AFTERWORD

Mao – Western Judgements

For the first decade after Mao's death, the China which he had bequeathed to his successors and hence, by implication, his own record, were on the whole viewed favourably in the West. Under Deng Xiaoping, the country began tentatively to embrace a liberal economic system and, although political control remained tight – in 1979, the ‘Democracy Wall’ movement was crushed and Wei Jingsheng and other dissidents were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment – there was a broad, if misplaced, Western consensus that in the foreseeable future China would become a more democratic state.

Misplaced but not entirely wrong. For the last forty years, the Chinese people have had more freedom and more possibilities for fulfilment than at any time in the country's history. After Deng Xiaoping opened the country's doors to foreign tourism, Westerners visited China in their millions and for the most part were entranced by what they saw. But, as so often, Western governments and public opinion placed the bar too high. The idea that China, which had never, in its 5,000 years of recorded history, experienced anything remotely resembling a democratic system, would suddenly, in the space of a few decades, leap through changes which in Europe had taken many centuries to achieve, required a suspension of disbelief, even in the age of globalisation and the internet. The ancient dictum, ‘Win and become a high official, lose and be boiled alive’ still guides political struggle at the summit of the Chinese Party and State – as witness the recent cases of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang – though thankfully today it applies metaphorically, not literally.

On June 4, 1989, reality returned. On Deng's orders, the Chinese army crushed a student-led insurrection, with hundreds or thousands of deaths in or near Tiananmen Square (the details are in dispute; the massacre is not). The West reacted with shock and dismay, but by then China was too important to ostracise for long. Two years later, Deng ramped up the movement towards a market economy and Western governments breathed a collective sigh of relief: if China was adopting a free-market system, which according to Marx would eventually engender a bourgeois middle class and bourgeois political institutions – in other words, democracy – it was a country the West could legitimately do business with.

However, that was not how things worked out. A Chinese middle class emerged, but bourgeois institutions did not. Instead, the Communist Party maintained iron control over political life and ideas. A decade after Tiananmen, when another challenge arose to the Communist Party's monopoly of power – this time in the shape of a group calling itself Falun Gong, a traditional secret society dressed up as a religious sect – it, too, was ruthlessly repressed.

Small wonder that by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Western opinion – particularly in the United States – was becoming disabused. The extent of the change was brought home to me when, during a visit to New York in the spring of 2005, Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC's nightly news, told me he wanted to make a film about China. He intended to call it ‘The Enemy’, he said. I winced. Surely, I suggested, ‘The Challenger’ or ‘The Rival’ would be more appropriate? No, Peter insisted: ‘The Enemy’ was how Americans were beginning to view China. He was right. That year, an opinion poll found that 35 per cent of Americans regarded China as a potentially hostile power. Ten years later the figure was 54 per cent. John Pomfret, who studied in China and spent five years as Beijing correspondent of the Washington Post, watched American attitudes sour and become increasingly hard-boiled. ‘The bloom’, he wrote, ‘was clearly off the Chinese rose.’¹ The Chinese noticed too. Colonel Liu Mingfu, a PLA hawk, whose 2010 book, The China Dream, provided Xi Jinping with the catchphrase for his leadership, responded: ‘Washington sees 1.3 billion people as enemies. Washington sees China as an adversary, and as a result that will push China to become an enemy of the United States.’² Six years later, Francesco Sisci, a veteran Italian commentator on Chinese affairs who lectures at Renmin Daxue in Beijing, wrote: ‘There is a change of mood in Beijing… 30 years ago, [China's] leaders believed the US had an interest in helping China as a piece of its grand anti-Soviet strategy; now many of those leaders think the US has an interest in stopping or slowing down China's growth as this could challenge American “world dominance”. [This] feeds, and is fed by, self-fulfilling rhetoric that moves back and forth on both sides of the Pacific.’³ President Obama's ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2012 reflected this new mood. The moment could have been better chosen, coinciding as it did with the resurgence of Russia and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, but in the long term there is no doubt that the continuation, or not, of America's post-World War II role as global hegemon will be determined primarily in Asia, above all by its future relationship with China.

It is a truism that the writing of history is influenced by the social and political context of the time in which it takes place.

In the early post-war period, US attitudes to China were poisoned by the McCarthyite ‘Who lost China’ debate (as though China had been America's to lose), and by the invective generated by the Korean War. The historical narrative was fashioned accordingly: Chiang Kai-shek was a good man; Mao Zedong and his colleagues were bad. Americans were forbidden to travel to China and few American historians took an interest in the communists’ rise to power. One who did was Benjamin Schwartz, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard, published in 1951 as Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, argued that Mao had created a distinctive version of Marxism-Leninism relying on the peasantry rather than the proletariat. Ten years later Chalmers Johnson enlarged on those ideas in Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power. But they were the exceptions. Most research on Chinese communism in the 1950s and early 1960s was carried out in Europe, where the ideological winds of the Cold War blew less strongly. In London in 1963, another American, Stuart Schram, published the first selection of original texts of Mao's works, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, followed, three years later, by a ground-breaking biography of Mao which is still being read half a century later. By then the political context was beginning to change. The Sino–Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution generated a surge of interest in ‘Red China’, which coincided throughout the West with a new intellectual climate, prompted by the coming of age of the post-war baby-boomers, whose values and aspirations were very different from those of their parents. In America the new radicalism was linked to the Vietnam War, which set the stage for an explosion of studies comparing and contrasting the war against the Vietcong with Mao's guerrilla war in the 1930s and 1940s.⁴ Then the deaths, a year apart, of Chiang Kai-shek and of Mao, the subsequent flood of memoir literature, the gradual unlocking of the archives and the easing of political constraints on historical research in both mainland China and Taiwan, allowed the emergence of a widely shared view, among Chinese and Western scholars alike, that Mao's rule, although deeply flawed, had been globally beneficial, laying a solid foundation for economic development and making the country once again a major player on the world stage.

Into this cosy consensus, in 2005, two British writers, Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, lobbed a depth charge. Their book, Mao: The Unknown Story, set out to debunk all previous writing on the subject.

The timing was inspired. China was no longer a distant, exotic land, a ‘flowery kingdom’ of Red Guards and mandarins, but an economic powerhouse challenging the United States for global dominance. What better moment to overturn the myth of the man who created modern China and whose legacy, albeit backhandedly, the Chinese leadership continued to uphold? ‘Our story is completely different,’ Chang told interviewers. ‘Nobody has explained Mao like us … People looked but they didn't see.’ Earlier scholars, she and Halliday argued, had failed to understand the true nature of Mao and his system of rule.

Chang had become an international celebrity as a result of her previous book, Wild Swans, an autobiographical account of the experiences of her family during the Chinese revolution. An exquisite panorama of Chinese society from the 1920s until Mao's death, it deservedly became a worldwide best seller. More perhaps than any other book since Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China in 1937, it made China instantly accessible and fascinating to a mass readership in the West. Chinese who read it were less impressed. Chang's father, they noted, had been a senior Communist Party official in the Sichuan Provincial Committee's Propaganda Department (which in the book is coyly renamed the ‘Public Affairs Department’), responsible for ensuring that the provincial media promoted Mao's policies during the Great Leap Forward, when some eight million Sichuanese peasants starved to death, the second-highest death rate in the country, and then for censoring the appalling results. Later, like many other high officials, he was severely maltreated and died during the Cultural Revolution. Jung Chang blamed Mao for his death.

The phenomenal success of Wild Swans – more than 12 million copies sold in 37 languages – served as the launch pad for Mao: The Unknown Story. Jung Chang's celebrity, combined with a bandwagon effect generated by a brilliantly orchestrated marketing campaign, which led non-specialist reviewers to outdo each other in praise, made Mao: The Unknown Story an instant triumph. Critics hailed it as ‘a bombshell of a book’, ‘the most powerful, compelling, and revealing political biography of modern times’, ‘a mesmerising portrait’ which would change forever the way the history of China would be viewed.

The superlatives were correct in one sense. The book's impact over the past decade, and the fierceness of the debate that it triggered, are hard to overstate. There has not been as vigorous a sinological controversy since the mid-nineteenth century, when the French savants, Stanislas Julien and Guillaume Pauthier, spent decades excoriating each other for ‘odiously distorting’ this or that aspect of the Chinese classics. But as a work of scholarship, Mao: The Unknown Story falls short. It is a highly significant book, but not for the reasons Jung Chang's admirers think.

