4-06-06, 8:48 am
As someone who studied Chinese history as a minor field as a graduate student at the University of Michigan four decades ago, I must confess that Mao: The Untold Story is literally one of the worst books that I‘ve ever read in Chinese or any other history. It beats even Lenin and World Revolution, a work by a likeable professor at City College, Stanley W. Page, which was an embarrassment to even the most ardent Kremlinologist because it portrayed Lenin as a corrupt individual who advanced the revolution to gain not only power but wealth for himself. Mao: The Unknown Story would have been greeted with either outrage or laughter by virtually all, non-McCarthyite historians and political scientists in the 1960s, including those who were rumored to be on the CIA payroll. It 'interpretations' would have been seen as similar to those advanced by Karl Wittfogel and other embittered right-wing scholars who testified in the 1950s before red-baiting congressional committees to attack their liberal colleagues, who were being purged from the State Department, the Foreign Service and, ironically, the less distinguished universities. What is remarkable, though, is the respectful reviews that such a work has received in the press in Britain and the US. Why this is true is a much more interesting question than the book itself, which simply asserts everything negative about Mao politically and personally, portraying him as a craven Soviet stooge for more than three decades while it uses every anti-Mao comment from Soviet sources to condemn him further From its first sentence, which accuses Mao of murdering 70 million people, to its portrayal of the Chinese Communist party as the creation and subversive instrument of the Soviet Union from its inception to the successful revolution of 1949, to its characterization of Mao as a surrogate Stalin (even though Stalin in the end appears relatively positive by comparison) who comes to power in the CCP through ruthless purges, and acts as a miserable coward during the Long March, subverting a Chinese 'modernization' which was advancing only to be hijacked by Communists, making it 'impossible' for the US to recognize China because he wanted to curry favor with Joseph Stalin to build China’s military power, and then continuing on his monstrous path. Consistent and monumental distortions and omissions like this are difficult to answer directly. First, let’s look briefly at the omissions. Mao’s intellectual development, the significance of the Hunan Report of 1926, dealing with the peasantry as a revolutionary force; the April Shanghai massacre of 1927 in which tens of thousands of Communists and others were murdered; Mao’s differences on strategy with other CCP leaders and particularly with the Comintern; the support that the imperialist powers gave to Chiang’s open dictatorship after the Shanghai massacre; the Chinese Communist party’s leading role in the resistance to Japanese colonial imperialism and the CCP’s growing strength during WWII(a war in which more than 10 million Chinese perished); all of which were acknowledged by anti-Communist scholars when I was in school, however unhappy they were with the CCP’s eventual victory, simply doesn’t exist here.
Also, the more than three billion dollars the Truman administration gave to Chiang’s military forces (material Soviet aid to the CCP was very negligible compared to this), the role of a rapidly developing McCarthyism which led to well documented purges in the State Department and the foreign service, doesn’t exist here either.
If you start with the premise, that Mao is the New Stalin, not so much the Red Pope of legions of underground Jesuitical Communists, the way Stalin was portrayed but a corrupt Red Buddha forcing 'right conduct' on the masses while he himself lived a totally dissolute life, then all of Chinese history, even the less extreme anti-Communist interpretations, lose all meaning.
Why deal with Mao’s thought, his important tactical adaptations of Marxism-Leninism to the desperate conditions that the Chinese people faced, if everything is known and the story told from the first line to the last? Why deal with Mao’s complicated and serious differences with the Comintern and the Soviet leadership, which serious scholars, and for that matter, intelligence analysts have documented for more than half a century, because that is merely a trick. Instead, read and cite Mao the way HUAC would read and cite Karl Marx, as a police agent investigating criminals with the statements of informers, and leave it at that.
This 'biography,' even with its extensive documentation, is no more a serious work than a documentary on the life of Fidel Castro on Fox News would or could be. As historians know, scholarship is about framework and selection, informed decisions, as to how sources are analyzed. This work’s use of sources is self-serving in the extreme choosing to omit any discussion of Mao’s positive contributions to the Chinese revolution or the really positive achievements of the Chinese revolution rather than answering them in any informed way.
