Drishtikone
(Material courtesy Wikipedia.com)
* Publisher: Random House
o Publication date: June 02, 2005
o ISBN: 0224071262
* Publisher: Knopf
o Publication date: October 18, 2005
o ISBN: 0679422714
Mao: The Unknown Story is an 832-page book written by the (married) historians Jung Chang and Jon Halliday after ten years of research. It was published in 2005 and paints Mao Zedong, Mao Tse-Tung in Wade-Giles, the former paramount leader of China and Chairman of the Communist Party of China, as being responsible for mass murder on a scale similar to, or greater than, that committed under the rule of Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin.
The ten years of research for the book includes interviewing literally hundreds of people who were close to Mao Zedong at some point in his life and revealing the contents of newly released secret archives. Additional knowledge comes from Chang’s personal experience of living through the madness of the Cultural Revolution in China.
According to the book “Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader” and claimed that he was willing for half of China to die to achieve military-nuclear superpowerdom.
Chang and Halliday argue that despite being born into a peasant family, Mao had little concern for the welfare of the Chinese peasantry. They hold Mao responsible for the famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward and claim that he exacerbated the famine by allowing the export of grain to continue even when it became clear that China did not have sufficient grain to feed its population. They also claim that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, including some of his personal friends, and argue that he was a more tyrannical leader than had previously been thought.
Some historians have criticised their portrait of Mao. British author Philip Short, whose own biography of Mao was published in 1999, has argued that Chang and Halliday have reduced Mao from a complex historical character to a one-dimensional “cardboard cutout of Satan” and that Chang is guilty of “writing history to fit her views”.
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Extract of the Book
Listen to the Interview on BBC with the Authors
MAO Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population,was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentiethcentury leader. He was born into a peasant family in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China. The date was 26 December 1893. His ancestors had lived in the valley for five hundred years.
This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic age. Buddhist temples dating from the Tang dynasty (AD 618-906), when Buddhism first came here, were still in use. Forests where nearly 300 species of trees grew, including maples, camphor, metasequoia and the rare ginkgo, covered the area and sheltered the tigers, leopards and boar that still roamed the hills. (The last tiger was killed in 1957.) These hills, with neither roads nor navigable rivers, detached the village from the world at large. Even as late as the early twentieth century an event as momentous as the death of the emperor in 1908 did not percolate this far, and Mao found out only two years afterwards when he left Shaoshan.
The valley of Shaoshan measures about 5 by 3.5 km. The 600-odd families who lived there grew rice, tea and bamboo, harnessing buffalo to plough the rice paddies. Daily life revolved round these age-old activities. Mao’s father, Yi-chang, was born in 1870. At the age of ten he was engaged to a girl of thirteen from a village about ten kilometres away, beyond a pass called Tiger Resting Pass, where tigers used to sun themselves. This short distance was long enough in those years for the two villages to speak dialects that were almost mutually unintelligible. Being merely a girl, Mao’s mother did not receive a name; as the seventh girl born in the Wen clan, she was just Seventh Sister Wen. In accordance with centuries of custom, her feet had been crushed and bound to produce the so-called ‘three-inch golden lilies’ that epitomised beauty at the time.
Her engagement to Mao’s father followed time-honoured customs. It was arranged by their parents and was based on a practical consideration: the tomb of one of her grandfathers was in Shaoshan, and it had to be tended regularly with elaborate rituals, so having a relative there would prove useful. Seventh Sister Wen moved in with the Maos upon betrothal, and was married at the age of eighteen, in 1885, when Yi-chang was fifteen.
Shortly after the wedding, Yi-chang went off to be a soldier to earn money to pay off family debts, which he was able to do after several years. Chinese peasants were not serfs but free farmers, and joining the army for purely financial reasons was an established practice. Luckily he was not involved in any wars; instead he caught a glimpse of the world and picked up some business ideas. Unlike most of the villagers,Yi-chang could read and write, well enough to keep accounts. After his return, he raised pigs, and processed grain into top-quality rice to sell at a nearby market town. He bought back the land his father had pawned, then bought more land, and became one of the richest men in the village.
