From the author of Wild Swans and her husband comes an extremely widely researched account of Mao Zedong's life starting from his early life growing up in a family of peasants, to becoming a scholar, to his eventual iron-fisted rule of China. The book contains little known accounts from many close to Mao as well as outside critics who saw the side that the Chinese public was barely allowed to think, let alone see. Any readers of this review need to keep in mind that this is one of the first accounts of Communist China I have read which makes it difficult to read critically into a lot of what Chang is saying as I have nothing to compare it to.
One of the first arguments put forward by the authors is that Communist China was largely initially funded by Russia under Stalin. Convicing arguments such as telegrams between the two leaders, Russian involvement in the CCP (the communist party of China) and the beginnings of Russian backing in weapons manufacture as well as the ultimate goal of possessing the atomic bomb which luckily never came to fruition. While I can't comment on the accuracy of these claims; the argument seemed to have considerable backing, much of which is still not admitted by officials in China today. It becomes clear that even during the closing stages of World War II, Mao and his followers were more committed to building up forces against the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek than partnering up to beat Japan once and for all. Despite elements of Russian resistance, Mao was able to recover his own army to overthrow the Nationalist government in 1949.
The book also offers a fresh perspective on Mao's beliefs through a combination of communications with other party members and other countries and his set of aims for his own Communist state and to eventually establish China as a super power. The means through which this was done are perhaps the most shocking. Mao continued to offer around 6% of his country's money to aid to the Russians and to other, smaller communist states. While this happened, the peasants farming the food to send overseas were being worked quite literally to the bone and tens of millions died in famine which was seemingly caused by Mao's policy of increasing exports of food every year until there was not even enough for his own citizens. The famine only stopped when some of Mao's top staff more or less forced him to stop the exports. They did this at the cost to their own lives, however, and Mao was to pay them back for this later.
Chang and Halliday also offer a useful account of the Cultural Revolution which was run through Mao's fourth wife known mostly as Madame Mao. This consisted of a huge clamp-down on books, music, plays and movies where the only books allowed were ones which espoused Maoism. This book has been criticised by many for blaming everything on Mao, but I don't think this is necessarily true; there were many personalities explored in this book such as Madame Mao, Lin Biao and Chou who clearly stayed with Mao through some of the most vicious periods of his rule and Madame Mao is definitely painted as a paticularly outwardly nasty woman who did whatever Mao told her to. Many people are criticised in this book for their role and it becomes clear that without his closest staff, Mao would have been unable to wreak the amount of destruction he did.
One of the things I would criticise about this book is the bits towards the end where Chang uses evidence to sum up what she believed to be what Mao was thinking at certain times. Obviously what he was thinking is something no one will ever know and no amount of biographical reconstruction can show us his thoughts about any one particular time or person.
Despite this, the immense amount of research that went into this book involving a decade spent in China interviewing various people is extremely impressive. This is really the first in-depth reading I have done on this period of China and will definitely be looking for other books to further cement my knowledge. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in China, Mao himself or Communist regimes.
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