Putting the ghosts to rest

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.