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that there are times when one's first duty is ‘to say that two plus two makes four’. That is often harder than it sounds. In the case of Jung Chang and her husband, the difficulty is compounded because Wild Swans gave great pleasure to millions of people. But the virtues of one book should not mask the faults of another. Where Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China in 1936 to promote Mao's cause, Chang and Halliday wrote The Unknown Story to demonise him.

For a number of reasons, not limited to the renown of Jung Chang, the subject is a minefield, as others who ventured into it before me have discovered. The China Journal, one of the two leading academic journals in the field, devoted a special issue in 2007 to a scholarly (and largely negative) assessment of The Unknown Story. Gregor Benton, the leading Western historian of the Red base areas, co-edited a collection of essays in 2010 entitled Was Mao Really a Monster?, which brought together the views of specialists all over the world: they, too, were critical. Benton wrote that Jung Chang and her husband had ‘merely inverted the error of the Mao-worshippers’ – those on the far left in the 1960s and 1970s (of whom, ironically, Jon Halliday was one).⁵ Half a century later, the pendulum has swung back. Adulation has given place to obloquy.

In this Manichean reading of history, Mao was the incarnation of evil from the day he was born to the day he died. Jung Chang herself has written that in all her research, she found ‘not one single thing’ that was positive about him. On that basis she proceeded, as the Chinese saying has it, ‘to cut the feet to fit the shoes’.

If her book were just another of the innumerable diatribes published over the years in small editions by left- and right-wing ideologues promoting their particular take on communist China, that might not matter very much. But Mao: The Unknown Story has become for many readers in the English-speaking world the definitive account of the founder of modern China, influencing popular and, to some extent, political perceptions of one of the world's two major powers, destined to play an ever growing global role in the century ahead. Right-wingers everywhere, especially in the United States, welcomed it as proof that all revolutionary movements lead to bloody dictatorship. Soviet communism had been discredited by Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn and finally Gorbachev; now it was the turn of the Chinese version. President George W. Bush made Jung Chang's book his bedtime reading and commented appreciatively that it had shown him ‘how brutal a tyrant Mao was … he killed millions and millions of people’ – something which apparently he had not registered before. With the Cold War now over, the threat to American power, economic this time, came from the People's Republic, the country which Mao had founded and which continues to bear his imprint today. Jung Chang's book meshed perfectly with the new narrative of a potentially hostile juggernaut emerging to challenge America's dominance in Asia.

Let there be no mistake: Mao was a tyrant – ruthless, cruel, despotic and driven by an almost superhuman will to prevail. That needs to be said. It can be said, as I hope the present volume has shown, without traducing the facts. It also needs to be said that many early Western accounts glossed over the dark side of his regime. But Mao was not just a tyrant. As Elizabeth Perry has written, ‘Were that the whole story, how do we explain Mao's remarkable ability to convince millions of his countrymen to sacrifice for his revolutionary crusade long before he possessed the coercive means to enforce compliance? And how do we account for the outpouring of nostalgia for Chairman Mao and his accomplishments so evident among many ordinary Chinese (especially the disadvantaged) even today, more than three decades after his death? Mao's charismatic appeal … is part of a larger revolutionary tradition that continues to reverberate in significant and sometimes surprising ways.’⁶

Looking back, ten years after Jung Chang's book appeared, it is hard to understand why the pundits who acclaimed Mao: The Unknown Story could not see any of that. One does not have to be an expert to sense that something is wrong when a book purports to know always what its subject is thinking, paints him as a villain without redeeming qualities and offers no explanation for his undeniable success. Claims that the radicalism of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, was the result of sexual frustration, and statements such as, ‘It was, it seems, a good day if the boss waived a few million deaths’, would appear to discredit themselves without any need for specialist knowledge.⁷ Yet even those who acknowledged that there were problems with Jung Chang's approach hastened to say they were minor compared with the book's merits.

In fact Mao: The Unknown Story was much more deeply flawed.

Gregor Benton has described the modus operandi: ‘The concrete charges … are invented and all are in some way faulty … They try to strip him of all credit by finding errors everywhere and explaining them as the systemic product of a wrong line.’ It was a method, Benton noted, that was imported into China after the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s.⁸

The Roman orator, Cicero, wrote more than 2000 years ago: Ne quid falsi audeat, ne quid veri non audeat historia [‘History may admit no falsehood, nor fail to mention any truth’]. This is not the place to give a detailed account of the omissions or ‘misstatements’, to use a neutral term, in Chang and Halliday's book: most are already well-documented and in any case a catalogue would make exceedingly tedious reading. None the less, a few examples may be helpful to illustrate the problems involved.

One of the major ‘revelations’ of Mao: The Unknown Story is the claim that, during the Long March in 1935, the battle between the Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek's forces to take control of the chain bridge over the Dadu River at Luding – a critical chokepoint where Chiang hoped to wipe out the communist army once and for all – never in fact happened. According to Chang and Halliday, it was a myth cooked up by Mao ‘probably … because [it] looked a good place for heroic deeds’. Their main source was a 93-year-old woman whose family owned a bean-curd shop near the bridge. When Chang interviewed her in 1997, she could remember only sporadic firing and no real fighting. Interviews 60 years after the event are notoriously unreliable, but for what it is worth I also visited Luding, five years before Chang. While there, I recorded an interview with a man in his late sixties who described how, as a ten-year-old, he and two other boys had hidden on the embankment and watched the entire battle. I found his account convincing because, contrary to the version then current in China, he described watching the communist soldiers, not swinging hand over hand along the chains, as Edgar Snow had recounted in Red Star over China, but crawling along them, which Chinese historians now agree is what happened. Chang went on to quote a Chinese newspaper interview with the curator of the local museum in which he was reported to have denied that the nationalists had tried to set the bridge on fire. When I interviewed him, he told me the opposite. As further evidence that the battle never occurred, Chang cites an interview by the British writer, Robert Payne, with Peng Dehuai in 1946, in which, she says Peng ‘did not say one word about fighting or a burning bridge.’ In his memoirs, however, Peng wrote at length about the battle. So did Payne, in an earlier book on his travels in the communist areas, Journey to Red China, which Chang does not cite. She concludes her requisitory with the words: ‘The strongest evidence for debunking the myth … is that there were no battle casualties.’ Yet Liu Binrong's Hong yi fangmian jun jishi, an exhaustive four-volume history of the First Front Army, published in 2003, states that three members of the 22-strong communist vanguard were killed in the assault. Chang prefers instead to quote a bodyguard of Zhou Enlai who overheard that there were no deaths, a story put about at the time as propaganda for the Red Army's invincibility.

So much for the evidence that the battle never occurred. On close examination, none of it stands up. As for the evidence that it did take place, Jung Chang passes over in silence the accounts of numerous contemporaries, including Otto Braun, the Politburo's Comintern adviser – a witness hostile to Mao if ever there was one – and of Yang Chengwu, who commanded the attack. She ignores articles in nationalist newspapers, which reported on the battle shortly after it occurred; documents in the nationalist military archives; and Chiang Kai-shek's telegrams ordering that the bridge be held.

I have dwelt on the authors’ treatment of this particular event because it demonstrates a selectivity in the use of sources which is found throughout the book. Every possible piece of hostile information, whether credible or not, is ‘vacuumed up’, as Andrew Nathan of Columbia University put it; anything which might reflect well on Mao is omitted.

Chang and Halliday take the same approach to citations. Early on in their book, they quote from the marginal comments which Mao wrote as a 24-year-old student on a translation of Friedrich Paulsen's System der Ethik. From one passage Jung Chang deduces that ‘Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. [He wrote:] “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people”.’ Leaving aside the mistranslation – Mao did not write ‘people like me’; he was talking about human beings in general – the real problem is with what follows, which Chang does not quote. Mao added that a key part of ‘duty to oneself’ is helping others who are in need. He went on to explain:

If I see someone in danger and do not try to rescue him, even if not doing so would not be considered wrong, will I really think in my own mind that not helping him is right? The fact that I think it is not right is what makes it my duty to rescue him. We rescue those who are in danger to set our own minds at rest.

Does that constitute misrepresentation? The reader will judge. It is certainly straining the truth. Throughout the book, Mao's words are quoted only when they can be used to damn him or, in the words of one China scholar, when the translation can be made to serve as ‘an offensive weapon’.⁹ In another passage from the same text, Jung Chang quotes Mao as writing that the actions of a hero are ‘like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a sex-maniac on heat and prowling for a lover [emphasis added]’. Mao in fact wrote that they were like ‘a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one's lover, a force that will not stop.’ This is not a matter of differing interpretations. The terms ‘sex-maniac on heat’ and ‘prowling’ are not present in the Chinese original.¹⁰ Chang cites among her sources, in addition to the Chinese text, the first volume of Mao's Road to Power, which contains the definitive English translation of this passage by a team led by Stuart Schram. She would therefore have been aware of how the text should be rendered. Yet she chose to publish a version which served her thesis that Mao was a sexually depraved psychopath.

