Word: mao
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...genocide under Hitler was a horrible atrocity, but isn't it time to stop ignoring this century's many other genocides? Why the silence concerning the 6.5 million Mao Zedong killed? Or the 20 million Stalin was responsible for murdering? Or the 2 million killed by black-African governments in Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan and other nations? Or the Japanese genocide that killed 2 million in World War II? And on and on. Your reviewer, like many other people, is dismayed that so few young Americans have heard of the Holocaust. But everyone should be angered about ignorance...
...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...
...Their Mao is bad to the core, a relentlessly selfish and duplicitous schemer as a young man who harbored "a love for bloodthirsty thuggery." And then he turned really nasty. Mao purged and murdered rivals. He pigged out on exotic delicacies amid the mass starvation his policies caused. (The authors cite estimates that 38 million people died of starvation and overwork during the Great Leap Forward. Mao, meanwhile, stuck to his misguided industrialization plans, blithely commenting that "half of China may well have to die.") In the 1970s, Mao even forbade surgery for his loyal No. 2, Zhou Enlai...
...Mao's celebrated exploits are recast as frauds. The Long March? The authors contend that legendary battles along the way didn't actually occur and suggest Mao and his communist army survived the 6,000-mile ordeal only because his political rival, Chiang Kai-shek, decided to let them move unopposed. The 1949 declaration of the People's Republic? A bust, the authors argue, as a nervous Mao frequently resorted to awkward throat clearing and offered no ideas for benefiting China's people. His love for the peasants? Phony. "There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots...
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...