Monumental Monster

...He told the Russians in _1__.~1957: We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution...

...Despite the fact that her books are still banned in China, they have returned to interview hundreds of survivors of Mao's entourage, besides traveling the length and breadth of the planet in search of Westerners who had contact with him...

...Indeed, as Chang and Halliday conclude, by the end of his life, "Mao had brought ill fortune to virtually every member of his family...

...famine, hitherto unknown, was deliberately caused by food requisitioning...

...Their anti-Western machinations, which caused the Korean War among other disasters, were reckless enough to risk a third world war...

...But Madame Mao's decade-long reign of terror was carried out entirely on her husband's orders...

...The most notorious of his wives and the only one to outlive him was, of course, the fourth and last: Jiang Stalin set a precedent, first by creating the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s, and then by concealing its existence, in order to crush internal and deflect external resistance...

...Maoism might be summed up as inhumanism...

...His third wife, Gui-yuan, was also driven over the edge by Mao's capricious behavior...

...The progress of the voting franchise, by racial and property-holding criteria, is authoritatively recounted for almost all of the states...

...Madame Mao was indeed a monster, as her servants testify: by turns neurotic (terrified of strangers, noise, drafts, and daylight), capricious (she ordered warships to sail up and down so she could photograph them), vain (she cut a ridiculous figure playing the First Lady in front of Western leaders), morbid (she demanded transfusions of the blood of young men), and cruel (a film director to whom she had once written an embarrassing letter after a row with Mao was tortured to death...

...But Stalin kept sons of both Mao and Chiang as virtual hostages...

...qing, better known as Madame Mao...

...Much of this violence was directed against his own side...

...Mao invented the heroic myth of the Long March in order to conceal the cynicism of his conduct...

...Why so cruel...

...She left behind writings secreted in the walls of her house, which only came to light half a century later, and were then suppressed...

...of cameo figures from Madison Washington to Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar to the assertive Governor Wilson Lumpkin, (pp...

...He had at least 50 villas, an unlimited supply of concubines, and was by far the richest man in China...

...The figure that emerges is not merely ruthlessly and cruelly indifferent to the human cost of his megalomania...

...Education, health, and welfare, usually the boast of Communist regimes, were of no interest to Mao...

...China's totalitarian economy depended on its own Gulag, the lao-gai, in which Chang and Halliday estimate some 27 million died...

...And Mao's sadistic treatment of his family, friends, colleagues, and servants was in a class of its own...

...He alone is to blame for perhaps the greatest single act of vandalism in history, encompassing the destruction of one of the oldest and noblest cultures on earth, including most of the monuments that had survived the civil war, the suppression of all old books, art, music, and theater...

...A striking theme of this biography is the cunning ways in which Mao played oft" the Russians and the Americans against one another...

...By the time Mao's Number 2, President Liu Shao-chi, intervened in 1961 to stop Mao's calculated and lethal policy of confiscating food from peasants in order to export it, at least 30 million had died, and the entire country was close to starvation...

...He it was who chided the Red Guards for being "too civilized," who dispatched them to desecrate the home of Confucius for the ancient sage's offense of"humanism...

...No detour into labor and religious and political factionalism is too obscure to be deserving of the brief redirection of the entire narrative to include it...

...His first taste of violence, ordering peasants to butcher their landlords, came in the mid-1920s even before he became a Leninist...

...But he was a late developer...

...Both his daughters were briefly favored, then dropped, eventually falling into clinical depression...

...Yet his schemes were not just more catastrophic than those of past despots because they were executed on a vaster scale: catastrophe was part of their purpose...

...smoothly and is often pleasing and even stylish...

...Jung Chang had first-hand experience of life in the charnel house that China became under Mao...

...Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit...

...Such callousness is common to all tyrants, past and present...

...Hitler and Stalin Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (ALFRED A. KNOPF, 832 PAGES, $35) Reviewed by Daniel Johnson belong to history, while Mao is still our contemporary...

...Though he never enjoyed the opportunities for carnage offered by a world war, Mao murdered more people in peacetime than Hitler in put together...

...It has only one serious problem: the author's relentless partisanship...

...It is slightly disconcerting to read of"Walter" Whitman and "David" Crockett, or that Henry Clay "coaxed" President William Henry Harrison into something "before he died" (presumably before Harrison died...

...Until now, that is...

...The biography is solidly based on a vast array of archival and secondary material, much of which has only recently come to light...

...B UT EVEN THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION was only the most public of Mao's crimes...

...Nixon goes to China" has entered the language, but the chapters devoted to this episode by Chang and Halliday are among the most shameful in the book...

