Unknown Mao ( born Mao: The Unknown Story ) is the biography of the founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong , written by spouses, writer Yong Zhang and historian John Holliday . The Mao book attributed responsibility for a greater number of deaths of civilians than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin .
Unknown Mao | |
---|---|
Author | Yoon Zhang and John Holliday |
Genre | Biography |
Original language | English |
Original issued | |
Publisher | Jonathan Cape (United Kingdom) |
Release | 2005 |
Carrier | Hard cover |
ISBN | 0224071262 |
Before writing the book, the authors conducted an extensive study, for ten years they interviewed people close to Mao and those who knew him; investigated the already published memoirs of Chinese politicians, and also studied the declassified archives in Russia and China. Zhang lived in the era of the Cultural Revolution , which the Wild Swans described in her novel.
Biography Mao quickly became a bestseller in Europe and North America, receiving an unheard of positive reviews in newspapers. Reviews of Chinese scientists were mostly critical.
Content
Story
Zhang and Holliday believe that from the very beginning of their time in power, Mao led a thirst for power, and he arrested and killed her political opponents, including some friends; this does not correspond to the generally accepted view of his early years. They claim that without Stalin’s support in the 1920s and 1930s, Mao could not have gained complete control over the party, and that Mao’s decisions during the Great March were not always successful, and did not correspond to what Mao ascribes to propaganda; Chiang Kai-shek , the book says, did not pursue the Chinese Red Army, and did not capture its soldiers.
The regions that controlled the communists of the Second United Front and during the civil war , such as Yenan and Jiangxi , were ruled by terror and financed by the opium trade. According to the authors, Mao sacrificed thousands of soldiers to get rid of several rivals, for example, Zhang Guotao , and did not seek to fight the Japanese invaders. Despite the origin of the peasants, Mao by 1949, when he came to power, ceased to care about the welfare of ordinary farmers. He sold the crop to subsidize the industry, and intimidation of those who disagreed led to the famine after the “ Great Leap Forward ”, which claimed many lives. Hunger was aggravated by the continuing export of grain.
Great hike
The authors believe that the Great March was not a heroic effort, as the CCP describes it, and the role of Mao as an leader was exaggerated. Officially, he was described as an inspiring commander, but during the march he walked in the rearguard , commanding small forces. Almost all participants in the Campaign did not like him, and his tactical and strategic skills were weak. In addition, the book says that Chiang Kai-shek allowed the Communists to proceed almost without resistance, since his son was taken hostage in Moscow.
The communist elite draws Mao a privileged person who always took care of his subordinates, protecting them from problems. Despite the large number of casualties among the soldiers, presumably, high army ranks did not die in the war.
The book says that, in contrast to the revolutionary mythology, in reality the battle on the Luden Bridge did not occur and the stories about the heroic confrontation are only propaganda. Zhang found a witness, Li Xiuzhen, who told her that the bridge was not set on fire, and there was no battle. Zhang argues that, despite the statements of the Communists, all the vanguard fighters survived the battle. In addition, according to military maps and records of the Kuomintang talks, it can be seen that the guard of the bridge was removed before the arrival of the communists.
Several historical works, including those written outside of the People's Republic of China, describe this battle, although not so heroic. Mr. Salisbury in "The Long March" and Charlotte Salisbury in the "Diary of the Great March" mention the battle for Ludin, but both historians relied on second-hand information. In other works, they do not agree with this point of view: Chinese journalist Sun Shiyun agreed that official records were distorted. She interviewed a blacksmith from the area who said: “When [the Kuomintang troops] saw the soldiers, they panicked and fled, and the command ran long before that. There was no particular battle. ” The Chengdu archives support this assertion [1] .
In October 2005, The Age newspaper wrote that it was unable to locate Zhang's witnesses [2] . In addition, The Sydney Morning Herald found an 85-year-old old woman, a witness to the battle, Li Gusiu, who was 15 at the time of the battle, who claimed that the battle took place: “The battle began in the evening. From the side of the Red Army there were many dead. The Kuomintang opened fire on the bridge superstructure to interrupt the chains, and one of them interrupted. After that, it took the Red Army seven days and seven nights to seize the bridge [3] .
In a speech delivered at Stanford University , former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski mentioned the conversation he had with Deng Xiaoping . Dan, according to Brzezinski, smiled and said: “Well, that's what they say about it in propaganda. It was necessary to raise the morale of the soldiers. In fact, there was a very simple operation ” [4] .
Opium production
One of the statements of the book - Mao not only tolerated opium production, but also sold them in exchange for financing the army. According to Russian data found by the authors, the trade went with an annual turnover of 60 million US dollars. It was stopped only by the growing economy and the high ranks opposed to it.
