Inside the Great Shipwreck
BERNSTEIN, THOMAS P.
Inside the Great Shipwreck Mao: The Unknown Story By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Knopf. 832 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Thomas P. Bernstein Professor of political science, Columbia...
...Consider the case of the peasants...
...At the end of 1958, the first year of the Great Leap, Mao tried to moderate excesses that had led to epidemics and to deaths from overwork and inadequate food...
...He supported major remedial measures, including long-term, large-scale imports of grain from Australia and Canada that began in 1961...
...After his second-in-command, Liu Shaoqi, offered a blistering critique of the Great Leap Forward in 1962, Mao nurtured a "volcanic hatred" of him...
...Eager to seize cities at any cost, he brought huge losses to his forces, as he had before on the Long March...
...In addition, we are told he was a thoroughly disgusting person who never bathed, maltreated his wives, and led a grotesque imperial-style sex life...
...Chang and Halliday barely mention that in the 1950s the U.S...
...Whatever nostalgia for him persists in China today partly stems from his record of standing up to foreign powers...
...Throughout his rule, he had villas built all over the country at great cost that he rarely occupied...
...He delighted in learning about the cruel public humiliation of his erstwhile lieutenants as they had their arms bent backward in the painful "jet plane" position...
...Early in the PRC's history, they add, Mao foisted a ruthless grain requisitioning program on peasants to finance military construction, and plunged them into "utter misery...
...The title of their chapter on the Great Leap is a Mao quotation, "Half of China May Well Have to Die...
...and if it is not half, it will be a third or 10 per cent, a death toll of 50 million people...
...At the same time, it is noted, Mao insisted on special privileges for himself...
...Moreover, the authors are correct to point out that in the fall of 1959 Mao abandoned any concern for the peasants when he revived Great Leap extremism and caused the single largest death toll of his reign...
...In the early 1970s, fearing that Prime Minister Zhou Enlai—his most "loyal slave"—might outlive him, Mao denied Zhou treatment for bladder canceruntil it was too late...
...But in context that remark sounds less bloodthirsty...
...A year later, the Chinese people proudly watched their troops expel the United Nations expeditionary force from North Korea...
...Was the latter comparable to Stalin's deliberate use of mass famine in 193 3 to crush peasant resistance...
...Instead, they contend that Mao oppressed, dragooned and exploited the peasants, forcing them to support the Communists...
...The Chinese had real enemies, and from their perspective it was not unreasonable to view atomic weapons as an essential deterrent...
...The authors harbor no doubts...
...The authors further obscure an accurate understanding of Mao by quoting selectively...
...That was the first time a Chinese army had beaten a Western army, and many Chinese saw it as a historic watershed, signifying the end to "100 years of humiliation" at the hands of imperialist powers...
...A 44page Bibliography of primary and secondary sources suggests that they read almost every word ever written by or about their subject...
...THE evidence suggests that Mao was cruel, deranged by ideology and tragically delusional in his ambitions for China—not that he purposely condemned tens of millions of peasants to death from starvation...
...threatened to use nuclear weapons against the PRC, as did the Soviet Union in the late 1960s...
...Over much of the Long March he was carried by his servants, who suffered atrociously...
...The overwhelming authority Mao possessed in 1949 was rooted in his achieving victory over Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists against all odds...
...Chiang later lost the civil war because of "moles, betrayals and poor leadership...
...It is truly a pity that this immense research effort did not yield a more balanced and insightful picture...
...The authors neglect to examine Mao's status as founder of the People's Republic and leader of the nation...
...Confronted by Chang and Halliday's portrait, one must at least ask whether it is the whole story...
...These prodigious labors yield a dismal picture of the Communist Party Chairman...
...Mao once said, "without the bomb people just won't listen to you...
...Their book, complete with a 14-page list of interviews conducted in China and 37 other countries, is the product of a heroic decade of research...
...Now he is widely seen as a member of the monstrous trinity that includes Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and as responsible for more deaths than either of them...
...Chang is the author of the acclaimed family memoir Wild Swans (1991), and Jon Halliday is a Russian-speaking British scholar...
...As for the U.S., General George C. Marshall, President Harry S. Truman's emissary to the peace talks between the two sides, contributed "significantly to Mao's conquest of China," say Chang and Halliday, thereby providing fresh grist to the "Who lost China...