This is not to say that everything in Mao: The Unknown Story is invention or distortion. Andrew Nathan has described the book as a mix of ‘plastic and jade’. Buried in the text are interesting and original nuggets. The problem is how to recognise them. What are we to make, for instance, of a supposedly verbatim quotation from the diary of Mao's wife, Yang Kaihui, to which is appended a footnote stating: ‘The following words were mostly recalled from memory after reading the document in an archive and some therefore may not be exact’? An archive? We know that a cache of Yang's papers was discovered in 1972 and is conserved in the Central Archives in Beijing, where senior Party researchers have been permitted to consult it: indeed, its existence was first revealed in the West in the first edition of this book. Foreigners are not admitted to the Central Archives, let alone to the restricted section where the original is held, which is off limits even to most Chinese scholars. So where did Jung Chang see it? Or was she briefed on its contents, as I was, by one of the Party hierarchs authorised to see it? If such doubts surround Yang Kaihui's journal, how much credence should we attach to Jung Chang's quotations from the unpublished diaries of Mao's eldest son, Anying? The alarm signal here is the way Jung Chang treated the experiences of Anying's wife, Liu Songlin (whom Chang refers to by an alternative name, Si-qi). This is her account of how Songlin learned of Anying's death in the Korean War:

Nobody informed Anying's young widow [that he was dead] for over two and a half years [until] she asked Mao, who [finally] told her … During those years she had been seeing Mao constantly, spending weekends and vacations with him, and he had not shown any sadness, not even a flicker to suggest that anything was wrong. He had even cracked jokes about Anying as though he were alive.¹¹

Mao: The Unknown Story takes that as evidence of Mao's indifference (notwithstanding the testimony of Peng Dehuai, who was with Mao when he learned of Anying's death: Peng wrote that Mao was devastated. Jung Chang disregards his account). But the issue here is not Anying but Liu Songlin. When I interviewed her in 2005, she told me essentially the same story as Jung Chang relates but gave it a totally different meaning:

Looking back, I feel very, very sorry for Chairman Mao. Why? Because he knew that Anying had been sacrificed, but … in front of me, he kept up the pretence that nothing untoward had happened, that it was all as usual. We often talked about him. He told jokes about Anying when he was small, and I shared my memories too. It must have been terribly hard for him. As an old man who had lost his son: it was so cruel … After he learnt of Anying's death, he told Li Linqiao and Ye Zilong [respectively Mao's chief bodyguard and secretary] that the news must be kept from me. He thought that I was too young and I would not be able to bear it.

In fact the explanation was no doubt simpler. Of all his surviving children, Mao had placed his greatest hopes on Anying. In grief, the first stage is often denial. After his son's death, denial appears to have become part of Mao's coping strategy: by seeking to protect his daughter-in-law he tried to control the pain he felt himself. But whatever the rationale, indifference was not part of it.

The inescapable conclusion is that little in Mao: The Unknown Story can be taken at face value. I suspect that there is more ‘jade’ in the text than is immediately apparent. But ‘jade’ and ‘plastic’ alike are daubed in such layers of vitriol that, unless each assertion is independently verified or disproved, there is no way of telling them apart.^*

China studies will get over this. In fact one can make a case – and a number of academics have – that, regardless of the veracity of their work, Chang and Halliday did the field a huge favour by forcing historians to re-examine what had become, in some cases, fallacious certitudes.

Ten years later, the sinological fur is no longer flying as fast. Most China scholars have moved on. Yet perhaps they have done so too quickly. For the episode has raised important questions, one of which was posed bluntly in a short but devastating review of Was Mao Really a Monster? by Michael Schoenhals, widely regarded as being, with Roderick MacFarquhar, the leading Western historian of the Cultural Revolution. It is worth quoting at some length:

Contributor A [Andrew Nathan] shows why a depiction of a ‘regime that engaged in fifty years of mass torture, killing and destruction for no good purpose’ is ultimately a welcome ‘revelation’, even if and when, as he admits, it amounts to ‘a possible but not a plausible’ account of Mao Zedong's life based on extensive use of ‘sources that cannot be checked … [or] are openly speculative or are based on circumstantial evidence … [or in some cases] untrue’. Contributor B [David Goodman] performs an exercise in a similar vein, setting out to explain how a book can be a ‘vast compendium of information about its subject’ even though it is saturated with ‘pretension … pomposity and … poor scholarship’. Contributor C [Lowell Dittmer] critiques a book that, as he points out immediately, is ‘not a work of objective scholarship’ but a ‘vacuum-cleaner assemblage of every bit of information conceivably damaging to Mao's revolutionary reputation’; yet he comes out concluding that it paints ‘a cumulative picture [that] is convincing and in my view quite devastating – it could conceivably alter forever our historical picture of the revolutionary origins of the PRC’. And contributor D [Arthur Waldron] admits to searching in vain for certain ‘facts’ established and ‘issues’ raised in the mainstream Sinological literature, but all the same is full of admiration for a work that ‘expose[s] Mao Zedong as one of the greatest criminals in human history’.

The question which Schoenhals raised was why some of the best-known names in China studies tied themselves in knots to find worth in a book whose methods they admitted were at best untrustworthy. His answer was ‘political correctness’.

That term may cover a multitude of sins, but in the case of Chang and Halliday's book, four in particular spring to mind: a sense of guilt among mainstream sinologists that, with hindsight, they had been too soft on the undoubted horrors which accompanied Mao's revolution, and were therefore ill-placed to criticise those who (even if for the wrong reasons) were now speaking out more frankly; a reluctance to be seen defending the founder of a regime which had become associated in the public mind with dictatorship and human rights violations; a desire, common to all corporative endeavours, of which academe is one, not to get too far out of line from the emerging political and public consensus that China, and everything connected with it, should be subjected to more searching and hostile scrutiny than had been the case before; and last but not least, a desire to appear ‘fair’, particularly on the part of scholars who have written extensively about Mao, lest their criticisms be seen as the sour grapes of academics whose work could never hope for the kind of commercial success that Jung Chang's books enjoyed.¹²

Yet there were obviously other factors at work as well. None of the foregoing explains why Mao: The Unknown Story struck such a chord with opinion makers and with the public at large. Geremie Barmé wrote that it was ‘tailor-made for the Age of Terror’.¹³ Today the Bush years are behind us, but Western concerns about China's emergence as a great power, and a correspondingly jaundiced view of its political system and of the history that created it, live on.

The changing social and intellectual climate also played a part. Revisionism is in vogue. In the English-speaking world (though not in France or Germany), the term has lost its former, negative connotation and has acquired instead a brave, new positive gloss. Questioning the Holocaust is still out of bounds but that is a rare exception. Everything else is fair game. Challenging orthodoxy has become an end in itself. Anything is better than what one reviewer called ‘the tired, old, standard version’, even when that tired, old version is more credible than any other. To make his or her mark, a historian has to come up with something new. Nor is it just historians. The number of articles retracted after publication from mainstream science journals because of suspicions that data have been faked, ‘massaged’ or plagiarised has grown exponentially in recent years. Among the main reasons is ‘the pressure to publish attention-grabbing findings.’ ¹⁴

Overturning conventional wisdom is accepted all the more readily because, throughout the West, mistrust of the political and intellectual establishment encourages the belief that there is a ‘truth behind the headlines’ which the authorities wish to conceal. Arthur Waldron, writing in Commentary, appears to have had this in mind when he accused his fellow China specialists of having ‘shamefully’ suppressed the evidence of Mao's depravity ‘lest it undermine the fantasy of a humane, caring leader’.

Beyond all these elements lies a deeper problem. The British historian, Norman Davies, put it this way:

History is too complicated. The past is too big, there is too much of it. Mythology is what is created because people prefer a simple, straightforward explanation of what happened to this awful, complicated mess.

