When Mao Zedong assumed power in China during the 1949 revolution, there was not a single popular demonstration in his favour. When he died in 1976, he left a legacy of seventy-eight million deaths in his wake.
Jung Chang, the award-winning author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, and University of London Research Fellow John Halliday presented their groundbreaking new biography Mao: The Untold Story last night at Innis Town Hall. The book contains a significant re-haul of the figure of Chinese dictator and father of the cultural revolution.
Trinity College provost Margaret Macmillan, acclaimed author of Paris 1919, introduced the book.
“It is a wonderful book,” Macmillan said, “one of these biographies that is deeply memorable because it deals with the life of a monster.”
Chang and Halliday explain in the book that the famine of 1958-1961, which resulted in the deaths of over thirty-eight million Chinese people, was the result of Mao’s military policies of exporting China’s crops to Russia in exchange for nuclear technology.
“Mao was a unique man,” Chang explained. “He seemed to be without pity.” Mao: The Untold Story places this character within the context of China’s modernization during the first half of the twentieth century. His ability to reject the values of traditional Chinese society allowed him to rule more ruthlessly than any previous Chinese leader.
“China had seen tyrants before, but they ruled for the most part by traditional Chinese ethics. Mao was free of the restraints imposed by traditional Chinese culture,” Chang said.
Chang and Halliday reject the theory that Mao’s dictatorship was necessary to unite a decentralized China. They explained that this interpretation of the 1949 revolution is widespread in both China and the Western world, even appearing in Time magazine’s profile of Mao as one of the hundred most influential figures of the twentieth century.
“Mao’s ruthless vision united a fractured people,” states the Time profile. In contrast, Chang and Halliday argue that the Nationalist Chang Kai-Shek united China before the Communist revolution and that this unification provided the necessary groundwork for Mao’s seizure of power. The authors suggest that his principal influence was Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Mao: The Untold Story and Wild Swans are currently banned in China, where the constitution is shaped by Mao’s teachings and where his picture even appears on the currency. Even the review of the biography in the Chinese edition of The Economist was blacked out by government censors. Chang, whose father was arrested and tortured for protesting Mao’s policies, fears that young Chinese citizens have a distorted perception of Chinese life under Mao.
“The government of China has created this myth that Mao is a founding father and only allows books to be published in China that sing his praises.”
