Word: mao
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...Some of the news in the book is not new. Mao's womanizing, gourmandizing and peculiar personal habits?his aversion to bathing and teeth brushing, for instance?surfaced in the entertaining 1994 memoir by his physician Li Zhisui. Evidence of Mao's Machiavellian ruthlessness has been seeping out of China for years. Journalist Jasper Becker reported in his 1996 book Hungry Ghosts that China's granaries were bulging during the 1958-61 famine, the worst in history...
...fund the Red Army in the early 1940s, Mao grew opium, bringing in as much as $60 million a year. He stopped after overproduction drove down the price and Party officials?though not Mao?decided the practice was unseemly...
...Mao 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...
...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...