The desire for simple answers to complicated questions is hardly new. But in the second half of the twentieth century, and above all in the last two decades, it has become more pronounced. At one level that is part of the downside of what in other respects is among the more positive developments of recent times: the democratisation of knowledge. In a broader sense, it has to do with the way modern life is lived: we try to cram more into less. As in all trade-offs, there is a price to pay. Broadcasters use a simplified vocabulary, books and newspaper articles are condensed, information is conveyed by news flashes, headlines and ‘tweets’. Brevity can be a strength: think of the beauty of haiku. But today the goal is often not concision but pandering to a limited attention span. People are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available. It has to be boiled down to manageable proportions. To appeal to a broader public, academics are tempted to put a premium on liveliness and accessibility. That is not necessarily a bad thing: it is certainly better than jargon. But it is difficult to combine with scholarship and it is rarely conducive to nuanced writing or to the separation of fact and opinion.¹⁵

China, more than most countries, defies reduction to simple, let alone simplistic, formulae. Yet specialist publications apart, that is all too often how the recent history of China is now written: in reductionist, bite-sized mouthfuls with the depth of a cardboard cut-out.

Lest that judgement appear too abrupt, let me quote from the opening paragraph of an article in the New York Times in 2015, which asserted baldly: ‘ In 20th-century totalitarian systems, tyrants like Stalin, Hitler and Mao murdered millions in the name of outlandish ideologies.’¹⁶ The authors were not journalists: they are both well-regarded professors – Sergei Guriev from Sciences-Po in Paris and Daniel Treisman of the University of California. Jung Chang's narrative has taken root. Marxism and Nazism are different sides of the same coin. Stalin, Hitler and Mao were monsters together and that is all there is to be said.

As though by symbiosis, while Mao's image has been blackened, that of his great rival, Chiang Kai-shek, has acquired fresh lustre. By the late 1970s, when China had become America's de facto partner against the Soviet Union, Chiang's supporters in the United States had been silenced. Attempts by the so-called China Lobby to show that Chiang would have won had it not been for the perfidy of Roosevelt and Truman who ‘betrayed [him] by withholding support and material aid at critical junctures of the Civil War’ had bitten the dust, thanks in part to a best-selling book by Barbara Tuchman, Sand in the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. She argued that the nationalists had lost because they were authoritarian, inept and corrupt, had no mass base and were debilitated by their obsession with the communists. The United States, she wrote, despite heroic efforts by General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, Roosevelt's choice for US Commander in the China theatre until 1944, had been unable to prevail because Chiang Kai-shek's army was unreformable without a wholesale change of system which the Generalissimo was unwilling to make. After two decades of Chiang's dictatorial and sometimes brutal rule on Taiwan, most American opinion-makers were inclined to agree with her.¹⁷

In Chiang's case too, however, the pendulum swung too far and needed to swing back. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars like Thomas Rawski and Julia Strauss argued that the Generalissimo's record before the war in building the institutions of a modern state had been better than most Western writers were prepared to admit and that his administration was not uniformly corrupt.¹⁸ But the first major work to challenge systematically the prevailing consensus on Chiang was Hans van de Ven's War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (Routledge Curzon, 2003). Van de Ven refuted Tuchman's thesis and effectively demolished the Stilwell myth, arguing that the American's military tactics were misguided, that he had no understanding of China or its people, and that his presence hampered rather than helped the war effort which the United States was pledged to support. Chiang, in van de Ven's view, was a better strategist than his American ally. After the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932, the Generalissimo had started trying to create a modern army and to build a centralised State with a disciplined bureaucracy and a solid political economy. The problem, van de Ven wrote, was that it was too little, too late. While the nationalists – not the communists – bore the brunt of the fighting against the Japanese, Chiang was hamstrung by his inability to achieve complete control over his forces, whose loyalties remained divided. Although officially they were all now part of the Guomindang, each unit was under the sway of an individual warlord. In such circumstances, van de Ven concluded, far from being incompetent, Chiang did better than expected, but he was not equipped to fight a modern war and his regime emerged from the conflict so badly weakened that by 1945, if not earlier, his chances of defeating Mao in the civil war which was to follow were seriously impaired.¹⁹

The same year that van de Ven's book appeared, Jonathan Fenby published Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (The Free Press, 2003), the first full-length biography of Chiang for almost thirty years and arguably the first ever to attempt a balanced judgement of his rule before 1949. While more critical than van de Ven, whose main focus was on military affairs, Fenby, too, rejected the wholly negative appraisal common to most earlier writers. Chiang, he wrote was ‘a reactionary authoritarian who set no great store by the lives of his compatriots, … a bad administrator … [who] tolerated corruption and amorality … [and] whose short-term battles with the Americans ended up by losing him the one ally who mattered.’ None the less, he had succeeded in unifying China, ‘even if that unity became the platform for his greatest adversary’; in the 1930s he had laid the foundations for modern industry, finance and communications; and he had managed to hold together a fragile coalition against the Japanese which, without him, might have sundered altogether.²⁰

In 2009, the balance shifted still further with the publication of Jay Taylor's The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Harvard University Press). Taylor offered a carefully nuanced appreciation of Chiang's rule. His leadership after the Japanese defeat was ‘a disaster’ and on occasion he sanctioned ‘extreme actions that amounted to staggering moral blindness or turpitude’. On the other hand he was ‘a modernising neo-Confucian’ whose goal was to make China ‘a harmonious, stable and prosperous society’. Few scholars today dispute that. As Fenby put it, the stigma of the nationalists’ defeat masked the regime's genuine successes. Taylor's conclusions, however, went further. Whether consciously or not, he wrote, Chiang ‘set the stage for Taiwan's development of a vigorous democracy’; in the final analysis, ‘it is [his] vision of modern China, not Mao's, that guides the People's Republic in the 21st century’.²¹ The reader will search in vain for passages in his book which support such assertions. None the less, Taylor's interpretation of Chiang as a would-be democrat has taken hold. A 2014 article by Robert Kaplan in the American journal, Foreign Policy, insisted: ‘Mao Won the Battle, Chiang Kai-shek Won the War’.²²

Ironically, support for the Generalissimo's rehabilitation has come from mainland China and opposition to it from Taiwan. With reunification in mind, Beijing today spins Chiang as an essentially honourable figure misled by bad advisers, ‘a nationalist and a patriot,’ in the words of one Chinese historian, ‘[who] never wavered in his determination to resist the Japanese.’²³ The Chinese Party, which for decades viewed the 1949 revolution as a complete rupture with the past, now emphasises continuity. Mao's regime is depicted as having built on the reforms of the nationalists who in turn built on the reforms of the late Qing.²⁴ In Taiwan, by contrast, where the wounds left by Chiang's repressive rule are still fresh and reunification is unpopular, his memory is played down.

The new narrative depicting Chiang Kai-shek as a progressive figure whose defeat was undeserved has been embraced not only by writers like Jung Chang and Jon Halliday but by several mainstream professional historians. Ramon Myers of the Hoover Institution has argued that had Marshall and Truman put America's full weight behind Chiang Kai-shek, instead of imposing a ceasefire in Manchuria in June 1946, the nationalists would have wiped out Lin Biao's forces and gone on to win the whole of China. Arthur Waldron concurs. Yet contemporary intelligence assessments and much of the historical evidence which has emerged since suggest otherwise. In the words of Harold Tanner, a leading scholar of the period: ‘Even if the United States had been willing to do so, extending unlimited military aid to an army that was pursuing a fundamentally flawed strategy and a government that was proving incapable of winning the political struggle is not likely to have changed failure into success’.²⁵ As it was, Truman's policy had the merit of keeping Americans out of a foreign civil war of a kind which subsequent events (in countries such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan) have shown they are not especially good at winning.

The wheel has gone full circle. Sixty years on, the ‘Who lost China?’ debate is back. Senator McCarthy must be smiling in his grave.

Frank Dikötter, whose writings on Mao and the Chinese revolution have likewise had great influence in the past decade, espouses both theses of the revisionist paradigm: Chiang was a decent leader, unfairly maligned; Mao and the tyranny he installed were fundamentally rotten.

From the outset Dikötter nails his colours to the mast. The first of his books (in historical sequence) is entitled China before Mao: The Age of Openness; the second, The Tragedy of Liberation; and the third, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe. The last in the series, The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976, appeared in 2016. Dikötter's theme is that China under Chiang Kai-shek enjoyed ‘a golden age of engagement with the world’;²⁶ that Chiang's defeat by Mao's forces was the result of American betrayal, massive Soviet aid to the communists and only to a marginal degree the venality of his regime; and that the communist system which followed consisted solely of ‘calculated terror and systematic violence’. The first decade of Mao's rule, he writes, was ‘one of the worst tyrannies in the history of the twentieth century, sending to an early grave at least 5 million citizens and bringing misery to countless more’. The second decade, with the Great Leap Forward famine and the onset of the Cultural Revolution, was exponentially worse, culminating in a blood bath when Mao, ‘an old man settling personal scores at the end of his life’, as Dikötter puts it, plunged China into an inferno.