...He receives no credit for installing Jefferson over the shadowyAaron Burr in continued on poge 72 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006...

...556, 561, 428), crowd, and generally American Democracy: enrich, the story...

...These jottings reveal Kai-hui's doubts about the husband who had not lifted a finger to save her and the doctrines that would bring death to her and so many after her: "Why are human beings so evil...

...Once he had full control of China, he had 3 million "counter-revolutionaries" publicly executed...

...But these are minor cavils and this book is quite readable despite its intense detail and complexity...

...Mao outlived his rivals by a quarter of a century--he died only in i976--and his cult of personality, unlike theirs, survives intact in China to this day...

...Mao later took a terrible revenge on Liu and his wife, and he treated his most talented but obsequious henchman, Prime Minister Chou en-Lai, little better...

...virtually none against the Japanese invaders...

...The so-called Great Leap Forward of 1958 was in "We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for victory of the world revolution...

...Perhaps Mao's most infamous crime was the invasion and annexation of Tibet, which took a decade to complete...

...The implications of doing so after one or both of them had died are sufficiently disturbing that the point is better not made (lO...

...Chang and Halliday puncture the myth, designed to protect Mao's reputation, that she and her "Gang of Four" were the real architects of the Cultural Revolution...

...An endless sequence of labor and social and religious agitators, of Clodhoppers, Tertium Quids, Loco Focos, Hunkers, Barnburners, and Know-Nothings...

...In fact, he suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion to preserve the government of the young republic from insurrectionists, not because he was a stooge of Hamilton's, as is implied (pp...

...In 1958 he told the party congress not to "make a fuss" if half the population were killed in a nuclear war...

...The official name of the campaign that followed--and continues to this day-was for once no euphemism: it was called "Big Destruction...

...The experience left him in "ecstasy...

...While his countrymen lived under a regime of abject poverty and self-denial, Mao himself indulged his extravagance, gluttony, and lust...

...Spotty" Lincoln is presented as eloquent and cunning at times, but often devious...

...The personal sources that have enabled biographers to bring Hitler and Stalin to life have been lacking in the case of Mao...

...A moving example, documented here for the first time, concerns Mao's second wife, Yang Kai-hui...

...purge still euphemistically termed the "Cultural Revolution": first as a Red Guard, then working in a peasant commune, as a steelworker and an electrician, re-emerging after Mao's death to study English and become a university lecturer...

...These slave labor camps still exist...

...C" ~ TALIN HAD SET a PRECEDENT, first by creating the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s, and then by ~___~J concealing its existence, in order to crush internal and deflect external resistance...

...The thoroughness of the author's research and organization of his material is exemplary...

...Not only did this aim cause Mao to let Chinese raw materials be exploited by giving the Soviet Union a monopoly...

...For in 3ung Chang, the author of a celebrated memoir, Wild Swans, the "great Helmsman" has finally met his match...

...Washington is passed over as an almost irrelevant figurehead as president who presumably rendered some service in the Revolutionary War and had earned the respect of his countrymen...

...This was enough to sever her fragile hold on reality, and she lapsed into insanity...

...Mao extracted the maximum from the president's visit, above all access to Western technology, pretending that the United States was now his ally against the USSR while continuing his anti-American propaganda...

...He apparently had almost nothing to do with founding the Republican Party, unjustly exploited the discomfort of the Democrats over slavery, and may not have exhausted acceptable means for avoiding the Civil War...

...Of course Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, was cruel too...

...Born into a privileged family, as a teenager she was caught up in the hideous Daniel Johnson is a writer in London...

...But he is presented as essentially a ceremonious constitutional monarch who indulged the alleged cupidity, treachery, and anti-republican tendencies of Hamilton...

...Just as Hitler and Stalin 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW deluded themselves when they identified with Frederick the Great or Ivan the Terrible respectively, so Mao was not a Chinese emperor but an ideologue...

...The result is a masterpiece...

...According to the Panchen Lama, who had originally been Mao's puppet, half of all adult Tibetan males were worked to death...

...Whereas Chiang let himself be manipulated into allowing the Reds to survive in the hope of getting his son back, Mao did not care what became of his children...

...He FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMER|CAN SPECTATOR 67 BOOKS IN REVIEW alone conceived the policies that murdered 3 million and ruined the lives of tens of millions of others...

...On the contrary, the facts show that Jiang Qing told the truth at her trial when she said: "I was Chairman Mao's dog...

...And he remarked casually to his inner circle: "Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die...

...The same applied to his brother, Tse-min, whom he first allowed to be captured and i then to be executed, forbidding his crony Chou En-lai to ask Chiang for clemency...

