Max Hastings reviewed the book "Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang
and Jon Halliday for the Telegraph in the U.K. Read his review in
http://arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=3D/arts/2005/06/05/bocha105=
..xml&sSheet=3D/arts/2005/06/05/botop.html
An outline of the article:
* Of all the follies of the 20th century's "useful idiots",
popular enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung was among the most
foolish.
* Mao is thought to have been responsible for some 70
million deaths in purges and authorised famines. Since
the victims were anonymous Chinese without friends in the
West, it seemed churlish for outsiders to make much of the
matter, except when Mao ventured outside his own borders
and began to massacre Tibetans, as he did in 1960.
* The authors suggest that Mao's early enthusiasm for the
nascent Chinese communist party reflected personal ambition
rather than ideological commitment or a concern for the
proletariat.
* Chang and Halliday write: "Mao did not believe in anything
unless he could benefit from it personally."
* Mao's notorious observation that "power comes out of the
barrel of the gun" dates from 1927, a period when his
outlaw band was pursuing extortion and terror throughout
its region.
* Mao's rise was driven less by sup****t from Chinese fellow
communists than by the shrewd calculation that Stalin's
backing would prove decisive.
* During the Red Army's Long March to Yenan, Mao himself was
carried on a litter for much of a journey that killed all
but 10,000 of the 80,000 marchers who set out.
* Chou En-lai, whom Kissinger and many Westerners later
f=EAted as the "civilised face" of Maoism, was in reality
another ruthless op****tunist, steeped in blood.
* In the Second World War, the authors argue, Westerners,
and especially General George Marshall, were deceived by
Communist claims that they were fighting the Japanese more
effectively than the Nationalists.
* Chang and Halliday suggest that Mao actively sought a
military showdown with the US in Korea in 1950. By 1952
the Russians and North Koreans were desperate to end the
war, but even after losing 400,000 Chinese dead Mao
remained eager to provoke the Americans to the limit,
because he believed that such a confrontation would induce
Moscow to give him the secrets of the atomic bomb.
* China military spending absorbed 61 per cent of the
national budget, including over =A32 billion to the nuclear
weapons programme.
* Chang and Halliday's account of the fall of Marshal Peng,
Liu Shao-chi, Lin Biao and finally Chou En-lai makes for
devastating reading.
* If this biography has a weakness, it is that it attributes
Mao's rise and long rule entirely to repression, and does
not explain why so many of his own people remained for so
long committed to his insane vision.
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