Dikötter avoids the pitfalls into which the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story plunge, but shares their ideas. The Tragedy of Liberation opens with a graphic account of the five-month long siege of Changchun by Lin Biao's forces in 1948, in which, Dikötter estimates, 160,000 civilians died. It was one of ghastliest incidents of the civil war, vividly described by Zhang Zhenglong, a PLA lieutenant-colonel, in Xuebai xiehong [White Snow, Red Blood] (Jiefangjun chubanshe, Beijing, 1989), one of a number of books questioning the official history of the conflict which were published in China during a brief period of openness in the late 1980s. As the siege unfolded, Lin Biao refused to allow the starving population to leave the city in order to put pressure on the besieged nationalists’ grain supplies; Chiang Kai-shek refused to allow the garrison to surrender and abandoned it to its fate. Civil wars are the most abominable of conflicts for, almost by definition, they erase the distinction between civilians and soldiers. The suffering of Changchun was instrumental in persuading Beijing and other cities to surrender without resistance. Did the lives saved there justify the horrors that befell its martyred population? Similar questions are often asked about the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden and of Tokyo during the Second World War, and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did they help bring the war to an earlier conclusion? Or were they unnecessary? There is no agreement. Likewise who was most responsible for the death toll in Changchun? The nationalist generals who starved the civilian population to death in order to feed their own troops? Chiang, who forbade surrender? Or the communists, who refused to allow the civilians to escape? One might think that all sides bore a measure of responsibility.

Dikötter does not address such issues, nor does he provide context. Warfare had been raging in China since the 1920s. In the 1930s Chiang Kai-shek had caused the deaths of more than half a million civilians – three times the number killed at Changchun – and condemned millions more to starvation by deliberately breaching the dykes on the Yellow River. During the war with Japan, as many as 20 million Chinese civilians may have died, either from Japanese carpet bombing or from the ‘kill all, burn all, loot all’ policy aimed at depriving communist guerrillas of support in the countryside.²⁷ The atrocity of Changchun was not simply, or even principally, an example of Mao's ruthlessness and indifference to human life. It was one horror among many in a chain of bloodshed which had begun a century before with the Opium Wars – waged by the Western powers to force open a marketplace which until then had closed its doors to foreign trade – or, if one wishes to take a longer view, with the civil and dynastic wars and rebellions which have punctuated all of Chinese history.

Dikötter's work is valuable primarily for his use of formerly closed provincial archives.²⁸ These contain fascinating accounts of how local officials reacted to central directives, and also, in many cases, copies of the original directives themselves – documents which, in the Central Archives in Beijing, are still under seal. However, the extracts he quotes are usually very brief and parts of The Tragedy of Liberation and Mao's Great Famine require extremely careful reading, often to the point of parsing each sentence, in order to be sure of the sense. Most of the documents describe excesses by local officials which the Party subsequently investigated and condemned, but this is not always made clear. In The Tragedy of Liberation, for instance, he quotes a report by Deng Xiaoping on land reform in western Anhui, where the local leadership killed an ever lengthening list of landlords and their relatives whom the peasants had denounced. Only in the last sentence does it emerge – between the lines – that Deng was denouncing, not approving, the indiscriminate killing.²⁹

There are also puzzling lapses. Describing the quotas Mao laid down during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries in the early 1950s, Dikötter quotes Mao as saying that ‘once a death rate of two per thousand had been achieved, people should be sentenced to life imprisonment’. The Chinese historian, Yang Kuisong, cites the same document as saying: ‘One per thousand can be surpassed but not by too much. In general, two per thousand should not be adopted as a new target. Many of these criminals can be sentenced to lifetime imprisonment [emphasis added].’³⁰

It may be argued that these are quibbles; factual errors occur in the best of books.³¹ However, Dikötter's errors are strangely consistent. They all serve to strengthen his case against Mao and his fellow leaders.³²

Mao's Great Famine ranks second only to Chang and Halliday's work in shaping popular perceptions of Mao and his regime. It describes in unflinching detail the horrors of mass starvation, the cruelty of the local officials who terrorised the peasants, the iron controls imposed to contain news of the catastrophe, and the disarray of a leadership which, from Mao, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai down, was utterly unprepared to deal with, when not actually in denial of, the suffering it had unleashed. Dikötter's portrait of the institutionalised ghastliness of those years is exemplary. As in his earlier books, citations are generally very brief, though that has since been partly remedied by the publication of The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962 (Yale University Press, 2012), by his principal collaborator, Zhou Xun, which provides lengthy extracts of a number of the documents he refers to.

The main problem of Mao's Great Famine is that it offers no credible explanation of why Mao and his colleagues acted as they did. Why did they believe that mass mobilisation would usher in an age of plenty? For believe it they did: Mao was convinced that so much grain would be produced that everyone would eat their fill and the country would still have a huge surplus.³³ When the first reports of famine emerged, why were they not taken seriously? Why did Zhou Enlai, even after its extent became clear, do nothing to alleviate it?

To dismiss the Chinese leaders’ policies as ‘ravings … [and] visionary whims’ does not take us very far.³⁴ Dikötter argues that they ‘glorified violence’, showed ‘a callous disregard for human life’ and adopted a logic of war, ‘regardless of the casualty figures’.³⁵ Some of that is undoubtedly true. But the one specific example that he offers points to a rather different picture. Li Xiannian, the hard-bitten Politburo veteran whose troops had been decimated by Moslem cavalrymen at the end of the Long March, broke down and wept when taken to a district in Henan where more than a million people had died of hunger. ‘The defeat of the Western Route Army was so cruel yet I did not shed a tear,’ he cried, ‘but after seeing such horror in Guangshan even I am unable to control myself.’³⁶

Dikötter rejects what he calls ‘the widespread view that these deaths were the unintended consequence of half-baked and poorly executed economic programmes’.³⁷ Yet most of the archival documents he cites show precisely that.³⁸ ‘In effect, the countryside was quarantined, as if peopled by lepers’, he writes. ‘Information was distorted all the way up to the Chairman.’³⁹ Contemporary sources confirm both those statements. When word did get out, investigation teams were sent in by the Party centre, and eventually – although much too late – the policy was changed.

Mao's Great Famine places the blame for the tragedy squarely on a communist regime of which ‘terror and violence were the foundations’.⁴⁰ But the horrors which it records, and the tortures inflicted by officials, may all be found in nineteenth-century accounts by Western missionaries, in Chinese treatises on punishment under the Empire, and in reports on the republican period. Theodore White wrote of the Henan famine of 1941–3, in which an estimated three million peasants died – roughly the same figure as perished in that province during the Great Leap Forward – that when he visited the area, local Guomindang officials offered him a banquet of ‘chicken, beef, water chestnut and three cakes with sugar frosting’. But travelling through the countryside,

The peasants as we saw them were dying. They were dying in the roads, in the mountains, by the railroad stations, in their mud huts, in the fields. And as they died, the government continued to wring from them the last possible ounce of tax … No excuses were allowed; peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last sack of seed grain to the tax collector's office.⁴¹

When a Chongqing newspaper published news of the Henan famine, the only response Chiang Kai-shek's government could think of was to close it down for three days. By the time the Japanese launched the Ichigō offensive two years later, the people of Henan had come to hate Chiang Kai-shek's regime so fiercely that they attacked the Guomindang army – which was supposed to be defending them against the foreign invader – stealing the soldiers’ weapons and grain and killing their officers. Such experiences help to explain why hundreds of millions of Chinese welcomed what Dikötter calls the ‘Tragedy of Liberation’. Compared with what had gone before, communist rule did not seem so bad. The Chinese writer, Liu Zhenyun, whose novel about the wartime famine in Henan was made into a film starring Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins, recalled asking his grandmother, who had been among the survivors, what she remembered of that time. The old lady brushed the question aside. ‘What's so special about that year?’ she asked. ‘People died of starvation all the time.’⁴² So much for the ‘golden age’ when Chiang Kai-shek ruled China before the communists took power.

