Re: [Marxism] Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

["Fei Jiao" <feijiao@xxxxxxxxx>]

As one author had put it, this book by Halliday and Jung belongs to
the shelves of airpoet bookstores. It deserves no attention for
serious history students. Here is a very good critique to it, from an
academic points of view.

***   ***   ****

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story. New York: Knopff, 2005.
REVIEWED BY: David Curtis Wright, University of Calgary

.......

According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, authors of the recently
published Mao: The Unknown Story, these numbers might not be all that
far off the mark. They claim in the first sentence of their long and
tendentious book that Mao "was responsible for well over 70 million
deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader."
Their portrait of Mao is of a brutal and monomaniacal political
entrepreneur, an ambitious tyrant who cared much more about his own
political and military power than about anything else, including his
families and the many children he sired. By Chang and Halliday's
reckoning, Mao spent five and a half decades, or nearly all of his
adult life, savagely snuffing out the lives of his own countrymen in
order to achieve, maintain, and expand that power. They maintain quite
seriously that Mao's ultimate objective was to attain superpower
status by hook or crook and eventually to rule the entire world.

This blockbuster biography will unquestionably do serious damage to
Mao's historical reputation, at least in the West and the free world,
and it is certainly the most damaging book to the myth of Mao since
the memoirs of Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician, were published in
1994 as The Private Life of Chairman Mao. Chinese translations of
Chang's and Halliday's book will soon be available in Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Singapore, and other areas beyond mainland China where Chinese
people can live freely. The coming vilification of the two authors in
mainland China is numbingly, eye-rollingly predictable. Jung Chang
will be portrayed as a traitor to China who married a foreigner, lives
highly and comfortably in Notting Hill in London, England, and cannot
or will not get over what millions of other Chinese also experienced
and have since put behind them - the horrors and madness of Mao's
Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (in other words, well over
half of Mao's reign as China's dictator from 1949 until his death in
1976). Together Chang and Halliday will likely be pilloried as
dishonest and deceptive connivers who long for the glory days of the
British Empire and China's supine subservience to the Western Powers
and Japan.

This calumnious caricature will of course be too easy. Chang and
Halliday are both accomplished biographers. Chang is the author of
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, a runaway international
bestseller first published in 1991 about the life experiences of three
generations of Chinese women in the tumultuous twentieth century, the
last of whom was Chang herself. Her British husband and co-author
Halliday is a historian of Russia. The two have collaborated on the
research for their Mao biography for over a decade, sifting through
prodigious amounts of Chinese- and Russian-language primary and
secondary historical materials and interviewing over a hundred people
who knew or dealt with Mao. Their biography is painstakingly
researched and written with an obvious combination of relish and a
quasi-evangelistic fervour to tell the world the truth about Mao. It
all makes for exciting and even exhilarating reading – at least at
first. But their doughty iconoclasm and dogged revisionism do
eventually wear thin, and by several chapters into the book it becomes
quite apparent that much of their historical reasoning is, on balance,
much more deductive than inductive. Some of the evidence and
documentation they adduce to subvert the orthodox versions of modern
history in mainland China is quite tenuous. For example, they blame
the loss of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists to Mao Tse-tung's
communists in China's civil war (1945-1949) on two main factors: the
American general George C. Marshall's pressure on Chiang to reach a
political modus vivendi with the Chinese communists and Chiang's
laxity in ferreting out communist moles within the Nationalist
military. But here their case is based almost entirely on a single
biography published in Taiwan in 1990 and on an interview with a
single high Nationalist official in Taiwan during the 1990s.

I have been hearing these same tired explanations from old
Nationalists in Taiwan for the last quarter of a century. The real
story of the Nationalist debacle in the Chinese civil war was far more
complicated, and among other reasons for it were Chiang's stubborn
rejection of American military advice to concentrate his military
strength in southern China. In attempting to achieve military control
over vast areas of northern China before the Chinese communists could
get to them, Chiang spread his forces out much too thin and sealed his
doom militarily.

At times Chang and Halliday seem willing to accept and believe
virtually any account or recollection that contradicts the official
version of modern Chinese political history. Nonetheless, they almost
always seem quite confident, and sometimes even cocky, about the
probity and reliability of the materials they have marshalled to
debunk the standard tales of Mao's rise to power. In their book there
is precious little give and take, no judicious weighing of evidence,
no generosity with the reader about what we do and do not know. In
their crusade to overturn just about every historical verdict or piece
of conventional wisdom on Mao ever conceived, however trivial, Chang
and Halliday ironically enough remain needlessly tethered to mainland
China's official version of recent political history. In so doing they
waste much ink and effort; it is quite unnecessary to dispel every
Chinese communist historiographical myth and then replace them with
strained or contrived alternate ones in order to establish that Mao
was a cruel and heartless despot. ...........

Chang and Halliday do not merely flirt with political reductionism –
they embrace it frankly and wholeheartedly. For them, virtually
everything in Mao's life is reducible to political ambitions and
imperatives. It would probably be unfair to characterise their
perspective as a one-dimensional view of Mao, because he was indeed a
political animal. But even in two dimensions, a purely political view
of Mao is inadequate to size up the entirety and complexity of the
man. Ultimately, theirs is a two-dimensional view of a
three-dimensional tyrant, and Chang and Halliday should have done more
than they did to develop a reasonably telling picture of who and what
Mao really was. .........

(FULL TEXT : http://www.jmss.org/2006/2006fall/reviews/blasko-review.pdf)

ALSO, Wekipedia has a good introduction around the controversaries and
debates of the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Unknown_Story

============
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 14:32:05 -0400
> From: gregory meyerson <gmeyerson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon
>        Halliday
> To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
>        <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Message-ID: <00a1249bab37c78c0107f055c3ff94fb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
>
> I think robert weil did something for monthly review that's relevant
> here too.
>
>
>
> I suspect this halliday book is as reliable as robert conquest.>
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