Word: changeful
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...didn't fight the Japanese during World War II, according to Chang and Halliday, but instead welcomed their invasion of the mainland. He and Stalin planned to divide China with Japan; Mao would end up running a Soviet puppet state much smaller than today's People's Republic...
...made a fortune in royalties from his writings, which Chinese were forced to read while other authors' works were suppressed. According to Chang and Halliday: "Mao was the only millionaire created in Mao's China...
...Chang and Halliday have some genuine scoops?on Mao's wartime conniving with the Japanese, his key role in fomenting the Korean War and, thanks to Halliday's excavations in newly opened Russian archives, his complex dealings with Stalin. As with Chiang, Stalin held Mao's son Anying hostage in Moscow for four years until Mao freed a pro-Soviet Chinese official...
...Chang and Halliday also connect a few dots. While 38 million Chinese were starving to death during 1958-61, much of the grain they produced was being shipped to the Soviet Union, where it accounted for two-thirds of all food imports. It was a weapons-technology-for-food program, a demonic bargain to make China a military superpower even at the cost of its own citizens' lives. "Half of China may well have to die," Mao said of this deal to his inner circle in 1958, according to Party documents. China's acquisition of the atom bomb, the authors...
...numerous are the damning disclosures in Mao that Chang and Halliday have little room for the emotive prose and lyrical description that animated Wild Swans. Neither, to their disadvantage, do they balance their relentless criticisms with any of Mao's accomplishments, like fending off Stalin's attempt to run China as a Soviet fiefdom, reimposing central authority in a fractious country, giving Chinese a new sense of pride and nationhood, or marketing his own image at home and abroad with dazzling aplomb...