The cadres who meted out barbaric punishments during the Great Leap Forward invented very little. Like necrophagy and cannibalism and the selling of women and children, such practices had always existed. That they continued in the 1950s and 1960s was an appalling indictment of Mao's regime, but it is sheer foolishness to pretend that the communists created them.^*

Dikötter's Mao was a ruthless despot pretending to be a ‘benign leader concerned about the welfare of his subjects’ while ‘China descended into hell’.⁴³ The smoking gun, in his account, is a comment made by the Chairman at a meeting of top leaders in Shanghai on March 25, 1959. Mao, he writes, having been assured that grain production had ‘increased hugely’ over the previous year, urged his colleagues to procure a third of this bountiful harvest, not 25 per cent as had been the case previously.⁴⁴ He then went on to say: ‘When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’ Dikötter takes the phrase literally to mean that Mao was ready to let half the population of China starve to death to ensure that the Great Leap could be carried through to the end.⁴⁵

Even without a complete transcript of what was said, there are good reasons to doubt that. If all the leaders were convinced there would be a bumper harvest, why would Mao or anyone else anticipate widespread famine? Secondly, the partial text published by Zhou Xun shows that Mao's comment was made not in a speech about farming, as Dikötter implies, but as a brief interjection during a discussion about industry.⁴⁶ She quotes him as saying that industrial investment should be targeted and precise because ‘to distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward’, before going on to draw a parallel with letting ‘half of the people die’ so that others might survive in a time of famine. Mao's mind often worked laterally. The logical explanation for what otherwise would be a complete non sequitur is that he was reaching out for a metaphor from the earlier discussion about the grain harvest to make the point that some industrial projects would have to be starved of funds so that others could proceed. We now know that was indeed his meaning. The full Chinese text, which has since become available, shows that Mao prefaced his remarks by saying, ‘If we want to fulfil the plan, then we need greatly to reduce the number of projects. We need to be resolute in further cutting the 1,078 major projects down to 500’.⁴⁷ Curiously that sentence is omitted from both Dikötter's and Zhou Xun's accounts. On closer examination, Dikötter's claim that Mao ordered a massive increase in grain procurement also turns out to be unfounded.⁴⁸ Every other recorded statement Mao made that winter and early spring focussed on the importance of easing the pressure on the peasants and avoiding unnecessary suffering. The previous November he had warned in strikingly similar terms that ‘half of China's population unquestionably would die’ if mass mobilisation were not reined in. He had ended his remarks on that occasion with the words: ‘Make it a principle to have no deaths’.⁴⁹

It is true that Mao's comments in Shanghai – which were designated ‘top secret’ and distributed to the thirty or so conference participants in a document which was marked ‘to be returned after the meeting’ – soon leaked out and led some provincial and grass-roots leaders to argue that deaths were inevitable in any struggle and must therefore be accepted.⁵⁰ It is true too that Mao engaged in massive self-deception, deluding himself that his diatribes against ‘right deviationism’ were unconnected with the excesses which followed. But that does not mean that Mao accepted, still less welcomed, the prospect of mass starvation. Every available piece of evidence, including those from the areas where people suffered most, affirms the contrary.

I have written at length about Chang and Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story, and the works of Frank Dikötter, especially Mao's Great Famine, because of the exceptional influence their books have had. It may be argued that is unfair to lump the two together. Dikötter's writing contains much new information; Mao: The Unknown Story is essentially a polemic. What they have in common is that both set out to make the case for the prosecution, rather than providing balanced accounts of the periods they describe.

Most of the new research which has appeared since the first edition of this book was published in 1999 is more conventional: scholarly academic studies, grounded in contemporary documents, which fill in many – though not yet all – of the gaps in our knowledge of the Chinese revolution and of Mao's role in it. They do not change the overall picture but permit a vast amount of fine-tuning. Details have been provided and historical errors corrected, just as, in the restoration of an old portrait, the removal of dust and grime and of later additions turns up unsuspected lineaments but leaves the original outline untouched. In this revised edition, I have incorporated the new material wherever it casts fresh light on Mao's actions, while endeavouring not to lengthen beyond measure what is already an epic tale.

The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution loom especially large in both Chinese and Western research over the past two decades.

On the former, Yang Jisheng's Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jishi, whether in the original two-volume Chinese edition, published in Hong Kong in 2008, or in the revised and abridged English-language version, Tombstone, four years later, is unsurpassed. Yang has justly been compared with Solzhenitsyn, for he allows his readers to glimpse what they might have had to endure had they and their families been among the millions whose lives were destroyed, often with unspeakable cruelty, by the horror which Mao unleashed. Few other writers, Chinese or Western, have come close to doing that.

Unlike Dikötter, who rather ungenerously dismisses Yang's book as ‘a hotchpotch, which simply strings together large chunks of text, [mixing] invaluable documents … with irrelevant anecdotes’,⁵¹ Yang is at pains to decipher the chain of responsibility, all the way down from Mao at the apex to the work group leaders at the grass roots, which linked the various actors who caused the tragedy, and the mixture of motives – visionary, self-serving, cynical and terrified – which led them to behave as they did. As a result we understand not only what happened but why it happened. He is not the first to do this. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, in their path-breaking book, The Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward, 1955–1959 (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1999); and Alfred Chan, in Mao's Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China's Great Leap Forward (Oxford University Press, 2001), focusing on the first year of the Leap, 1958, have also explored Mao's personal responsibility relative to that of other leaders. But Yang's net is spread wider, combining political analysis with an almost unbearably vivid personal account of what the famine did to those who lived through it and to the tens of millions who died.

In certain respects, Yang's early life resembled that of Jung Chang. Both their fathers died under Mao's rule; both were initially enthusiastic supporters of the regime before becoming disabused. In Yang's case, his foster father, the uncle who had raised him from the time he was three months old, starved to death in Hubei province in April 1959.

But there the similarities end. Yang is not out for revenge. As he states in the preface to Tombstone, his aim is ‘to restore historical truth for others who [like myself] had been deceived’.⁵² He attributes the catastrophe first and foremost to the totalitarianism of the Chinese regime, a system in which Leninism was grafted on to imperial rule. ‘Mao Zedong was the creator of this mould,’ he writes, ‘[or] strictly speaking, he was [its] successor and developer … [But] he himself was to some extent [its] creature … Within the framework of this system, Mao's own actions were to a certain extent also beyond his control. No one had the power to resist such a system, not even Mao.’ In Yang's judgement, the ruled share part of the blame with the rulers. Locked into a millennial tradition of ‘imperial thinking’, they ‘worshipped their leaders, venerated authority and resigned themselves to adversity’. ‘In all fairness,’ he writes, we should acknowledge that ‘the people's genuine aspirations lay behind much of the folly of the Great Leap Forward’.⁵³

Precisely because he acknowledges human frailties, misguided loyalties and the genuineness of Mao's flawed vision, his indictment of the Chinese Communist Party, its leaders and the system it established is all the more powerful. For Dikötter, Mao's China is reduced to a relentless inventory of horror, in which everyone behaves appallingly and everything is black. Yang notes that upright officials, like Wang Yongcheng, the Party secretary of a county in Shandong, one of the worst-hit provinces, were able to ensure that no one in their areas starved by deflecting orders from above and allowing the peasants to grow food themselves.⁵⁴ Dikötter enumerates the victims of the famine; Yang writes of the ‘blood-drenched human dramas’ that lie behind the figures.⁵⁵

Part of the explanation for this difference in approach is that Dikötter and, ironically, Jung Chang as well, write from a Western standpoint. Indeed, that may be one reason that their books have been so popular. They try to make sense of that ‘awful, complicated mess’ of history in ways that speak to the Western mind.

Yang writes as a Chinese, who lived through the abominations he describes, who understands why those caught up in them reasoned as they did, yet who rejects the self-serving official disculpations. Although his book – like Dikötter's and Jung Chang's – is banned in China, it reflects fundamentally Chinese, not Western, attitudes to past suffering.

Liu Zhenyun, the novelist whose grandmother remembered starvation under Chiang Kai-shek as an everyday occurrence, found that ‘the surviving famine victims and their descendants have relegated all their memories … to oblivion … After enduring so many hardships over the centuries, Chinese have learnt that [black] humour and a large helping of amnesia are the secrets to facing tragedy.’⁵⁶ Deng Xiaoping adopted that approach in 1981 when he argued that priority should be given to building a prosperous future rather than delving into the horrors of the past. For him, it was politically expedient: better to look ahead than to start unpicking the communists’ record with unforeseeable consequences.

At this point perhaps I may be permitted an ‘irrelevant anecdote’ of my own. My son's Chinese grandmother spent the last decades of her life in a courtyard in Beijing, surrounded by neighbours who, during the Cultural Revolution, had vilified her and her children as ‘black category people’. Her husband had been designated a Rightist in 1957 and sent to the countryside to work as a peasant, remaining there until after Mao's death. Two years later, during the famine accompanying the Great Leap, her second son, then a schoolboy, was arrested for complaining of hunger and spent the next 25 years in a labour camp. In 1975 her fourth son was executed as a counter-revolutionary. She herself attempted suicide but lived. Today all those subjects are taboo: by family consensus, no one mentions them. Why reopen old wounds? In any case, similar experiences befell millions of others. What is the point of raking up what can no longer be changed? At most the former victims permit themselves a certain discreet satisfaction that, in the new China that emerged after Mao's death, they have done rather better than those who persecuted them all those years ago.