Though relatively well off,Yi-chang remained extremely hard-working and thrifty all his life. The family house consisted of half a dozen rooms, which occupied one wing of a large thatched property. Eventually Yichang replaced the thatch with tiles, a major improvement, but left the mud floor and mud walls. The windows had no glass – still a rare luxury – and were just square openings with wooden bars, blocked off at night by wooden boards (the temperature hardly ever fell below freezing). The furniture was simple: wooden beds, bare wooden tables and benches. It was in one of these rather spartan rooms, under a pale blue homespun cotton quilt, inside a blue mosquito net, that Mao was born.
Mao was the third son, but the first to survive beyond infancy. His Buddhist mother became even more devout to encourage Buddha to protect him. Mao was given the two-part name Tse-tung. Tse, which means ‘to shine on’, was the name given to all his generation, as preordained when the clan chronicle was first written in the eighteenth century; tung means ‘the East’. So his full given name meant ‘to shine on the East’. When two more boys were born, in 1896 and 1905, they were given the names Tse-min (min means ‘the people’) and Tse-tan (tan possibly referred to the local region, Xiangtan).
These names reflected the inveterate aspiration of Chinese peasants for their sons to do well – and the expectation that they could. High positions were open to all through education, which for centuries meant studying Confucian classics. Excellence would enable young men of any background to pass imperial examinations and become mandarins – all the way up to becoming prime minister. Officialdom was the definition of achievement, and the names given to Mao and his brothers expressed the hopes placed on them.
But a grand name was also onerous and potentially tempted fate, so most children were given a pet name that was either lowly or tough, or both. Mao’s was ‘the Boy of Stone’ – Shi san ya-zi. For this second ‘baptism’ his mother took him to a rock about eight feet high, which was reputed to be enchanted, as there was a spring underneath. After Mao performed obeisance and kowtows, he was considered adopted by the rock. Mao was very fond of this name, and continued to use it as an adult. In 1959, when he returned to Shaoshan and met the villagers for the first – and only – time as supreme leader of China, he began the dinner for them with a quip:’So everyone is here, except my Stone Mother. Shall we wait for her?’
Mao loved his real mother, with an intensity he showed towards no one else. She was a gentle and tolerant person, who, as he remembered, never raised her voice to him. From her came his full face, sensual lips, and a calm self-possession in the eyes. Mao would talk about his mother with emotion all his life. It was in her footsteps that he became a Buddhist as a child. Years later he told his staff: ‘I worshipped my mother . . . Wherever my mother went, I would follow . . . going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper money, doing obeisance to Buddha . . . Because my mother believed in Buddha, so did I.’ But he gave up Buddhism in his mid-teens.
Mao had a carefree childhood. Until he was eight he lived with his mother’s family, the Wens, in their village, as his mother preferred to live with her own family. There his maternal grandmother doted on him. His two uncles and their wives treated him like their own son, and one of them became his Adopted Father, the Chinese equivalent to godfather. Mao did a little light farm work, gathering fodder for pigs and taking the buffaloes out for a stroll in the tea-oil camellia groves by a pond shaded by banana leaves. In later years he would reminisce with fondness about this idyllic time. He started learning to read, while his aunts spun and sewed under an oil lamp.
Mao only came back to live in Shaoshan in spring 1902, at the age of eight, to receive an education, which took the form of study in a tutor’s home. Confucian classics, which made up most of the curriculum, were beyond the understanding of children and had to be learnt by heart. Mao was blessed with an exceptional memory, and did well. His fellow pupils remembered a diligent boy who managed not only to recite but also to write by rote these difficult texts. He also gained a foundation in Chinese language and history, and began to learn to write good prose, calligraphy and poetry, as writing poems was an essential part of Confucian education. Reading became a passion. Peasants generally turned in at sunset, to save on oil for lamps, but Mao would read deep into the night, with an oil lamp standing on a bench outside his mosquito net. Years later, when he was supreme ruler of China, half of his huge bed would be piled a foot high with Chinese classics, and he littered his speeches and writings with historical references. But his poems lost flair.
