Mao: The Unknown Story.

• Author: Blanchette, Jude
• Position: Book Review

Mao: The Unknown Story Jung Chang and Jon Halliday London: Jonathan Cape, 2005, 814 pp.

Mao Zedong, who imprisoned an entire nation for 30 years and murdered tens of millions of its citizens, still has his defenders. In 2003, Colby College professor Lee Feigon published Mao: A Reinterpretation. Lee argued that Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution actually benefited China by forcing the country to break away from its Stalinist past. Surprisingly, the book received positive reviews, including one by Dow Jones's Far Eastern Economic Review. Can one imagine a respected scholar publishing and receiving praise for a book entitled Hitler: A Reinterpretation? Even a revisionist look at Stalin might raise eyebrows. Mao, however, still has a thin layer of appeal. Or at least he did.

Thankfully, the Mao myth has been receding in the West for 30 years, not least because his machinations have been so thoroughly exposed. While Che Guevara survives as a romantic figure largely because the average college student is unaware of his reign at La Cabana prison (among other things), the majority of scholars have come down hard on Mao. The latest and perhaps the most complete look into his darker side is Mao: The Unknown Story.

In the savagely personal Wild Swans, author Jung Chang traced three generations of her family as they survived the atrocities of Communist China. In Mao, she and her husband, Jon Halliday, dissect the career of the man most responsible for the murder and destruction that marked communist China from 1949 until his death in 1976 and the rise of the reformist Deng Xiaoping. If the legacy of Mao Zedong has retained any romanticism or legitimacy in the 21st century, Chang and Halliday's monumental work should permanently solidify his place on tyranny's Mount Rushmore, alongside Hitler, Stalin and Kim Jong Il.

The tone of the book is evident from its first sentence: "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" (p. 3). The picture of Mao that emerges in the following 800 pages is at once fascinating and terrifying. We see a young man who joined the communist ranks, not because he was a believer, but because it provided a job. Mao would have been happy to move up the ranks of the Nationalists had that route to power looked more promising. Yet, communism, not...