That brings us to the second major episode of Mao's years in power: the ten years of ultra-left policies, and the rather shorter period of ‘great chaos’, which he inaugurated in 1966.

Like the Great Leap, the Cultural Revolution has been the subject of much new research over the last fifteen years. In Hong Kong, Song Yongyi and his colleagues have compiled a vast database of Cultural Revolution documentation (as well as similar, though smaller, databases on the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward). In China itself, the authorities would clearly prefer that the whole period simply be forgotten: as early as 1991, the Party demanded an end to what it called ‘public reassessments’.⁵⁷ Most of the new studies by mainland historians have therefore been published abroad. In the West, four books have appeared to which the much overworked word ‘seminal’ may be applied, in the sense that all future writing on the subject will have to take them into account. (Here I have limited myself to those which deal directly with Mao's role – not those, in many cases no less interesting, which explore other aspects of that great upheaval).

Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (Harvard University Press, 2006), is likely to remain for the foreseeable future the definitive overview of the period. Balanced and meticulously researched, it is the fruit of many decades of observation and reflection, leavened, in Schoenhals's case, by rooting around in the Beijing and Shanghai flea markets for discarded police files and Red Guard documents. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, in The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 2007), focus on the last four years of Mao's life, one of the least understood periods of his rule, when the triangular contest between the ultra-leftists led by Jiang Qing, the pragmatists under Deng, and the middle-of-the-road Cultural Revolution beneficiaries, headed by Hua Guofeng, played out under Mao's watchful eye even as his strength, though not his will, faltered. They despatch many of the myths that have grown up around that Byzantine struggle, and within the limits of the still fragmentary documentation available, make sense of an extraordinarily convoluted time. Their use of archival sources is exemplary: there could be no greater contrast to Jung Chang and Halliday or even Dikötter. Jin Qiu's The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution (Stanford University Press, 1999) deals with an even shorter period: from the 9th Party Congress in 1969 to Lin's flight two years later. Jin is Wu Faxian's daughter and the title of her book, based on her PhD thesis, is well-chosen. Apart from giving by far the best account to date of the mysterious events that led to Lin Biao's death in September 1971, she offers an insider's insights into the personal feuds and relationships among the dozen or so families at the very summit of Chinese power. (Jean-Luc Domenach, in Mao, sa cour et ses complots [Mao, his court and its conspirations] (Fayard, Paris, 2012), also explores the role of these personal-political alliances and the conflicts they engendered, but casts his net more widely, examining relations among the several hundred high-ranking Chinese officials who made up the ruling elite at the level just below the summit from 1949 until Mao's death.)

A fourth book on the Cultural Revolution, which had a considerable impact when it appeared, Gao Wenqian's Wannian Zhou Enlai [Zhou Enlai's Later Years] (Mirror Books, Hong Kong 2003), is harder to evaluate. An English-language adaptation followed under the sardonic title, Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (Public Affairs, 2007). Gao spent fourteen years as a researcher attached to the Central Archives, ending up as Deputy Head of the Zhou Enlai Studies Small Group. Before moving to America in 1993, he smuggled out his notes on the documents he had been allowed to see. His book's importance is that it was the first to dissect in detail Zhou's elusive and enigmatic, Janus-like personality – his immense charm and utter ruthlessness; his capacity for self-abasement, which towards the end of his life became an obsession; his great qualities of leadership; and his extraordinarily complicated relationship with Mao, in which he played the role of valet to master, chief eunuch to emperor. The original Chinese edition contains a great deal of new material, but is also riddled with errors. Unfortunately the abridged English version is inserted into an overview of Zhou's early career and of the Cultural Revolution which appears to have been written for particularly dim-witted high school students. The translators’ use of American colloquial does not help. The Cultural Revolution, the reader is told, was ‘little more than a mom and pop show run by Jiang [Qing] and Mao’, and Mao himself is made to sound like Al Capone: ‘This guy [Zhang Chunqiao]’, he supposedly tells Lin Biao in 1970, ‘needs two more years of observation … After two years I'll quit and you can take over and handle the work.’⁵⁸ Apart from being idiotic, this devalues a book which, as Jonathan Spence has observed, in many respects breaks new ground and of which important parts ring true.⁵⁹ Gao's depiction of Zhou amending minutes of key meetings to advance his political agenda could only come from someone with intimate knowledge of the original archival texts. His account of Deng Yingchao's pregnancy, since confirmed by other sources, touches on matters known only to a very small number of people in Zhou's immediate circle,⁶⁰ and the final chapter, dealing with the Premier's illness and death, is both moving and packed with detail conveying the murderous unpredictability of life at Mao's court in the final years of his reign. Yet other parts of the text – notably those dealing with the 1970 Lushan plenum and Lin Biao's demise – are muddled, contradictory or just plain wrong. Whatever the reason, Gao has been less forthright than he might have been. In private some of those in Mao's inner circle, notably Wang Dongxing, have been far more critical of Zhou's self-serving behaviour,⁶¹ which may be the true explanation of why Mao treated him as contemptuously as he did. Gao's book is intriguing but it could, and should, have been much better than it is.

The past decade has also seen three significant new biographies of Mao, all (originally at least) in languages other than English. Mao: The Real Story, by Alexander Pantsov, was first published in Russian in 2007 and subsequently translated and re-edited by Steven Levine (Simon and Schuster, 2012). It is, as the title implies, a riposte to Chang and Halliday's The Unknown Story – even the dust jacket has the same format as theirs, but with a red background instead of bilious green and a photograph of a benign looking Mao in place of a sinister caricature. The opening sentence sets the tone: ‘Historical figures merit objective biographies.’⁶² Apart from incorporating new Chinese research about Mao's early life, its great strength lies in Pantsov's access to the Chinese Section of the Russian State Archives, which contain documents relating to the CCP held by the Soviet Communist Party (the CPSU) and the Comintern, including voluminous personal files on Mao and other Chinese leaders. The result is an illuminating and distinctively Russian perspective – with all the pluses and minuses that that implies – on the key episodes of Mao's rise to power and on relationships within the Chinese leadership.⁶³ Alain Roux's magisterial work, Le Singe et le Tigre: Mao, un destin chinois [The Monkey and the Tiger: Mao, a Chinese Destiny] (Larousse, Paris, 2009) is among the most balanced and comprehensive accounts of Mao's life in any Western language. Erudite and extremely readable, it offers a finely judged appreciation of Mao and the times in which he lived – constructed, in the best French sinological tradition, from a vast range of Chinese sources, official and unofficial, academic and scurrilous, which have been painstakingly collated and cross-checked to give each its proper weight. The notes alone, which take up the last 200 pages of an 1,100-page volume, make the book worthwhile. Sadly, it has not been translated into English, perhaps because of its length. Even longer and, until now, still less accessible to most Western readers is the definitive multi-volume Chinese-language biography of Mao, which runs to some 3,000 pages, published by two leading Party historians, Jin Chongji and his colleague, Pang Xianzhi, who was in charge of Mao's private library until his purge during the Cultural Revolution (Jin Chongji, Mao Zedong zhuan (1893–1949), Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, Beijing, 1996; and Jin Chongji and Pang Xianzhi, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976), from the same publisher in 2004). While constrained by the need to adhere to the official interpretation of Mao's overall role – discussed in the preface to this book – their account provides a wealth of new information, including substantial extracts from many previously unpublished documents in the Central Archives, and, despite certain omissions, they manage between the lines, if not always explicitly, to convey an extremely detailed, reliable and sometimes critical portrayal of Mao's political career. In the process they offer valuable insights into what may and may not be written about Mao in China today. Although the full text will not be translated, an abridged two-volume English version is to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

Though not strictly speaking a biographical work, mention must also be made of Stuart Schram's monumental series of translations of Mao's writings before 1949, Mao's Road to Power (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY), referred to earlier. When the first edition of this book was published, four volumes had appeared, covering the period 1912–34. Schram, then the doyen of Mao scholars, did not live to see the project completed. Four further volumes have followed, taking the story up to the Seventh Congress in 1945, and two more are yet to appear. The introductory articles alone, by Schram himself and other scholars including the late Stephen Averill, Lyman van Slyke and Timothy Cheek, are almost a biography in themselves. For anyone interested in the way Mao's mind worked, these texts are essential – and fascinating – reading.

