forever.