Mao clashed frequently with his tutors. He ran away from his first school at the age of ten, claiming that the teacher was a martinet. He was expelled from, or was ‘asked to leave’, at least three schools for being headstrong and disobedient. His mother indulged him but his father was not pleased, and Mao’s hopping from tutor to tutor was just one source of tension between father and son. Yi-chang paid for Mao’s education, hoping that his son could at least help keep the family accounts, but Mao disliked the task. All his life, he was vague about figures, and hopeless at economics. Nor did he take kindly to hard physical labour. He shunned it as soon as his peasant days were over.
Yi-chang could not stand Mao being idle. Having spent every minute of his waking hours working, he expected his son to do the same, and would strike him when he did not comply. Mao hated his father. In 1968, when he was taking revenge on his political foes on a vast scale, he told their tormentors that he would have liked his father to be treated just as brutally: ‘My father was bad. If he were alive today, he should be “jet-planed”.’ This was an agonising position where the subject’s arms were wrenched behind his back and his head forced down.
Mao was not a mere victim of his father. He fought back, and was often the victor. He would tell his father that the father, being older, should do more manual labour than he, the younger – which was an unthinkably insolent argument by Chinese standards.One day, according to Mao, father and son had a row in front of guests.’My father scolded me before them, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I called him names and left the house . . . My father . . . pursued me, cursing as well as commanding me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer . . . My father backed down.’ Once, as Mao was retelling the story, he laughed and added an observation:’Old men like him didn’t want to lose their sons. This is their weakness. I attacked at their weak point, and I won!’
Money was the only weapon Mao’s father possessed. After Mao was expelled by tutor no. 4, in 1907, his father stopped paying for his son’s tuition fees and the thirteen-year-old boy had to become a full-time peasant. But he soon found a way to get himself out of farm work and back into the world of books. Yi-chang was keen for his son to get married, so that he would be tied down and behave responsibly. His niece was at just the right age for a wife, four years older than Mao, who agreed to his father’s plan and resumed schooling after the marriage.
The marriage took place in 1908, when Mao was fourteen and his bride eighteen. Her family name was Luo. She herself had no proper name, and was just called ‘Woman Luo’. The only time Mao is known to have mentioned her was to the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, when Mao was strikingly dismissive, exaggerating the difference in their ages: ‘When I was 14, my parents married me to a girl of 20. But I never lived with her . . . I do not consider her my wife . . . and have given little thought to her.’ He gave no hint that she was not still alive; in fact, Woman Luo had died in 1910, just over a year into their marriage.
Mao’s early marriage turned him into a fierce opponent of arranged marriages. Nine years later he wrote a seething article against the practice: ‘In families in the West, parents acknowledge the free will of their children. But in China, orders from the parents are not at all compatible with the will of the children . . . This is a kind of “indirect rape”. Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children . . .’
As soon as his wife died, the sixteen-year-old widower demanded to leave Shaoshan. His father wanted to apprentice him to a rice store in the county town, but Mao had set his eye on a modern school about 25 kilometres away. He had learned that the imperial examinations had been abolished. Instead there were modern schools now, teaching subjects like science,world history and geography, and foreign languages. It was these schools that would open the door out of a peasant’s life for many like him.
