Mao - Unknown Story - Essay Example

Mao: The Unknown Story Biography Review Mao: The Unknown Story, a biography written in 2005, is about the life of Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China, who lived between 1893 and 1976. It was authored by Jung Chang together with her historian husband Jon Halliday, contending that Mao Zedong was responsible for the demise of more people during peace than Stalin and Hitler. As expected, the book was well received in the North America and Europe, while its reception in China was heavily critical. The authors dispute the idealistic manner in which Mao’s ascent to power is explained. They portray Mao as a manipulative tyrant who did anything in pursuit of power. In fact, they claim that Mao’s motivation since he was a young boy was power, and this led to the murder and arrest of most of his political opponents; whether they were his friends or not. They contend that Stalin’s patronage in the 20s and 30s was responsible for his ascent to the Communist Party’s chairmanship, while the Long March and the decisions he took at the time were not heroic as has been stated by many Chinese scholars. The authors wrote the book to debunk Mao’s mythical status as the Chinese government’s emblem that remains the same to the present day. According to the authors, those areas that were controlled by the Communists in the Civil War were financed by the sale of Opium, which allowed the Communists to rule by terror (Chang & Halliday 156). Sacrificing over five thousand soldiers to rid the party of his enemies and rivals, they claim that Mao was not even responsible for the initial plan to fight off invaders from Japan. His wealthy background ensured that he had no concern for Chinese peasants, which they support by detailing his determination to make the Great Leap Forward successful, leading to the death of millions of Chinese from famine. Mao’s role in the revolution and the Long March was also exaggerated, tweaked throughout years of rule by the Communist Party to make him the leader of the revolution. The autobiography authors claim that he only commanded a small force and was almost left behind, majority of those who marched alongside him disliked him, and came up with flawed strategy and tactics. Mao, along with other elite Communist leaders, is also accused of being privileged and protected from the hardships that his subordinates were going through. Contrary to mythology surrounding the revolution, the biography contends the Luding Bridge Battle was a fabrication and that the heroic crossing was complex propaganda. According to the book, a witness named Li contended that the bridge was never set on fire, nor was there any fighting on the bridge (Chang & Halliday 160). Using battle plans from the Kuomintang, the authors show that those forces on the bridge guarding it were pulled back prior to the attack by the Communists. One major allegation the authors make in the biography is that Mao was in support of opium production and its trade in those areas that the Communists controlled. The trade, according to some sources from Russian archives, generated some $100 million every year for Mao and the Communists (Chang & Halliday 165). The only reason that the production was stopped was because they overproduced the opium, which had a negative impact on the price, rather than the commonly held belief that Mao stopped it due to its immoral nature. They also allege that Mao put those under his command through torture in order to rid the party of those against him. For example, Zhang Guotao was sent into the Gobi desert with a platoon of soldiers on a mission that was hopeless, following which all survivors were ordered killed due to ineptitude. Other ways he used to get rid of his opponents included general purges and cultural revolutions. In comparison to Chinese official information, the authors disclaim the fact that the Communists under Chairman Mao waged guerilla warfare on the Japanese. Instead, they claim that Mao’s main concern was saving his troops to take on the Nationalists in China (Chang & Halliday 170). Another allegation in the biography is that Mao was very interested in joining the Korean War, despite suggestions by Chinese official sources that he was reluctant to join in. In fact, Mao had promised to make troops available for North Korean leader Kim Il Sung prior to the conflict’s start (Chang & Halliday 200). One of the most stinging allegations they make about Mao is that, in the decades during which he was in power, he held ultimate responsibility for the death of some seventy million Chinese, which was more than any other leader during the 20th century. The writers of the book have the belief that Mao was prepared to see half of all Chinese people perish in order to achieve military and political superiority in the world (Chang & Halliday 202). It is, however, imperative to note that the estimates given by the authors in this biography is the highest of those made regarding Mao’s entire rule. The authors of Mao: The Unknown Story, seek to peel off the falsehoods and masks that have been used to clean the image of Mao as a leader and as a man by the Chinese Communist establishment. The biography reveals Mao to be one of the 20th century’s worst leaders along with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin (Chang & Halliday 250). With regards to the number of people who died during his rule from unnatural causes and for which he can be held accountable, Mao can be described as being more deadly than both. Rather than being the first leader in Communist China to stand up for the peasants needs and stop their exploitation, they expose Mao as someone who held the peasants in disdain. In fact, it is claimed that Mao’s Communist forces in the 20s and 30s, who lived and fought in the countryside, took farm produce from the peasants in those areas and went as far as to leave the peasants destitute. Mao utilized terror with full knowledge of what he was doing to ensure that his will was enforced on the Communist Party, as well as on those people who came under the control of his forces. During the vaunted Long March, it was also shown that Mao and his Communist forces did not have any qualms about using thousands of soldiers, who at the time were scarce, in fruitless diversions that ended up sacrificing the men for the sole purpose of advancing the leadership of Mao (Chang & Halliday 251). The callous nature in which he disregarded fellow Chinese lives and comrades also became evident in the book, especially following his eventual control of larger parts of the Chinese Republic. Despite advice given to him by his commanders about the battlefield, he insisted on continuing the war in Korea, expecting that this would tie up the over one