Given the humbug that surrounds Mao, the meaningless official position in China that he was 70% right, 30% wrong (tell that to perhaps 70 million dead), and the leftover sanctity in Western tradition resulting from the writings of Edgar Snow and later toadies, it's hard not to welcome a book that sticks the knife in to one of the world's greatest monsters.

But given that the case against Mao is so easy to make, it doesn't do to undermine it by embellishing it. Doing so simply hands the knife to those who claim that the legitimacy of their own rule is derived from that of Mao, and invites them to stab back.

Much as it's fun to revel in stories that Mao was an opium grower and drug dealer, that his contribution to defeating the Japanese was largely inconsequential, and so on, the book is so utterly one-sided, so lacking in balance and depth, and so full of open hatred, that it's merely China Daily in reverse. There are no shades of grey: Mao was utterly and completely black, and absolutely any mud that can be made to stick is thrown. As several scholars have pointed out, much of the evidence for many of the attacks is flimsy and unverifiable. Although there planks, even entire wooden rafts all around them to offer support, the authors constantly clutch at straws.

In short, this is a book to be read with care, and certainly not with credulity. I found the continuing open bile to be an insult to the intelligence, and I've never been able to complete reading the thing although, as I say, it's long past time that Mao's monstrousness got more publicity. But much of this is simply anti-Mao propaganda.

Historian Andrew Nathan's review in the London Review of Books tackles many of the problems:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/nath01_.html

Here's a key section:

It is clear that many of Chang and Halliday’s claims are based on distorted, misleading or far-fetched use of evidence. They state, for example, that the Chinese Communist Party ‘was founded in 1920’, and not, as is usually said, in 1921 – a point they think important because Mao wasn’t in Shanghai in 1920. The two sources they cite, however, merely confirm that early Communist cells were founded a year before the First Party Congress met in Shanghai in 1921, something not contested by historians. They claim that the Kuomintang politician Wang Jingwei was the hidden ‘patron’ of Mao’s early Party career, which appears to be a misreading of the fact that Wang, who served briefly as head of the Nationalists, appointed Mao as well as other Communists to KMT posts during the time of the KMT-Communist united front.

Chang and Halliday cite four sources to support their statement that Mao amassed ‘a private fortune’ during the Jiangxi Soviet period of the early 1930s. One is an anonymous interview which cannot be checked. The second source is a book in Chinese by a writer called Shu Long, which says that Mao ordered his brother, Zemin, who was president of the Communists’ state bank, to disperse money from a ‘secret treasury’ to the various Communist military units when a gathering enemy offensive threatened the money’s security. The third is The Long March by Harrison Salisbury (1985), which says similarly that Zemin took part in hiding the Red Army’s money and treasure in a mountain cave for two years until it was removed shortly before the Long March and divided among the Communist armies that were about to set off on the March. The fourth source is a file in the Harrison Salisbury papers at Columbia University. However, the citation is garbled, so the file Chang and Halliday used cannot be located in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library (nor can the correct citation be reconstructed from the information given).

In the chapter subtitled ‘Chiang Lets the Reds Go’, Chang and Halliday say they have ‘no doubt’ that Chiang Kai-shek allowed Mao’s army to escape from encirclement in 1934 so that it could threaten the warlords of Sichuan and Yunnan, who would then have to capitulate to Chiang to save themselves. It’s true that the Red Army escaped, but most scholars attribute this to Chiang’s incompetence. Chang and Halliday’s clinching evidence is a published reminiscence that Chiang told his secretary: ‘Now when the Communist army go into Guizhou, we can follow in. It is better than us starting a war to conquer Guizhou. Sichuan and Yunnan will have to welcome us, to save themselves.’ Although the quote is accurate, it does not prove the existence of a strategy. The source – who is not the person to whom the remark was allegedly made, Chen Bulei, but a lower-ranking staff member, Yan Daogang – himself explains Chiang’s remark by saying that he first made every effort to prevent the Red Army from entering Guizhou, and only after this failed decided to pursue the Reds there despite the opposition of the local warlord. In any case, one would expect a complex, long-term strategy of this kind to leave more than one fugitive piece of evidence.

Jonathan Spence's review in the New York Review of books (available as a paid download) covered much of the same ground, and remarks generally:

Mao: The Unknown Story contains many other examples of "secret" conversations between the top leaders of China which somehow have made their way into the memoir literature and thus become "sources." It is rare that the authors show the candor that they do on one occasion, where, citing some remarks about foreigners' sexual habits made by the wife of the guerrilla leader Zhu De, they comment that her "information reflected the gossip of the day."

For a more general overview, also see:

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/b...icle224522.ece

The book has served a useful purpose in starting conversations about Mao's horrific record, but many would wish it to be a better, fairer book. Surely we expect some semblance of balance in our histories and biographies, and there's none here. The causes of Jung Chang's hatred for Mao are set out in her earlier Wild Swans, a book with many distortions of its own, and which is best treated as a novel. But histories are supposed to be a different kind of book altogether.

But you are very unlikely to meet anyone in China actually able to make an informed and reasonable contribution on this subject either.

Peter N-H