Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The eminent political theorist Hans Morgenthau once said that it is in the nature of states to seek power above all. "Politics," he said, "is a struggle for power. Whenever people strive to realize their goal by means of politics they do so by striving for power." Nothing I've read in recent memory encapsulates Morgenthau's idea more completely than Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's massive histo-biography of China's "Great Helmsman," Mao Tse-Tung. The "unknown" story they tell thoroughly shatters the myth of Mao, which no doubt needed to happen. But whether their story has integrity or not is another matter. In spite of staggering research and an immense bibliography, the bitter tone permeating almost every page undermines the authors' credibility. In the first sentence of the opening paragraph, Chang and Halliday claim that Mao Tse-Tung was "...responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader." The remaining 800 pages of this depressing account are devoted to proving this claim, and while the story they tell is deeply disturbing and needs to be taken seriously, I am left with a nagging feeling of doubt. At times Chang and Halliday seem unable to resist embellishing fact, or what is presented as fact about Mao's personal and public life, with sarcasm and innuendo. At the beginning of the Long March, for example, Mao informed his wife, Guiyuan, that no children could be taken along. As a result, his two-year-old son had to be left behind and Mao never saw him again. The authors conclude the anecdote with the comment that "...Mao showed no particular sadness about leaving Little Mao behind, and did not even say goodbye to his son. His sorrow was reserved for himself." Well, perhaps that was so, but perhaps not. How can one truly know how Mao felt in the chaos of the moment? That Jung Chang especially has a right to harbour bitterness toward Mao is not in question; the Cultural Revolution almost literally destroyed her parents. But on a strictly factual basis the story of Mao is devastating enough - it doesn't need to be reinforced with further negativity. I don't think anyone has ever seriously disputed the fact that Mao was a tyrannical despot of horrendous proportion. Given the historical and political realities of the time, he was in good company. With the deaths of the dowager empress and her impotent son in the early 1900s, dynastic rule ended and China, now rudderless, was up for grabs. Centuries of insularity had made the country extremely vulnerable. Across the land, tyrants, despots, warlords, imperialists and power brokers of all shades and nationalities fell over each other to get to the trough. European-owned railways built by coolie labour staked out the territory for future exploitation. To the north, Russia, already stung by the Crimean War, sought to turn China into a blockade against future Japanese invasion. Far to the west, Standard Oil of New Jersey was busy affirming my mother's adage to me as a child that if I dug down deep enough in our backyard, eventually I'd come out the other side and find myself in the heart of Qinghai Province. In spite of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and later the Wuchang Uprising in 1911, it seemed that everyone but the Chinese was poised to claim the spoils. This was China in the early part of the century, and the ensuing struggle for domination of that great country set the stage upon which Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution played their parts. In the end, at unimaginable cost, Mao and the Chinese people won out. But if it hadn't been Mao, it would have been someone else-Chiang Kai-shek and his in-laws, for example, who single-mindedly devoted themselves to converting the chaos into American dollars to finance their own ends. Mao outlasted them all in his lifelong quest for global revolution. But without some sense of the larger historical context that spawned the revolution-a context that Chang and Halliday fail to provide - Mao inevitably comes across as the worst of a bad lot. Maybe he was, and maybe that's what the quest for political power really is all about. But thirty years after Mao's death, it doesn't seem to matter much what was driving him. China today is extremely focused on taking over the world in ways that Mao, from an ideological perspective, would probably find utterly astonishing. In order to gain a balanced historical perspective of China, the "unknown" story ought to be told, and given their respective qualifications both authors were in a good position to tell it. But I think they let personal feelings influence their judgement far too much. What's missing from this book is the kind of balanced, reasoned assessment that recorded history needs if it is to be trusted and relevant. Unfortunately, this work creates a new myth in place of the old. Instead of a saviour, we now have a monster, and it's hard to know what to do with it.