Campaigns against political opponents
It is alleged that Mao caused his subordinates unnecessary suffering, put them at risk only to destroy their opponents. Zhang Gotao , a Politburo contender, was sent in 1936 with an army to a hopeless battle in the Gobi Desert . After that, Mao ordered the execution of the survivors.
Zhang and Holliday believe that there were other secret ways to deal with opponents besides terror ( Let a hundred flowers bloom ) and operations like the Cultural Revolution. Mao twice tried to poison Wang Ming , another competitor who eventually had to seek refuge in Russia.
Sino-Japanese War
Zhang and Holliday write that, unlike official data, where communist forces fought a difficult partisan war against the Japanese forces, in reality battles were rare. Mao needed people for a war with the Kuomintang, and he was angry when the Red Army fighters attacked the Japanese military.
Sleeping Agents
Significant figures of the Kuomintang in the book are declared the secret spies of the communists, one of them was Hu Zongnan , the general of the NRA . The son Hu rejected the accusations, and the conflict with him forced the publishers to cancel the publication of the book in Taiwan [5] .
Korean war
Mao promised Chinese reinforcements to Kim Il Sung (the leader of North Korea) before the Korean War. Holliday investigated this issue in his work Eng. Korea: The Unknown War .
The number of victims
The book begins by saying that Mao is responsible for the deaths of 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than anyone else in the 20th century. Zhang and Holliday claim that Mao was striving to double the population to achieve military and nuclear superiority. Estimates of the dead during his reign differ, and the authors' estimate is one of the highest. Sinolog Stuart Schram ( born Stuart Schram ) notes in the recall that “exact figures ... are estimated by informed writers at 40–70 million” [6] .
Chinese scientists agree that hunger during the Great Leap has led to tens of millions of deaths, Zhang and Holliday consider this hunger to be the culprit of half of all 70,000 deaths. The official figures of Hu Yaobana (1980) are 20 million, and Philip Short’s estimate in the 2000 book “Mao: A Life” names the most likely number of victims from 20 to 30 million, and the number of authors of the book is 37.67 million. Historian Stuart Schram calls this data “quite likely the most accurate” [7] . Yang Jisheng , a member of the CCP and a former Xinhua correspondent, cites figures of 36 million [8] . In the book of 2010 Eng. Mao's Great Famine: 1958-62 , Hong Kong Historian Frank Dicketter Frank Dikötter , who gained access to the recently opened Chinese archives, claims about 45 million dead, saying that the Great Leap is "one of the most terrible murders in human history" [9] .
Professor Rudolf Rummel has published updated data on world democide in 2005, saying that he considers the figures of Zhang and Holliday to be the most accurate, and also that he corrected his data according to their reports [10] .
Critical reviews
The book of Zhang and Holliday was heavily criticized by some scholars. Without denying that Mao is a “monster,” several historians specializing in modern Chinese history and politics questioned the accuracy of some of the findings, questioning their objectivity; pointed to selectivity in the use of evidence [11] .
David Goodman, Professor of Modern China Science at the Technical University of Sydney , wrote an extremely critical review of the book in The Pacific Review . He suggested that the authors proceeded from the promise of conspiracy among scientists who prefer not to reveal the truth. Goodman also criticized the controversial style of the “Unknown Mao,” and he also strongly rejected the methodology and some specific conclusions [12] .
Thomas Bernstein, a professor at Columbia University, spoke of the book as "... a great tragedy for modern Sinology" because "scholarship is in service to destroy Mao's reputation. The result is a colossal number of quotations taken out of context, distortion of facts, omission of many things, which makes Mao a complex, controversial and multifaceted figure ” [3] .
A detailed examination of the "Unknown Mao" was published in the January 2006 issue of The China Journal . Professors Gregor Benton ( Cardiff University ) and Steve Zang ( W. — D. Tsang; Oxford University ) argue that the book “misinterpreted sources, they are used selectively, out of context, or distorted in order to put Mao in a mercilessly bad light " [13] .
Timothy Chick ( University of British Columbia ) stated that “the book of Zhang and Holliday is not historical in the generally accepted sense of the word”, but “reads like an exciting version of the Chinese soap opera” [14] .
Response to criticism
In December 2005, an article about the book was published in The Observer , which included a small note, where Zhang and Holliday responded to the main criticism [15] .
The cited views of scholars on Mao and Chinese history are generally accepted data that we had an idea about in the process of creating the book. We came to our own conclusions regarding the events in the course of our ten-year study.
