Mao is Number One Monster of 20th Century
In a country that still reveres him, what ought we expect?
In their new book, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make an impassioned case for Mao as the most monstrous tyrant ever. They argue that he was responsible for "well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th-century leader," and they argue that "he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin" in that he envisioned a brain-dead, "completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders."
The book demonstrates just how brutal and conniving Mao was in his rise to power, maps out the key role he played in fomenting the Korean War and reveals the huge degree to which he was dependent on Stalin both in coming to power and in trying to turn China into a nuclear superpower. The authors write that "close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork" during the Great Leap Forward and an accompanying famine. This, they contend, was a result not of economic mismanagement but of cold political calculus. They argue, further, that Mao launched his deadly Cultural Revolution as a means of purging those officials (like his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi) who had dared to question his catastrophic Great Leap Forward policies.
Not only does their book demolish many of the myths Mao perpetrated about himself - myths that were believed by a host of Westerners, ranging from Simone de Beauvoir to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon - but it also serves up a far more scathing portrait of the Chinese leader than those laid out by recent biographers like Philip Short and Jonathan Spence.
