![[Everything Shii Knows]](../mediawiki/skins/common/images/wiki.png)
- Mao: The Unknown Story
- Jung Chang
This review is part of the Every Book Shii Reads project.
Contents |
Review
Mao: The Unknown Story is a revisionist biography of Mao Tse-tung by Jung Chang. Chang has a decidedly transparent anti-Mao bias. The book opens with the 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." This is true, and perhaps the most important thing you could say about Mao, but by opening the book with this statement the author sets an agenda, similar to opening a book about Hitler by reminding us of the Holocaust. Mao is a highly conflicted character, still controversial in China today, but the purpose of this revisionist biography is not to analyze everything that made him the man who he was, but rather to evaluate his personality based on Chang's source documents and contrast those facts to the official Red Chinese story. To summarize, this book is somewhat an essence of everything anti-Mao Chang could dig up.
However, it is a highly detailed and well-written work and, if read with a critical eye, will learn you many interesting details about Chairman Mao's life.
Chapter summaries and things to look out for
Chapter 1
Mao's upbringing as a peasant; his tendency to get expelled from grammar schools; his rather un-Confucian opinion of his father (he said that his father should do more work since he was older); his disapproval of arranged marriage.
Chang disputes Mao's claim that he had great sympathy for the plight of the peasant as mere propaganda, and cites various of Mao's friends, teachers, and acquaintances who mention in their contemporary diaries only Mao's distaste for peasant life and annoyance with peasant attempts at getting into politics.
Chapter 2
Mao's college days, including a sociopathic commentary he wrote on a German philosopher named Friedrich Paulsen. In this commentary (or marginal notes), he writes things like, "People like me are not building achievements to leave for future generations," and "People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people." The purpose of this commentary is debatable. Delia Davin argues that he was "trying to arrive at a philosophical understanding of duty." It seems to me Objectivist. We all go through phases.
Chang paints an unflattering picture of Mao's abilities in learning language and distaste for manual labor. The consistent theme is Mao's attempts to use rhetoric and philosophy to justify avoiding responsibility whenever possible. I would argue that if Mao was really obsessed with defending and securing his own laziness, he probably wouldn't have decided to rule China with an iron fist for a quarter century.
Chapter 3
Mao's second marriage; the 1st Chinese Communist Congress, a sparsely attended affair of hot air and Russians; how Mao converted people to Communism (he talked to them). Mao allegedly takes pleasure in giving orders without having such wordy meetings as the Congress.
Mao quote: "I think labourers in China do not really suffer poor physical conditions. Only scholars suffer."
Moscow orders the Chinese Communists to secretly join the Kuomintang, i.e., the Nationalist Party, which was receiving money from Moscow. Moscow wanted the CCP to keep an eye on the Nationalists. Mao eagerly agrees, possibly because Moscow is paying his wages. Mao was kicked out of the CCP by 1925, allegedly for confusing the ideologies of the KMT and CCP, or trying to fuse them. So, he goes home for a while.
Chapter 4
Mao lays low while the Chinese government cracks down on Communists. Then the KMT puts him on a list of suspected Communists in order to cleanse their own ranks. Finally he has to decide between the CCP and the Republicans. Chang says Mao chooses the CCP because the KMT is becoming a moderate party, and he takes such pleasure in watching gore and violence.
Chapter 5
Moscow tells the CCP to find themselves an army. Mao intercepts a group of starving, mutinied soldiers and becomes their leader. He announces that he is turning them into bandits for the glorious cause of Communism, and proceeds to send them out on devastating countryside raids and kill people and so forth. He forms secret branches of the CCP which answer only to him. Mao gains favor with Stalin due to his taste for brutality.
Chapter 6
In an un-Communist act of pure political power grabbing, Mao takes the reins from Zhu, commander of the general army, and runs his new army around the countryside, taking orders from the CCP headquarters in Shanghai. Eventually Mao attempts to kick Zhu out entirely, but the CCP is none too happy about this and the army votes to dismiss him from the top post and reinstate Zhu. Mao goes directly to Jiaoyang and manages to stall a Communist congress long enough that they are forced to evacuate because the KMT forces are coming. Mao then appoints his henchmen to the key posts they were going to vote on in absentia. Finally, Mao befriends Lin Biao and gets Lin's unit to quietly mutiny with Mao against Zhu's command, leaving Zhu 6,000 men short in a 12,000-man army.
Normally this would create civil war. But Mao continues to curry favor with the Soviets, and they begin to promote him as the dictator-oligarch of the CCP (vozhd, the word used for Stalin). Moscow likes Mao because other Chinese Communists show Trotskyist leanings. As Stalinists in the CCP write letters recommending Mao head the Army, Shanghai gets increasingly nervous about Mao's division of the army and prod Zhu first to write a letter requesting him to come back, and finally to send troops to escort him back. Having conquered Zhu, Mao keeps him as a figurehead commander of the "Zhu-Mao Army" in a somewhat condescending way.
Chapter 7
Zhu-Mao army now comprises 1/4 of total Communist army. The secret letters of Mao's second wife translated, probably for the first time.