hundred thousand US troops in total disregard of the sacrifices that the Chinese Army was making (Chang & Halliday 286). Compared to the American casualties, Chinese casualties were disproportionate. His regime also saw the squeezing of Chinese Peasants’ livelihoods in order to meet urban and industrial needs, but also in order to pay back the Eastern Europeans and the Soviet Union for the provision of advanced and developed weaponry, particularly with regards to nuclear arms development. During Mao’s scheme that was aimed at overtaking the US and the UK, the Great Leap Forward was an unqualified failure, leading to immense suffering by Chinese peasants, including starvation and mass premature demise of some thirty five thousand peasants (Chang & Halliday 288). This willingness to sacrifice his people continued until his death as he kept on pursuing his ultimate goal of global superpower status. The authors of the biography also seek to debunk Mao’s status as the greatest Chinese leader by casting revealing and new light on various episodes during the tumultuous life of Mao Zedong. They debunk the Long March myth, contending that the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Army, Chiang Kai-shek ensured their safe passage as they marched through some of the rural provinces that he thought his rule to be weak (Chang & Halliday 301). In addition, Chiang hand several constraints, especially the fact that his son was a hostage of the Soviet Union, which made him reluctant to attempt any destruction of the Chinese Communist forces. The much-vaunted crossing at the chain bridge in Dadu is debunked in this biography, dismissing official Chinese claims that Mao’s soldiers marched across the burning bridge under a hail of machine gun fire (Chang & Halliday 303). They show these to be a complete sham and as being meant for propaganda purposes, interviewing historians from the region, consulting sources from the disbanded Nationalist forces, and visiting the very scene themselves. In their attempt to show up Mao as a fraud, the authors successfully contend that he was entirely dependent on support from the Soviet Union. In addition, Mao was also for the idea that the Chinese Communists could not make it alone and that they needed to pursue links with the Soviet Union to get military assistance. In fact, Mao’s Communist forces are shown to have been in the jaws of defeat as General Marshall, an American General, who was mediating the Civil War unwittingly, allowed the Communists to escape crushing defeat as they retreated by imposing a four-month truce (Chang & Halliday 410). By allowing this ceasefire, Mao’s Communist forces were able to get assistance from the Soviet Union, allowing them to reverse the trend and crush the Nationalists at Manchuria, which opened the way for them to take over the rest of China. While some of the distortions about this period had already been questioned and debunked by scholars from China and the west, the access by the authors to records from the recently opened archives in Russia and China allow the authors to give an authoritative opinion on what actually happened, rather than simply talking about the falsehoods. Not only have the authors of this biography fully used the literature they have gotten access to, their notes also show that they have spent at least ten years sifting through archival information, especially in countries that they would not have been able to do so before. By utilizing Chinese contacts as a way to interview a wide array of individuals who were acquainted with Mao in one way or another, they are able to bring out Mao’s real image. Those they interview include witnesses, secretaries, colleagues, friends, and domestic workers. For this reason, they are able to give information that was previously unknown about the life of Mao from his childhood to his death. For instance, while it had long been known that the Communist forces under Mao marketed opium trade to fund their activities, the authors enriched this information by showing how the trade benefited the top leadership and enabled the local governments to build up reserves (Chang & Halliday 157). In addition, they also showed how the opium trade had to be controlled after it led to massive inflation, rather than due to Mao’s conscience as it had always been claimed. The authors are also successful in showing Mao as a man who was self-centered and whose major strength lay in his ability to be pitiless, disregard other people, his ability to spot weaknesses, and exploit them, and his single-minded nature. They are able to achieve this by giving evidence of how he neglected his wives and children (Chang & Halliday 450), his love for reading and food, as well as his bevy of women. They are also able to show his paranoia and lack of courage by showing the more than fifty villas that he had constructed all over China, which were constructed to withstand nuclear attacks. They also show his lack of the skills one would associate with successful leaders of a revolution, such as Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, or Lenin. His lack of oratory skills, clear ideology, and idealism are perfect examples given in the book. In fact, his organizational skills are also questioned, and the authors contend that he was simply driven by his thirst for power. Through blackmail and torture, he was able to build selectively the Communist Party, and it is clear from reading the book that he enjoyed it. Some of the interviewees also claim in the book that he derived pleasure from watching a peasant uprising in 1927 that led to the violent deaths of thousands of people (Chang & Halliday 509), while some also claim that he preferred to watch films of the violence and humiliation of his rivals. All these factors tie with the rest of the book to give a very different image of Mao Zedong than what was initially available. The biography gives several insights of life in China during Mao Zedong’s rule. For example, while the Great Leap Forward has always been viewed as one of the greatest catastrophes of the last century, it is clear that the land reform that took place at the time is responsible for the great economic emergence of China in the last ten years. His insistence on the end of child marriages, as well as the emancipation of women, moved china away from being a country that was inhospitable for women to one of the best places for women in the world today. Indeed, while the authors do not conclude the book this way, it is clear from reading the book that the assault by Mao on the age-old social and economic structures in China laid the groundwork for today’s socio-economic success. Work Cited Chang, Jung. & Halliday, Jon. Mao: The Unknown Story. New York: Anchor Books, 2005. Print. Read More