Mao: The Unknown Story

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday · 2005

Thesis

Mao Zedong was not a flawed idealist whose revolution went wrong but a ruthless, self-serving tyrant from early in life, whose rise depended on deception, Soviet backing and the sacrifice of his own followers, and who as ruler of China was responsible for more deaths in peacetime than any other leader of the twentieth century.

The main ideas

Mao was responsible, the authors argue, for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime.
His character was set early. As a young man he wrote that people like him owed duties only to themselves.
Key episodes of the Communist founding story, including the Long March, were distorted or invented.
Mao's rise owed much to Stalin, and the authors claim Soviet agents shaped the course of China's war with Japan.
The Great Leap Forward famine was not an accident of bad policy: Mao exported food to pay for weapons while tens of millions starved.
The book's sweeping claims rest on sources many historians cannot verify, and specialists have challenged many of them.

Seventy million

Jung Chang, author of the family memoir Wild Swans, and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, spent more than a decade on this biography, drawing on archives in several countries and interviews with people who knew Mao. The book was published in 2005 and is banned in mainland China.

Its opening sentence states the thesis: Mao, who for decades held absolute power over a quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. The rest of the book is organized to show that this outcome followed from his character and choices, not from circumstance or the excesses of subordinates.

The authors present the figure as the cumulative toll of famine, purges, labor camps and political campaigns. It is not broken down into a verifiable count; critics regard it as an estimate whose basis is not fully explained.

Implication: when assessing a ruler's record, ask how many deaths followed from decisions the ruler made or could have stopped, not only how many were ordered directly.

A character formed early

Chang and Halliday trace Mao's outlook to his twenties. In the winter of 1917 and 1918, aged 24, he wrote extensive notes in the margins of a Chinese translation of the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen's A System of Ethics. The authors quote from these notes to show a young man who rejected obligations to others: in their rendering, people like him had a duty only to themselves and none to other people.

They present these notes as the key to his conduct for the rest of his life: indifference to suffering, delight in upheaval, and the treatment of everyone, including his wives, children and closest comrades, as instruments of his own ambition.

The mechanism, as they argue it, is that the revolution did not corrupt Mao. He used the revolution, recognizing it as the route to unchecked power.

Implication: early, private statements of values can predict how a person will behave once constraints are removed.

The Long March revised

The Long March of 1934 and 1935, the Red Army's retreat across China to the northwest, is the founding legend of the Chinese Communist Party. Chang and Halliday argue that much of it was false.

They claim that Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, allowed the Red Army to escape, as part of a bargain with Stalin to recover his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who was being held in the Soviet Union. They argue that Mao's leadership during the march was marked by scheming against rivals that cost his own forces dearly.

Their most specific challenge concerns the Battle of Luding Bridge, celebrated as the heroic crossing of a chain bridge under enemy fire. The authors assert that there was no battle at the bridge, relying on the testimony of a local witness interviewed about sixty years later and on circumstantial evidence about casualties and timing.

The mechanism, in their account, is propaganda: the Party built its legitimacy on a heroic origin story, and the story was shaped to serve Mao.

Implication: treat the founding stories of any regime with suspicion, especially those that serve the leader who controls how they are told.

Stalin and the war with Japan

The authors argue that Mao's rise depended throughout on the Soviet Union, which funded the Chinese Communist Party, backed Mao against his rivals and shaped its strategy.

One of their most contested claims concerns the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan in 1937. They argue that Zhang Zhizhong, the Nationalist general commanding the Shanghai–Nanjing garrison, was a long-term Communist agent whom Stalin activated in August 1937 to provoke fighting in Shanghai and draw Chiang into a war with Japan, relieving Japanese pressure on the Soviet Union.

They also argue that Mao preferred to let the Nationalists bear the burden of fighting Japan, preserving his own forces for the civil war that followed.

The mechanism, in their account, is that Mao and the Communist Party served Soviet strategic interests in exchange for the support that made their victory possible.

Implication: in civil conflicts, ask who is funding and directing each side, because foreign interests can shape decisions presented as domestic.

The famine and the superpower program

The authors' account of the Great Leap Forward, Mao's campaign from 1958 to industrialize China through mass mobilization, puts the death toll from famine and overwork at close to 38 million over about four years.

Their central argument is that the famine was not merely the result of mistaken policy. Mao's government exported large quantities of food to the Soviet Union and elsewhere to pay for military technology, including the atomic bomb, while people in the countryside starved. Had the food not been exported, the authors argue, very likely no one would have died of hunger.

They use as a chapter heading a remark Mao made at a party meeting in Wuchang in November 1958: that with so many projects under way, half of China might well have to die. Critics have argued that in context the remark warned against overwork rather than accepting mass death.

Implication: when a government's priorities are revealed by what it exports or spends during a crisis, those choices say more about its aims than its stated policies.

Limits

Its sources often cannot be checked. Andrew Nathan, reviewing it in the London Review of Books, described the authors as magpies who included every bright piece of evidence, producing a Mao that was possible but not plausible, and noted that many interviews and archival claims could not be verified.
Specialists have disputed many specific claims. Jonathan Spence, in the New York Review of Books, rejected the claim that Zhang Zhizhong was a Communist agent, citing Zhang's own memoir; a 2010 volume of academic responses, edited by Gregor Benton and Lin Chun, judged the portrait in many places woefully inaccurate while agreeing that Mao's policies were disastrous.
Its revisions of the Long March are contested from both directions. The historian Sun Shuyun, who retraced the march, also found the official account exaggerated, but described the real story as more heroic and more tragic than is known.

Born Red — one teenager's experience of the Cultural Revolution Mao unleashed.
River Town — the China that emerged after Mao, seen from a provincial town in the 1990s.