Chapter 8
The awful, stomach-churning details of Mao's purge of the Communist Army. After gaining control of most of the army through his usual methods of ignoring orders and rearranging meetings to his benefits, Mao initiates an enormous system of torture to rid the party of "AB," a long-dead Anti-Bolshevik movement which was recreated as an imaginary demon infiltrating all levels of the Party. Anyone who does not torture his fellow soldiers and comrades is accused of being "AB"; some of the disgusting methods described have not been used anywhere before or since. Those tortured often shout names at random, and those named are also tortured and killed, sometimes by tearing their heart from their chest. Torture victims go to Shanghai to plead their case before the CCP, but the CCP is taking orders from Stalin now, and Stalin approves wholeheartedly of purges. The testimony of the torture victims is forwarded by the CCP to Mao so he will know who tattled on him and guarantee far more pain and death.
The Nationalists try to ally with the Communists to stop the Japanese, who are doing their own share of torture in Nanjing, but the Communists refuse as their chief loyalty is to the Soviet Union. The CCP later rewrites this story to interchange their names with the KMT and make them look more patriotic. History is unreliable; "ye shall know them by their acts."
In 1931, the Soviet bloc consisted of Russia and Mongolia. On November 7, Communist Chinese join the bloc by founding an unrecognized state, the Chinese Soviet Republic, centered around Jiangxi. One of the AB torturers is the first to call Mao "Chairman." Mao tells him, "You learn really fast."
Chapter 9
Mao is Prime Minister and President of the nascent PRC, but not yet dictator. He is forced to work side by side with Soviet plants to ensure loyalty to the USSR and balance out his lust for power. These poor saps are doomed.
Peasants give up their jewelry and food to support the Army, surrendering the luxuries of classical China. They receive in return "Army bonds" which are then extorted from them, plunging them into the destitution they enjoy even today. Children are taken out of secondary school and instead are formed into bands who roam the countryside harassing adults into joining the Army. Mao continues to run routine purges of the populace for "class enemies," scaring people into joining the Army to prove their allegiance. By an official PRC count in 1983, nearly 240,000 died during these early purges. But this is a mere shadow of what is to come.
Chapter 10
Mao throws himself a Roman-style triumph in Zhangzhou.
I stopped reading here because of a weak stomach. I am going to return this book to the library; maybe I'll pick it up again someday.
Chapter 40
Mao tells his underlings to make China twice as productive as it was last year, utterly ruining once of the most fertile and prosperous countries, and starving millions, in the amazing span of four terrible years. Mao has no idea how production actually works. To assist irrigation, he starts thousands of building projects, most of which kill people from overwork and starve the rest. He scares local authorities (under the threat of executing them as anti-Party insurgents) into overreporting their yields so he can take more food from the already impoverished peasants. He orders the entire population of China to kill all the sparrows in the country, making it open season for pests which proceed to eat away the crops. He melts down all the building and farming tools, making them into worthless pig iron in backyard furnaces. But this is only the beginning! He destroys the Chinese villages and makes them over into state-run "communes". To do this he has the peasants destroy all their woks and stoves (and sometimes even their homes) and hands the cooking of food over to the state, making withholding of food a weapon which can be used at any level, and eliminating any backup plan the peasants might have.
Nearly 40 million died due to the "Great Leap Forward".
Mao laughed at the destruction of Chinese civilization and weeping of remaining intellectuals as he ordered the filling in of ancient lakes and decimating of historic monuments.
Chapter 41
Mao's defense secretary Peng goes to Eastern Europe to cry that the figures of surplus food in China were all made up and plead with them not to demand so much food from China. Many local CCP branches are also letting the peasants keep some of their food so they don't starve to death so much. Mao does not tolerate this insubordination, and starts yet another purge of "anti-Party" elements. The fear of being labeled a traitor is renewed and Party members jump to follow Mao's orders.
Mao's ex-wife Guiyan had left him 22 years ago, but had mental breakdowns in Russia. She returned to China, hopelessly lonely, banned from Beijing. In late 1959 Mao decides he wants to see her, even knowing she "could well collapse mentally if she got too excited" (his words), out of some sadistic pleasure. He surprises her with an unexpected visit and she collapses. He then exiles her to Nanchang and she goes insane, unable to care for herself, sometimes dragging herself out to the capital, "drooling at the mouth" and demanding to see Mao again.
Chapter 42
Gullible leftist-liberals visit China during the Great Leap Forward and believe the PRC's claim that there is no starvation at all.
Chapter 48
Mao tells schoolmistress Song Binbin ["Educated and Gentle"] to "Be Violent." She changes her name to Song Yaowu ["Be Violent"] and her school becomes the "Red Violent School," echoing the transformation of hundreds of schools into torture chambers. Children were told to torture and kill anti-party elements. This was known as the Great Purge. People were brainwashed, made to wear a standard uniform. Leisure was replaced with Communist meetings and recital of Communist propaganda. "For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sand Mao's quotations set to raucous music, and danced militantly waving the Little Red Book."
"Confucius is humanism ... that is to say, People-centered-ism." Mao destroys the home of Confucius and thousands of other cultural relics from China's 3,000-year history. Intellectuals who supported the study of history are robbed, tortured, and exiled.
Chapter 54
Nixon visits China... sigh... I lost this entire summary. In a word, Kissinger defers to Mao, Mao insults Nixon heavily and publicly, and the USA is the PRC's bitch throughout the visit.
Chapter 58
Bedridden, Mao groggily asks for news about the Japanese prime minister; even with his body dying, his mind is still focused on staying up-to-date and on top of all world politics. After reading the newspaper report, he dies.
Other reviews of this book
This book has a surplus of reviews. Here are some.