Word: halliday
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...newest effort to shine history's harsh light on the Great Helmsman is Mao: The Unknown Story (Knopf; 814 pages) by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Chang is the author of Wild Swans, the gripping and mega-selling 1991 memoir of how three generations of her family survived modern China's upheavals. (She was a Maoist Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution's early stages.) Halliday, Chang's husband, is an author and Russia historian...
Among China scholars, there has been much debate about the book's editorializing (it was published in Britain in June). Chang and Halliday spent years researching the book and conducted interviews with surviving Mao associates around the world. But for all its detail, this is a one-dimensional portrait, an exhaustive trashing that gives one pause, as does the certainty with which many events are described. "Mao did not care one iota what happened after his death," the authors say. Who could characterize even their own feelings with such certitude...
...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...