...The promise that Communist rule had ended China's long history of famines was a core part of its claim to legitimacy...
...Getting Mao Zedong right clearly remains a formidable challenge...
...Starvation was hardly the way to accomplish this...
...Mao knowingly starved and worked these millions of people to death...
...He did not himself devise the famous strategy of surrounding the cities and taking them only at the last stage of the struggle for power...
...THE authors reject the widely accepted thesis that Mao came to power with at least some genuine peasant support...
...On the practical side, Mao frequently dwelt on the need to maintain peasants' capacity to work, labeled "their enthusiasm for production...
...That is not, of course, to suggest the idea of working peasants to a point short of death is not shocking in itself, or that it is forgivable in the eyes of history...
...Early on he began to take pleasure in the torture killings of his enemies...
...But subsequently the Russians concluded he was too dangerous to be trusted and stopped their assistance...
...His chief weapon, whether dealing with his entourage or society, was terror...
...And, in the 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon was taken in by Mao and his wily premier, Zhou Enlai...
...The question is raised by the publication of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Stoiy...
...His relations with the Soviet Union in the 1950s revolved around his quest to obtain modern military technology...
...Yes, he was responsible for the Great Leap Forward famine, an unspeakable catastrophe that left 30 to 40 million people dead...
...The authors do grant that China's test of its first atom bomb in 1964 elicited "genuine exultation" from the Chinese, but give short shrift to the import ofthat sentiment...
...Mao's megalomania resulted in an overriding preoccupation with his "superpower program" and its objective— "to rule the world...
...school of yore...
...Mao, the authors claim, was motivated entirely by a lust for power...
...Yes, Mao did harness them to his construction projects and he willingly subjected them to harsh exploitation...
...They combed through Soviet archives and had unspecified access to Chinese archives...
...He schemed, betrayed, tortured, killed, and drove presumed rivals to suicide...
...That is, if Mao was motivated solely by a lust for power, ifhe couldnot do anything right, and if the only bond between him and his followers was fear, how could he have inspired the commitment from his lieutenants essential to revolutionary triumph and the pursuit of his massive social projects...
...In the pivotal conflict over Manchuria (the Northeast), he laid siege to the city of Changchun, starving the population and causing more deaths than the Japanese had during the 1937 Rape of Nanking...
...It erupted four years later, during the Cultural Revolution...
...But does recognizing Mao as a bloody tyrant capture the range of his leadership during China's long-drawn-out Communist revolution (1928-49), orprovide a full understanding of the 27 years (1949-76) he ruled the People's Republic of China (PRO...
...There were good reasons why he would not do so...
...When Mao learned the dimensions of the Great Leap catastrophe in the fall of 1960, he was deeply shaken...
...While talking with provincial Party chiefs about the massive irrigation and industrial construction projects that were a hallmark of the Leap, he said if all the projects were tackled simultaneously, "half of China's population unquestionably will die...
...When in 1955 the Soviets agreed to provide nuclear technology, "Mao was ecstatic...
...In the Korean War, he ordered the "Chinese People's Volunteers" to advance southward far beyond their supply lines, again incurring large unnecessary losses...
...Mao then pointed to the example of a provincial Party secretary who had been dismissed for failing to prevent famine, adding: "If with a death toll of 50 million you didn't lose your jobs, I at least should lose mine...
...The authors make much of food exports as a cause of famine, but merely hint at the imports—at one point charging that the regime sent the Canadian grain to its then ally Albania rather than feed its own people...
...Not so long ago he was hailed as a philosopher-king, the creator of an egalitarian, nonbureaucratic state, and a poet who disarmingly described himself as a "monk under a leaky umbrella...
...Reviewed by Thomas P. Bernstein Professor of political science, Columbia University Getting Mao Zedong right has been a formidable challenge...
...Chiang KaiShek is said to have allowed the Communists to survive their Long March because he wanted to protect his son, then a hostage in the Soviet Union...
...Mao: The Unkown Story, it should be noted, unfairly derides both the Kuomintang and the Americans...
...It's quite all right to do a lot, but make it a principle to have no deaths...
...whether I should lose my head would also be in question...
...Even during the revolution, far from living the austere life of a guerrilla fighter, he occupied the most luxurious dwellings available...
...As a military leader, Mao comes across as a serial bungler who repeatedly led the Communists to defeat...
Vol. 88 • September 2005 • No. 5