China, the largest nation in the world in terms of population, was, as I sometimes tell my classes, until the revolution a more terrorized and oppressed version of my old neighborhood in the South Bronx—a vast slum where criminals ran wild and landlords oppressed the people who desperately wanted to fight back, defend themselves, but didn’t know how, enslaved by tradition and their own fears and divisions.
Except, the Chinese, unlike the poor people in my neighborhood, couldn’t move out of China to some better neighborhood before the poverty and drugs and crime destroyed them. They also faced a foreign enemy, the Japanese imperialists, who sought to compound their misery by turning them into a colony of semi-slaves. The Chinese Communist Party gave the Chinese people a way to fight back, to liberate themselves from their internal reactionary oppressors, murderous Japanese imperialists, and the great imperialist powers that sought since the 1920s to defeat their revolution. Mao, by adapting Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions, made an enormous contribution to the Chinese revolution and to the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples in the colonial regions and poor countries of the world.
Mao also made horrible errors and disastrous choices in the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, veering away from Marxist materialism into an idealist fog in which he believed that industry could be created in a decentralized rural environment and the country developed by adherence to ideology. This and the personality cult he and his supporters created around him did great damage to the development of the Chinese revolution. But that is the stuff of serious history, and that is not what Mao: The Unknown Story is. At best, it is the flip side of the personality cult, with the equivalent of anti-Red Guard Young Republicans waving the Wall Street Journal and shouting, 'Down with Mao and Chinese Communism.' But I have been begging the question. Why the positive response. The co-author, Jung Chang, is the author of a respected work, Wild Swans, telling Pearl Buck style, the story of China through generations of a family. Jon Halliday an English writer, as the co-editor of a work called The Psychology of Gambling and other less known non-scholarly works
Perhaps this tells us more about ourselves today than about China. In the 1950s and 1960s, the enormous social achievements of the Chinese Revolution were very hard to deny, and those who saw China the way Mao: The Untold Story does, were seen for what they were – McCarthyites who purged the State Department, attacking even moderate liberal scholars and writers, running interference for General Macarthur’s advocacy of expanding the Korean war into China and in effect launching WWIII in Asia. McCarthy himself had said of the leading China scholar and State Department advisor, Owen Lattimore, if you asked any American school child who the number one Soviet agent in the US government, he would say Owen Lattimore. That you could count the number of school children who had even heard of Owen Lattimore on the fingers of two hands was lost in the hysteria of 1950. But why should similar comments about Mao and the CCP be unanswered in liberal circles today when they were protested in such circles half a century ago? Today the Soviet Union is no more and China is an enormous mixed economy exporting huge quantities of consumer goods to the rich countries. 'Post cold war liberals' today are ready to believe the worst about China, from 'slave labor' to 'unfair trade practices' just as 'cold war liberals' were ready to believe the worst about the Soviet Union half a century ago. That may explain the generally positive reviews the work has received in progressive publications like the Manchester Guardian and the Independent in Britain and the far less progressive New York Times in the United States.
In the late 1930s, Chiang K’ai-shek, China’s rightist dictator, reportedly responded to popular criticism that he was failing to fight the Japanese by saying 'the Japanese are a disease of the skin. The Communists are a disease of the heart.' For Jon Halliday and Jung Chang, the modern history of the Chinese people, all the tragedies and suffering in the collapsing feudal system and the mass murder of Japanese imperialism, are diseases of the skin. Mao, the Chinese Communist Party, the Peoples Liberation army, and the Chinese Revolution are diseases of the heart. For that reason they have written a crude work to cut the heart out.
It is said that this work is suppressed in China. This is bad and in the long run helps to give the work credibility. I think it should be read there and widely discussed. Its distortions are so transparent that Chinese scholars and journalists could easily pick them apart. Also, Chinese people, even those with strong criticisms of the CCP, would I believe see this work as an attack on them and their achievements as much as it is an attack on Mao.