Original Text (Eng.)We have been aware of our biography of Mao. Decade's research.- [16]
The authors also responded to Andrew Nathan in a letter to The London Review of Books .
English Publications
- Publisher: Random House
- Publication date: June 2, 2005
- ISBN 0-224-07126-2
- Publisher: Knopf
- Publication date: October 18, 2005
- ISBN 0-679-42271-4
Publications in Russian
- Unknown Mao. - M .: Tsentrpoligraf , 2007. - ISBN 978-5-9524-2896-6
Chinese Publications
- Publisher: Open Magazine Publishing (Hong Kong)
- Publication date: September 6, 2006
- ISBN 962-7934-19-4
Notes
- ↑ Shuyun, Sun. The Long March. - London: HarperCollins , 2006. - p. 161–165. - ISBN 000719479X .
- ↑ Throwing the book at Mao . The Age (October 8, 2005). The appeal date is April 4, 2007. Archived September 15, 2012.
- ↑ 1 2 Hamish McDonald. A swan's little book of ire . The Sydney Morning Herald (October 8, 2005). The appeal date is April 4, 2007. Archived June 6, 2012.
- ↑ Zbigniew Brzezinski. America and the New Asia (not available link) . Stanford Institute for International Studies (March 9, 2005). The date of circulation is December 2, 2006. Archived September 15, 2012.
- Ung Jung Chang: Mao launched land reform obedient . Renminbao (2006-10-11). Retrieved on 4 April 2007. (in Chinese)
- ↑ Schram, Stuart. Mao: The Unknown Story (Eng.) // The China Quarterly : journal. - 2007. - March ( no. 189 ). - P. 205 .
- ↑ ^ Stuart Schram "Mao: The Unknown Story". The China Quarterly (189): 207. Retrieved on 2007-10-07.
- ↑ Mark O'Neill. A hunger for the truth, a banned on the mainland. Archival copy of April 27, 2009 on the Wayback Machine South China Morning Post, 2008-7-6.
- ↑ Jasper Becker . Systematic genocide Archival copy of April 11, 2012 on the Wayback Machine . The Spectator , 25 September 2010.
- ↑ RJ Rummel. Getting My Reestimate Of Mao's Democide Out Undeclared (November 30, 2005). The appeal date is April 9, 2007. Archived September 15, 2012.
- ↑ Fenby, Jonathan . Storm rages over the bestselling book on monster Mao , London: Guardian Unlimited (December 4, 2005). The appeal date is November 19, 2007.
- ↑ Goodman, David S. Mao and The Da Vinci Code : conspiracy, narrative and history (Eng.) // The Pacific Review: journal. - 2006. - September ( vol. 19 , no. 3 ). - P. 361, 362, 363, 375, 376, 380, 381 .
- ↑ Benton, Gregor; Steven Tsang. The Portrayal of Opportunism, Betrayal, and Manipulation in Mao's Rise to Power (Eng.) // The China Journal: journal. - 2006. - January ( no. 55 ). - P. 96, 109 .
- ↑ Cheek, Timothy. Inside the Party: Academic Biography as Mass Criticism (eng.) // The China Journal: journal. - 2006. - January ( no. 55 ). - P. 110, 118 .
- ↑ Jonathan Fenby . Storm Rages Over The Bestselling Book On Monster Mao , The Guardian (December 4, 2005). The appeal date is July 18, 2007.
- ↑ Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. A Question of Sources . London Review of Books (December 4, 2005). The appeal date is November 14, 2007. Archived September 15, 2012.
Links
- "Mao: The Unknown Story" Excerpt from the book
- "New Bio Offers Sinister View of Chairman Mao" NPR (contains interviews with Yoon Zhang and John Holliday)
- "Homo sanguinarius" The Economist , May 26, 2005
- "To be Attacked by the Enemy is a Good Thing" Robert Weil, China Study Group December 31, 2005
- "This book will shake the world" , Lisa Allardyce, The Guardian , May 26, 2005
- "Too much hate, too little understanding" , Frank McLinn, The Independent on Sunday , June 5, 2005
- "The long march to evil" , Roy Hattersley, The Observer , June 5, 2005
- "The inhuman touch - MAO: The Unknown Story" , Richard MacGregor, The Financial Times , June 17, 2005
- China experts attack biography's 'misleading' sources , Jonathan Fenby, The Observer , December 4, 2005
- "Mao: A Super Monster?" , Alfred Chan, Pacific Affairs, (2006, vol. 79, no. 2)
- "China's Monster, Second to None" , Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times , October 21, 2005
- "The Mao That Roared" , Adi Ignatius, TIME , October 23, 2005
See also
* Pantsov A.V. Mao Zedong ( 2007 )