In the later nineteenth century, China had embarked on a dramatic social transformation. The Manchu dynasty that had ruled since 1644 was moving from the ancient to the modern. The shift was prompted by a series of abysmal defeats at the hands of European powers and Japan, beginning with the loss to Britain in the Opium War of 1839-42, as the powers came knocking on China’s closed door. From the Manchu court to intellectuals, nearly everyone agreed that the country must change if it wanted to survive. A host of fundamental reforms was introduced, one of which was to install an entirely new educational system. Railways began to be built. Modern industries and commerce were given top priority. Political organisations were permitted. Newspapers were published for the first time. Students were sent abroad to study science, mandarins dispatched to learn democracy and parliamentary systems. In 1908, the court announced a programme to become a constitutional monarchy in nine years’ time.
Mao’s province, Hunan, which had some 30 million inhabitants, became one of the most liberal and exciting places in China. Though landlocked, it was linked by navigable rivers to the coast, and in 1904 its capital, Changsha, became an ‘open’ trading port. Large numbers of foreign traders and missionaries arrived, bringing Western ways and institutions. By the time Mao heard about modern schools, there were over a hundred of them, more than in any other part of China, and including many for women.
One was located near Mao: Eastern Hill, in the county of the Wens, his mother’s family. The fees and accommodation were quite high, but Mao got the Wens and other relatives to lobby his father, who stumped up the cost for five months. The wife of one of his Wen cousins replaced Mao’s old blue homespun mosquito net with a white machinemade muslin one in keeping with the school’s modernity.
The school was an eye-opener for Mao. Lessons included physical training, music and English, and among the reading materials were potted biographies of Napoleon,Wellington, Peter the Great, Rousseau and Lincoln. Mao heard about America and Europe for the first time, and laid eyes on a man who had been abroad – a teacher who had studied in Japan, who was given the nickname ‘the False Foreign Devil’ by his pupils. Decades later Mao could still remember a Japanese song he taught them, celebrating Japan’s stunning military victory over Russia in 1905.
Mao was only in Eastern Hill for a few months, but this was enough for him to find a new opening. In the provincial capital, Changsha, there was a school specially set up for young people from the Wens’ county, and Mao persuaded a teacher to enrol him, even though he was strictly speaking not from the county. In spring 1911 he arrived at Changsha, feeling, in his own words,’exceedingly excited’. At seventeen, he said goodbye for ever to the life of a peasant.
Mao claimed later that when he was a boy in Shaoshan he had been stirred by concern for poor peasants. There is no evidence for this. He said he had been influenced while still in Shaoshan by a certain P’ang the Millstone Maker, who had been arrested and beheaded after leading a local peasant revolt, but an exhaustive search by Party historians for this hero has failed to turn up any trace of him.
There is no sign that Mao derived from his peasant roots any social concerns, much less that he was motivated by a sense of injustice. In a contemporary document, the diary of Mao’s teacher, Professor Yang Chang-chi, on 5 April 1915 the professor wrote: ‘My student Mao Tse-tung said that . . . his clan . . . are mostly peasants, and it is easy for them to get rich’ (our italics). Mao evinced no particular sympathy for peasants.
Up to the end of 1925, when he was in his early thirties, and five years after he had become a Communist, Mao made only a few references to peasants in all his known writings and conversations. They did crop up in a letter of August 1917, but far from expressing sympathy, Mao said he was ‘bowled over’ by the way a commander called Tseng Kuo-fan had ‘finished off ‘ the biggest peasant uprising in Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64. Two years later, in July 1919, Mao wrote an essay about people from different walks of life – so peasants were inevitably mentioned – but his list of questions was very general, and his tone unmistakably neutral. There was a remarkable absence of emotion when he mentioned peasants, compared with the passion he voiced about students, whose life he described as ‘a sea of bitterness’. In a comprehensive list for research he drew up in September that year, containing no fewer than 71 items, only one heading (the tenth) was about labour; the single one out of its 15 sub-heads that mentioned peasants did so only as ‘the question of labouring farmers intervening in politics’. From late 1920, when he entered the Communist orbit, Mao began to use expressions like ‘workers and peasants’ and ‘proletariat’. But they remained mere phrases, part of an obligatory vocabulary.
