Word: mao
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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 calculate, "caused 100 times as many deaths as the ones dropped by the U.S. on Japan...
...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...
...Also missing is an attempt to explain Mao's enduring popularity in China. In a conversation with TIME, Chang ascribes that phenomenon to "brainwashing." But nearly three decades after his death, as New China races toward the industrial and military glory of which Mao could only dream, the man remains as well liked as ever. His visage beams benignly across Beijing's Tiananmen Square, long lines of visitors creep past his preserved corpse nearby, and restaurants are decorated with Mao memorabilia. Perhaps in a time of galloping economic modernization and social upheaval, Chinese crave the reassuring continuity provided...
Amid the cozy clutter of books and Chinese antiques in her London town house, Jung Chang talked with TIME's Donald Morrison about Wild Swans, Mao Zedong and the future of China. Excerpts...