 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Mao - The Unknown Story
By Jung Chang & Jon Halliday
Jonathan Cape $65.00
Generalissimo - Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost
By Jonathan Fenby
Free Press $29.95
 This
hefty debunking of the remnant Mao myth, exhaustively prepared by one-time Red
Guard, Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, and her husband, Jon Halliday, has now
joined Mao's Last Dancer on the best-seller list. Less popular, presumably because
he 'lost' China, is the study of Chiang, an excellent work by English journalist,
Jonathan Fenby.
Mao Tse-Tung and Chiang Kai-Shek were the giants of modern China's history
and their legacies are felt strongly on the mainland and in Taiwan respectively.
The Mao biography will shock those still viewing him as an honest, frugal leader
who devoted himself to the advancement of his people. Rather, Mao's passions were
exercising power, dominating global communism and if possible the world itself,
and many personal indulgences, not least young women.
'Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter
of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in
peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader,' the book begins, detailing
how the son of a peasant family became an unscrupulous despot who, with Stalin's
vital help, created a terror state run by cowed cadres.
One standout is the talented yet obsequious foreign minister, Chou En-Lai,
cruelly denied treatment for bladder cancer because the paranoid Mao was determined
to outlive him.
The purging of opponents began in 1930 when thousands of Red rivals were killed
on Mao's orders, many 'hauled through the streets to their execution with rusty
wires through their testicles.'
Things peaked with the 'Great Leap Forward' that caused 38 million to die of
starvation and overwork: two decades later Mao would commend Cambodia's Pol Pot
regime for pursuing similar policies.
The disastrous Cultural Revolution was marked characteristically by the Chairman's
hypocrisy: as the Red Guards were destroying antiques, Mao, a keen reader, was
accumulating looted books. Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was just
one foreigner to be fooled, remarking that Mao's sitting room 'looked like the
retreat of a scholar.'
What might have happened if Chiang Kai-Shek, as corrupt as Mao but far less
ruthless, had triumphed in the civil war following the defeat of Japan and courted
the US as Mao did Russia?
Neither author speculates, although Chiang's persona would not have helped:
'The trouble in China is simple,' opined US Gen. Stilwell, in Fenby's excellent
study.
'We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate superstitious, peasant son of a bitch,'
whom he first dubbed 'Peanut' and later, 'the rattlesnake'..
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore
|