Decades later, Mao talked about how, as a young man in Shaoshan, he cared about people starving. The record shows no such concern. In 1921 Mao was in Changsha during a famine. A friend of his wrote in his diary: ‘There are many beggars – must be over ??? a day . . . Most . . . look like skeletons wrapped in yellow skin, as if they could be blown over by a whiff of wind.’ ‘I heard that so many people who had come here . . . to escape famine in their own regions had died – that those who had been giving away planks of wood [to make coffins] . . . can no longer afford to do so.’ There is no mention of this event in Mao’s writings of the time, and no sign that he gave any thought to this issue at all.
Mao’s peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants.
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Controversy on the Book
While receiving worldwide praise, the book is not without controversy, and several points have been disputed.
* The Crossing of Luding Bridge
Chang argues that there was no battle at Luding Bridge and that the story was simply Communist propaganda. Jung Chang is currently amongst a minority of sources that deny the incident took place. She named a witness to the event, Li Xiu-zhen, who told her that she saw no fighting and that the bridge was not on fire. In addition, she said that despite claims by the Communists that the fighting was fierce, all of the vanguard survived the battle. Chang also cited Nationalist (Kuomintang) battleplans and communiques that indicated the force guarding the bridge had been withdrawn before the Communists arrived. But diaries of several veterans of the Long March, as well as non-Chinese sources such as Harrison E. Salisbury’s The Long March: The Untold Story, Dick Wilson’s The Long March 1935: The Epic of Chinese Communism’s Survival and Charlotte Salisbury’s Long March Diary, do mention a battle at Luding Bridge. However, at present no one has directly challenged Chang’s evidence.
* The role of the Red Army in the Sino-Japanese War
Chang claims that the KMT did the majority of the fighting, whilst the Red Army did not attempt to engage the Japanese. American generals such as Joseph Stilwell did mention the relative combat efficiency and good leadership of the Red Army compared to the KMT army, though Stilwell had a poor relationship with Chiang Kai-shek over many issues concerning the Chinese war effort – Stilwell was eventually replaced in 1944. Also people like Willy Lam and Hans van de Ven have argued, as well as Chang, that the KMT contributed far more to the Chinese war effort than the Communists and that Red forces spent at least as much time fighting the KMT as they did the Japanese.
* Tactics of Chinese forces in the Korean War
Chang states that China pushed back American forces by ‘swamping’ them with hordes of ‘human waves’, sourced by the actor Michael Caine. However, declassified American sources indicate that this belief was partly wartime propaganda and that Chinese forces were never deployed in numbers as large as was previously believed.
* Number of deaths under Mao
Chang claims that 70 million people died while Mao was in power, many of which occurred during the ‘Great Leap Forward’. It has been argued that she failed to take important factors into consideration, such as reports of poor weather that contributed to the famine – it has also been argued that average Chinese death rates dropped during Mao’s rule. Estimates of the numbers of deaths during this period vary, people such as Wim F Werthheim suggesting inaccurate data to be the main cause. Analysts and historians, both Chinese and non-Chinese, mostly put the death toll at around 30 million people during the Great Leap Forward, with the majority of the deaths due to starvation. Dr Ping-ti Ho stated his belief that he believed “missing” Chinese from the 1950s census records never existed in the first place.
* The Sino-Indian War and the McMahon Line
Chang says that Mao deliberately violated a treaty concerning the Sino-Indian border, even though it had been rejected by all Chinese factions, including the KMT.
British historian Philip Short stated his belief that Chang was being one-sided in her views that Mao was alone to blame for China’s ills:
“I fear this is a case of writing history to fit their own views; doing what the Chinese call cutting the feet to fit the shoes. Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there’s no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan… He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius… It was not just one man who caused all this pain.”
Jung Chang
Life in China
1.1 Early life
Chang was born on the March 25, 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China. Her parents were both Communist Party officials, and her father was greatly interested in literature. She quickly developed a love of reading and writing, creating her own poetry as a child.