...The most heinous were almost entirely hidden from view at the time...

...But Mao also gained an appetite for world domination, which led him to subordinate all other policies to the goal of making China the third military superpower...

...To move strategic industries away from coastal regions, Mao beggared his people...

...For his own electoral ends, Nixon de-demonized Mao for mainstream opinion in the West...

...Mao's brand of totalitarian Communism owed much to Stalin, who was both his model and his rival...

...As the authors remark: "What fascinated Mao was violence that smashed the social order...

...Today Jung Chang lives in London with her husband and co-author Jon Halliday...

...But the Chinese pupil excelled his Georgian master in deploying genocidal terror as a routine instrument of domestic policy...

...But Chang and Halliday have provided us for the first time with a comprehensive, reliable, and chillingly lifelike portrait of this evil megalomaniac, who thought "the world needed to be unified" under his dismal tyranny and who still casts a long shadow over China...

...Washington and Lincoln are too celebrated to be frontally attacked, but, not being Democrats, they are seriously diminished...

...Oddly, he never took a bath...

...By the end, Mao had actually killed some 70 million of his own people...

...It also led him to distort the entire economy...

...l ~ UT MAO SANTASIZED aBOUT GENOCmE on an ~-~even greater scale...

...The Rise of Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz (W,W, NORTON, 992 PAGES, $35) Reviewed by Conrad Black Relentless Partisanship T HIS BOOK IS a PRODIGIOUS FEAT o f scholarship and organization, weaving into its narrative every political splinter group, and attempting to give appropriate weight to all the tides and currents of American sociology from the Revolution to the Civil War...

...Not only was Chou constantly humiliated and forced to take the blame for Mao's mistakes, but he was not told he had cancer and was denied treatment to ensure that he did not outlive Mao...

...If he is more recent, however, he has also seemed more remote, for the simple reason that we have hitherto known much less about him...

...Having deserted her and their three children years before, he left them at the mercy of the Nationalists after his first (disastrous) military adventure, the siege of Changsha in 1930...

...reality the worst recorded famine in human history...

...True, his principles were as expendable as his people, and what came to be known as "Maoism" was really just sweet-and-sour Stalinism...

...He was also a monumental hypocrite...

...72-3...

...Over two decades of civil war, Mao had ample occasion to indulge this fascination, resorting to every variety of terrorism, torture, assassination, and massacre...

...He is a yellow dog Democrat who romanticizes and exalts the forebears of the present Democratic Party, and denigrates their opponents with a mechanical and sometimes grating consistency...

...Nevertheless, Mao hoodwinked almost everybody, especially Westerners who prided themselves on being anti-Communists...

...What makes modern totalitarian states incomparably more vicious is that their victims are no longer collateral damage, but are deliberately sacrificed in the name of ideology...

...In particular, Nixon and his secrecontinued on page 70 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW tary of state, Henry Kissinger, betrayed Taiwan without gaining even a promise not to use force--a concession Kissinger now says he regrets...

...524...

...and in just two years, 1959-61, practically all the 2,500 monasteries were destroyed...

...It is still too soon to speak of a definitive biography of Mao--that may have to wait until the Chinese Communist Party finally loses its stranglehold on power and goes the way of its Soviet counterpart...

...Like all oriental despots, Mao's power depended partly on control of water supplies, but his hydraulic projects caused environmental catastrophe and when the shoddily built dams broke, whole towns were inundated...

...The writing, despite occasional outbursts of pedantry and a tendency to dryness that understates the farcical aspects of much of the subject, flows Conrad Black is the author o f Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (Public Affairs...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Monumental Monster F THE THREE GREAT DICTATORS of the last c e n t u - r y - S t a l i n , Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung--the last was by no means the least destructive...

...On a whim, he summoned her back to his court, then sent her back to provincial obscurity...

...But not only did he allow his rivals to walk into traps or send them on suicide missions, he also demonstrated psychopathic indifference to the suffering he inflicted on those closest to him...

...His ultimate victory, and the salvation of the Union and Emancipation of the slaves, were mitigated by the deaths of 600,000 people in the War...

...John Adams, a solid if unexciting New Englander, is portrayed as a buffoon masquerading as having martial aptitudes, avirtual counter-revolutionary, brushed aside by the virtuous Jefferson...

...By the time he came to power in 1949, aged 55, Hitler was dead and Stalin had only four years left to wreak havoc...

...In 1958 he told the party congress not to "make a fuss" if half the population were killed in a nuclear war...

...She refused to repudiate him and was shot...