Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact.
Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao.
This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.
Author(s): Gregor Benton, Lin Chun
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 200
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Reviews in non-specialist academic publications
1. Dark tales of Mao the Merciless
2. Jade and plastic
3. Portrait of a monster
1
2
3
Part II: Reviews in The China Journal
4. The portrayal of opportunism, betrayal and manipulation in Mao’s rise to power
Individualism and self-interest
A communist of the Soviet type?
Mao and Putonghua
The start of the Long March
Chiang ‘let the Long Marchers go’
Chiang chose the destination for the Long March
The Dadu River ‘myth’
The Xi’an Incident
The New Fourth Army (N4A) Incident, January 194130
Three communist moles
Shao Lizi
Zhang Zhizhong
Hu Zongnan
Conclusion
5. The new number one counter-revolutionary inside the party: academic biography as mass criticism
The ‘Evil Man’ school of history
Mass criticism history: the historiography of denunciation
Conclusion
6. Pitfalls of charisma
Mao, the Soviet Union and the bomb
Domestic politics and the Great Leap Forward
Concluding remarks
7. ‘I’m So Ronree’
He’s back
Bandit Mao
Troubles with the telling
The Monkey King
No one left to dance with
Part III: Reviews in other specialist academic journals
8. Mao and The Da Vinci Code: conspiracy, narrative and history
The Mao Conspiracy
Martyrs to daytime TV chat shows
References
9. Mao: a super monster?
Manipulation of sources
Simplistic reasoning, faulty logic
Part IV: Chinese reviews
10. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story: a review
11. Mao: The Unknown Story: an intellectual scandal
Hyper-promotion of a book
Scholarship, what scholarship?
The interviewees
How evidence is selected: the example of Gong Chu
Referencing: a clever deception
Appearance and instant satisfaction
Flawed claims and absurd explanations
Further flaws
Mao, China’s Hitler and Stalin
Fairy tale and how scholarship changes
Does it matter?
It does not matter as long as the politics are right
Hitler: a favourite European comparison
Personality of Mao: the known story
The logic of denial of the known story
Truth or fabrications
Why was plastic so appreciated?
Revolution: from farewell to burial
References
12. A critique of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story
Introduction
1 The purge in the Ruijin base
2 Chiang let the Reds go (I)
3 Chiang let the Reds go (II)
4 The ‘fake’ battle at the Luding Bridge
5 Mao was carried throughout the Long March
6 Mao did not fight the Japanese
7 The New Fourth Army trap
8 Mao sacrificed his brother Tse-min
9 The Rectification Campaign
10 Selling opium
11 Three millions deaths in 1950–51
12 Twenty-seven million deaths in prisons and labour camps
13 The Superpower Programme
14 Thirty-eight million deaths in 1958–61
15 Three million deaths in 1966–76
16 Mao’s aim in the Cultural Revolution
17 Mao compared with Hitler
Appendix A: Jung Chang, the well-known story
Appendix B: Miscarriage of the Chinese version of
Part V: Other reviews
13. Mao lives
14. From Wild Swans to Mao: The Unknown Story
1 Negative thesis
Selective sources
Interpreting sources
2 Lack of scholarly judgement
3 Lack of historical perspective
a) Soviet conspiracy
b) 1927
c) The soviet period
d) The Long March
e) The Sino-Japanese War
f) Korean War
g) Cambodia
Mao Zedong 1893–1976, a bibliography
Reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story
Notes
Index