As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father become successful at a regional level. His formal ranking was as a “level 10 official”, meaning that he was one of 20,000 or so most important cadres in the country. Chang grew up with servants including a wet-nurse, a nanny, a maid, a gardener and a chauffeur, provided by the Chinese Communist Party. Her home was in a guarded walled compound, and she was educated at a special school reserved for officials’ children.
1.2 The Cultural Revolution
Like many of her peers, Chang chose to become a Red Guard at the age of 14, during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. In Wild Swans she said that she was “keen to do so”, stating, “I was thrilled by my red armband”1. But Chang also described how she refused to participate in the attacks on her teachers and other Chinese, and she left after a short period as she found the Guards too violent.
The failures of the Great Leap Forward had led her parents to oppose Mao Zedong’s policies, though not him by name. But the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution was not something they could avoid. They were targetted as most high-ranking officials were, and when Chang’s father criticised Mao by name, Chang writes in Wild Swans that this exposed them to retaliation from Mao Zedong’s supporters. Both were publicly humiliated — ink was poured over their heads, they were forced to wear placards round their necks, kneel in gravel and to stand outside in the rain — followed by imprisonment, her father’s treatment leading to lasting physical and mental illness. Their careers were destroyed, and her family was forced to leave their home.
Before her parents’ denunciation and imprisonment, Chang had unquestionably supported Mao like most Chinese. But by the time of his death, her respect for him had been destroyed. She wrote that when she heard he had died, she had to bury her head in the shoulder of another student to pretend she was grieving.
The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives2.
1.3 Studying English
Chang was unable to go to university once the Cultural Revolution had started due to the disruption of the university system by the Red Guards. Instead she spent several years as a barefoot doctor (a part-time peasant doctor), a steelworker and an electrician, though she received no formal training because of Mao’s disdain for academic education past basic level.
The universities were eventually re-opened and she gained a place at Sichuan University to study English, later becoming an assistant lecturer there. After Mao’s death, she passed an exam which allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was politically rehabilitated.
2 Life in Britain
2.1 Academic background
Chang left China in 1978, staying first in Soho, London. She later moved to Yorkshire, studying linguistics at the University of York, and living in Derwent College, in the block nearest to Heslington Hall. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from York , becoming the first person from the People’s Republic of China to be awarded a Ph.D. from a British university.
She has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Buckingham, the University of York, the University of Warwick, and the Open University. She lectured for some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before retiring in the 1990s to concentrate on her writing.
2.2 New experiences
In 2003, Jung Chang wrote a new foreword to Wild Swans, describing her early life in Britain – as well as why she wrote the book in the first place. After living in China during the 1960s and 1970s, Britain was exciting to her. She found even colourful window-boxes worth writing home about – Hyde Park and the Kew Gardens were inspiring. After the initial culture-shock, she soon grew to love Britain with the vast variety of cultures, literature and arts that were available to her. She took every opportunity to watch Shakespeare’s plays in both London and York. However she still has a special place for China in her heart, saying in an interview with HarperCollins, “I feel perhaps my heart is still in China”. [2]
Chang lives in West London with her husband, the British historian Jon Halliday, who specializes in Soviet history. She regularly visits mainland China to see her family and friends there, with permission from the Chinese authorities, despite carrying out research on her biography of Mao there.
2.3 Celebrity
The publication of Jung Chang’s first book Wild Swans soon made her a celebrity. At the time of printing little was known in the wider world about 20th century China, especially its Communist years. Thus the personal description of the life of three generations of Chinese women helped fill this void in accessible international literature.
Chang became a popular figure for talks about Communist China, and she travelled all over Britain, Europe, America and the rest of the world. She returned to the University of York on June 14, 2005 to address the university’s debating union. Hundreds of students turned out to meet her, including dozens of Chinese exchange students. That same year the BBC invited her onto the panel of Question Time for a first-ever broadcast from Shanghai, but she was unable to attend when she broke her leg at the last minute.
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