Other recent monographs have cast light on specific aspects of Mao's life. Any list is bound to be subjective, but among those that stand out are Elizabeth Perry's Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition (University of California Press, 2013) and Stephen Averill's Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Between them they provide a vivid multi-faceted picture of the extraordinarily complex social and cultural world in which Mao began his political career. Perry describes the secret societies, labour racketeers, workers, traditional elites and corrupt (and progressive) bosses amid whom Mao, Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi attempted to ‘communicate foreign concepts through familiar conduits’ by enmeshing socialist ideas with local customs, folk religion and ritual. A decade later Mao would formalise this experience as ‘the sinification of Marxism’. Averill, who spent twenty-five years studying Jinggangshan, has left a marvellous account, published posthumously by colleagues, of peasant life and social and ethnic conflicts in the remote, bandit-infested region where in 1927 Mao established the first substantial communist base area.

Yoshihiro Ishikawa, in The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party (Columbia University Press, 2013), Steven A. Smith (A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–27, Curzon, 2000) and Alexander Pantsov (The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, University of Hawaii Press, 2000) have filled in many gaps in our knowledge of how communist doctrines came to China and the halting and often confused efforts of Chinese intellectuals to create a communist movement. While not specifically about Mao, they help to explain the context in which his ideas about Marxism developed, and Ishikawa, in particular, throws new light on the mechanisms whereby communist texts reached China through Japan.

Relatively little new work has been done on Mao's life prior to and during the May Fourth movement, no doubt because all the eyewitnesses are long dead and most of the surviving documents are already well-known.⁶⁴ Other areas remain under-explored for different reasons. Crucial documents on the Gao Gang-Rao Shushi affair remain sealed because of Deng Xiaoping's involvement. That is also the case of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which Deng organised on Mao's behalf, and of the period between the 10th Plenum in 1962 and 1965, when Deng and Liu Shaoqi were working to repair the damage wrought by the Great Leap Forward. Certain documents relating to Mao's role in the sufan, the campaign against counter-revolutionaries in the early 1930s, are likewise off limits even to senior Chinese Party researchers. But the ‘black hole’ in Mao studies concerns the hidden struggle between Mao and Zhou in the late 1930s and the rectification campaign which followed, when the future Premier was forced to make a series of abject self-criticisms (none of which has ever been made public) and Party dissidents were brought to heel by imprisonment and torture. While well known in outline, the detailed story of this crucial period has yet to be written. The relevant documents are believed still to exist, hidden in the most restricted section of the Central Archives, but, given their sensitivity, it may be decades before they are made public, if ever.

So how should one judge Mao and the China he left behind? Stuart Schram concluded, after half a century studying the man and his ideas: ‘Mao's merits outweighed his faults, but it is not easy to put a figure on the positive and negative aspects. How does one weigh, for example, the good fortune of hundreds of millions of peasants in getting land against the execution … of millions, some of whom certainly deserved to die, but others of whom undoubtedly did not? How does one balance the achievements in economic development … during the whole twenty-seven years of Mao's leadership after 1949, against the starvation which came in the wake of the misguided enthusiasm of the Great Leap Forward, or the bloody shambles of the Cultural Revolution?’⁶⁵

Another of Mao's biographers, Delia Davin, has written: ‘No honest person who has studied the Maoist record would wish to be cast as an apologist for him … But his revolution reunified China and made the country a force to be reckoned with in the world. The Chinese remember that and so should we.’⁶⁶ Pankaj Mishra, in the New Yorker, wrote that ‘Mao provided a battered and proud people with a compelling national narrative of decline and redemption … Increasingly … China's middle classes accept the additional story in Maoism – the story of rising China: China was great, China was put down, China is rising again.’ Mao, he concluded, was ‘disgraced, discredited, and irreplaceable’.⁶⁷

As for the conflicting visions of China's future pursued by Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, one may legitimately wonder how much difference it would really have made, in the long sweep of history, if Chiang rather than Mao had won in 1949. Rana Mitter, an Oxford don whose thinking is representative of the younger generation of China scholars, has pointed out: ‘Both the nationalists and the communists wanted to establish a politically independent state, with a government that penetrated throughout society, and a population that was stable, healthy and economically productive … However [neither] was seeking to establish what the West, and particularly the United States, would regard as a democracy: a liberal, multi-party regime with significant civil liberties.’⁶⁸ Indeed both explicitly rejected it. In a passage which remains relevant to American policy today, Bai Chongxi, the Guangxi warlord who in 1934 had allowed the Long Marchers to cross his territory to reach safety in the south-west, and who, ten years later, became one of Chiang's key commanders, wrote in his memoirs in the late 1970s, long before there was talk of ‘regime change’ and ‘exporting democracy’ in Washington: ‘The big mistake that America often makes is to force their model of democracy on other countries’.⁶⁹

Mao's victory was viewed at the time as a grave setback for America's strategic goal of establishing a democratic or at least neutral China on the Soviet Union's southern border. Yet the ‘loss’ of China to communism did not prevent the United States becoming the world's dominant power. Nor did US support for Chiang's rump state in Taiwan make it a democracy: that did not happen until long after the Generalissimo's death. Had Chiang defeated Mao, would he have been able to unify and develop China as effectively as his communist rival? In Pankaj Mishra's words: Would China without Mao have found the political basis for its current prosperity?⁷⁰ That is open to debate. In any case, the challenge to the West posed by Xi Jinping's China today is not communist but nationalist. There is no reason to think that a mainland China ruled by Chiang Kai-shek's successors would wish to act significantly differently from that now ruled by Mao's heirs.⁷¹

But all this is ‘what if?’ history. The fact is that Mao won. The historian's task is neither to blame nor to praise him, but to describe how he did so, how he used his victory and why. As Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine wrote in the preface to their biography of Mao: ‘It is far too late to settle any scores … He is dead and answerable only, as he said himself, to Karl Marx. The task we set ourselves, rather, was to portray in all essential details one of the most powerful and influential leaders of the twentieth century. It is our hope that this book will help readers to achieve a deeper and more accurate understanding of Mao, of the times and country that produced him, and of the China he created.’⁷² I cannot put it better.

* There is an intriguing, remarkably apposite and today largely forgotten precedent for Mao: The Unknown Story. In 1910, Sir Edmund Backhouse co-authored a book entitled China under the Empress Dowager, which was said to be based on the diary of the Comptroller of the Imperial Household, Jing Shan. For many years, his book was regarded in European chancelleries as the ultimate authority on China's last dynasty, and it exerted a powerful influence on Western views of the warlord period over the following two decades. An account in East Asian History recalled ‘a tidal wave of eulogies’ for Backhouse's work in contemporary newspapers: ‘Critics everywhere, not to be outshone by their peers, showered it with extravagant expressions of appreciation, as if no praise were high enough.’ Thirty years later, Jing Shan's diary was shown to be a forgery. Today the entry for Backhouse in the Oxford University Press's Dictionary of National Biography concludes: ‘There may be many small truths in [his] manuscripts … but we know now that not a word he ever said or wrote can be trusted.’ As though to show that there is nothing new under the sun, in 2013 Jung Chang published a biography of the same Empress, Cixi, whom historians have portrayed with rare unanimity as a benighted, reactionary ruler, in which she advanced the contrarian argument that the dowager was actually a great and progressive woman. One of the few specialists to review the book, Pamela Crossley of Dartmouth College, writing in the London Review of Books, noted the same problems that plague The Unknown Story. ‘Many of her sources are indirect, suggestive or just plain unreliable’, Crossley wrote. ‘Her claims regarding Cixi's importance seem to be minted from her own musings, and have little to do with what we know was actually going in China … Rewriting Cixi as Catherine the Great or Margaret Thatcher is a poor bargain: the gain of an illusory icon at the expense of historical sense.’ Jung Chang admired Cixi; she loathed Mao. Both books come across as the fruit of personal crusades.

* In this context it is worth considering the case of the world?s next most populous nation, India. According to the Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist, Amartya Sen: ‘Despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former… India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame’ (quoted by Pankaj Mishra in ‘Staying Power: Mao and the Maoists’, New Yorker, December 20, 2010). The Indian government acknowledges that, by its own reckoning – which may be too low – 39 per cent of Indian children today are stunted by malnutrition and have a greater likelihood of starving to death than in most African countries (Global Nutrition Report, 2015). That in no way diminishes the horror of what Mao and his colleagues did, but it is a useful reminder that such abominations are not unique either to the communists or to China and that they are not yet a thing of the past.