In 1976, the year of Mao’s death, I went back to China when the British foreign secretary Anthony Crosland paid an official visit there. Asked what he thought of Mao’s colossal experiment in social engineering, Crosland replied, ‘It’s revolting.’ If you’re puzzled by this reaction from Old Labour’s leading thinker, you should read the new biography by Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday. The book breathes life from every page. In addition to extensive Chinese and non-Chinese written sources, the authors have conducted several hundred fascinating interviews with people who were close to Mao and his entourage or witnesses to events described.
In public life we should never forget what can happen when political ‘narrative’ parts company with the truth, and language loses touch with reality. The conventional picture of Mao’s place in history is that he was the visionary, statesman, strategist of genius, philosopher and poet, who in his lifetime brought China from semi-colony to Great Power, making changes in one generation that took the West centuries to achieve. With China now one generation away from overtaking the United States as the largest economy, who is to say that this view is all wrong? But in a world where the contest between Western democratic values and absolutism remains unresolved, we still need to understand the true price of alternatives. Jung Chang’s book highlights the immense human costs of Mao’s career and the appalling political monster that this Frankenstein created.
Other biographers have stated that the victims of Mao’s land reforms, purges, political campaigns and famines (such as those triggered by the Great Leap Forward) were exceeded only by all the dead of the second world war; and greatly outnumbered the killings of Stalin or Hitler. Mao: The Unknown Story now puts the total of those who perished in peacetime as a consequence of Mao’s misrule at over 70 million — a figure significantly larger than that normally attributed to the second world war.
Based on death rates from Chinese demographers, these authors say that close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the four years 1958–61, 22 million of them in 1960 alone. These magnitudes were confirmed by Liu Shao-chi to the Soviet ambassador at the time. During the first two of these years, Mao actually exported millions of tons of grain, to pay for industrial and defence hardware. The regime apologist Han Su-yin stated that Chinese urban housewives (NB, not peasants) got 1,200 calories a day in 1960: presumably she was unaware that this was significantly less than the daily intake granted to concentration-camp labourers at Auschwitz. At times of shortage Mao, an ignoramus on economics, simply issued the order ‘Educate the peasants to eat less.’
Famine apart, the authors calculate that deaths in prisons and labour camps over Mao’s years from 1949 totalled some 27 million. In the ten years of the Great Purge (1966–76) that came with the Cultural Revolution, at least three million people died violent deaths outside prison. Post-Mao leaders have stated that 100 million people (one-ninth of the entire population) suffered in one way or another during that period.
The first half of this admirably annotated and indexed book moves deftly through Mao’s political coming of age, the Long March, to his supremacy in the Party, the building of his power base in Yenan, culminating in the eventual defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the founding of the Chinese People’s Republic in 1949 when Mao was 55 years old. The second half covers his last 27 years in power, his pursuit of superpower and nuclear status, his drawn-out revenge on political opponents in the Cultural Revolution which brought the whole country to its knees, and the final Götterd
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