|
Mao: The Unknown Story | 
 enlarge | Authors: Jung Chang, Jon Halliday
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy Used: $7.80
You Save: $11.15 (59%)
New (42) Used (25) Collectible (2) from $7.80
Avg. Customer Rating:  256 reviews
Sales Rank: 17857
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 864
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.8
ISBN: 0679746323
Dewey Decimal Number: 951.05092
EAN: 9780679746324
ASIN: 0679746323
Publication Date: November 14, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Minor wear around the edges of the pages. Ships within 24 hours. 100% money back guaranteed.
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
In the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, "Today, Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." For Chang, author of Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to history, but to decency. Mao: The Unknown Story does not contain a formal dedication, but it is clear that Chang is writing to honor the millions of Chinese who fell victim to Mao's drive for absolute power in his 50-plus-year struggle to dominate China and the 20th-century political landscape. From the outset, Chang and Halliday are determined to shatter the "myth" of Mao, and they succeed with the force, not just of moral outrage, but of facts. The result is a book, more indictment than portrait, that paints Mao as a brutal totalitarian, a thug, who unleashed Stalin-like purges of millions with relish and without compunction, all for his personal gain. Through the authors' unrelenting lens even his would-be heroism as the leader of the Long March and father of modern China is exposed as reckless opportunism, subjecting his charges to months of unnecessary hardship in order to maintain the upper hand over his rival, Chang Kuo-tao, an experienced military commander. Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao's ascent to power and subsequent grip on China in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon's visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao's unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao's ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors' consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. --Silvana Tropea
10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Q: From idea to finished book, how long did Mao: The Unknown Story take to research and write? A: Over a decade. Q: What was your writing process like? How did you two collaborate on this project? A: The research shook itself out by language. Jung did all the Chinese-language research, and Jon did the other languages, of which Russian was the most important, as Mao had a long-term intimate relationship with Stalin. After our research trips around the world, we would work in our separate studies in London. We would then rendezvous at lunch to exchange discoveries. Q: Do you have any thoughts about how the book is, or will be received in China? Did that play a part in your writing of the book? A: The book is banned in China, because the current Communist regime is fiercely perpetuating the myth of Mao. Today Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, and the regime declares itself to be Mao's heir. The government blocked the distribution of an issue of The Far Eastern Economic Review, and told the magazine's owners, Dow Jones, that this was because that issue contained a review of our book. The regime also tore the review of our book out of The Economist magazine that was going to (very restricted) newsstands. We are not surprised that the book is banned. The regime's attitude had no influence on how we wrote the book. We hope many copies will find their way into China. Q: What is the one thing you hope readers get from your book? A: Mao was responsible for the deaths of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime, and he was bent on dominating the world. As China is today emerging as an economic and military power, the world can never regard it as a benign force unless Beijing rejects Mao and all his legacies. We hope our book will help push China in this direction by telling the truth about Mao.
Breakdown of a BIG Book: 5 Things You'll Learn from Mao: The Unknown Story 1. Mao became a Communist at the age of 27 for purely pragmatic reasons: a job and income from the Russians.
2. Far from organizing the Long March in 1934, Mao was nearly left behind by his colleagues who could not stand him and had tried to oust him several times. The aim of the March was to link up with Russia to get arms. The Reds survived the March because Chiang Kai-shek let them, in a secret horse-trade for his son and heir, whom Stalin was holding hostage in Russia.
3. Mao grew opium on a large scale.
4. After he conquered China, Mao's over-riding goal was to become a superpower and dominate the world: "Control the Earth," as he put it.
5. Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "half of China may well have to die."
Product Description
The most authoritative life of the Chinese leader every written, Mao: The Unknown Story is based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of Mao’s close circle in China who have never talked before — and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relationship with Stalin went back to the 1920s, ultimately bringing him to power; he welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China; and he schemed, poisoned, and blackmailed to get his way. After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing this dream he caused the deaths of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history. In all, well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao’s rule — in peacetime.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 251 more reviews...
 Evil beyond description October 1, 2008
3 out of 72 found this review helpful
Words cannot convey the magnitude of atrocities against the Chinese people that are described in detail here. And most of it is still not known in the West. The author backs up the reporting of every event with two or three sources that were present at the time. According to the authors of The Black Book of Communism, estimates are now between 60 and 65 million Chinese that died as the direct result of Mao's attempt to create the Chinese version of the "New Soviet Man." The national psychosis of those years will take generations to recover from, olympics or no.
 Relentlessly Brutal September 13, 2008
175 out of 182 found this review helpful
If a picture is truly worth 1,000 words, Jung Chang could have drawn a crisper portrait and spared us the repetitive and monotonous diatribe that stretches over 600 pages. This depressing narrative is peppered with painstaking details on each solitary injury, strategic blunder and character foible of Mao over his long and lethal lifetime. As insightful and illustrative as all this might be, she could have chosen a few select examples and still made her points about what a savage, conscienceless thug he was.
The best chapters are those that depict Mao's scheming interactions with fascinating world-stage characters ranging from Stalin and Khrushchev to Kissinger and Nixon. The entertaining anecdotes about his personal habits and odd scatological humour add colour and lighten the dismal recounting of the fate of the mind-numbing millions who suffered under Mao. But, overall, the experience of reading this lengthy tome can be as relentlessly brutal as Mao himself.
 Informative History of Mao September 9, 2008
8 out of 234 found this review helpful
I am not a student of Chinese history and knew little of the details of Mao's rule in China until reading this book. In fact, the reason I read the book at all was to learn a little something more than my general impressions derived from news reports during this period. With that said, my overall evaluation of the book is that it is a long ponderous volume that for the general reader is not worth the effort of slogging through over 600 page of dense text to learn some of the details of Mao's reign. I also have some skepticism of the large volume of supporting materials, which are used to source choice facts or quotes plucked from these items to support the authors' statements.
Despite the large effort necessary to get through it, the book serves a very basic need. I believe that even among sophisticated and educated people, little is known, especially in the United States, of the horrors of the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao Tse Tung -- this in marked contrast to our knowledge of the Holocaust and Hitler's insanely evil mass murders. In recent years, however, some scholars (e.g., Robert Conquest) and popular writers (e.g., Martin Amis) have attempted to bring to the attention of general readers the atrocities and mass murders of Stalin and the Soviets. But as far as I know, there has been little corresponding effort with respect to Mao's atrocities, and this volume helps to fill that gap. Its greatest value thus lies in just setting forth the facts of Mao's mind-numbing atrocities. At the end of the book (p. 613), the authors write that "[w]ell over 70 million people had perished - in peacetime - as a result of his [Mao's] misrule." This one statement just about says it all. What more does one need to know about a leader who systematically caused the deaths of over 70 million innocent souls! The remainder of the book gives the ghastly details, in particular the widespread famines that resulted from requisitions of agricultural products needed by the regime to generate foreign exchange to support a massive weapons program.
The parallels between the atrocities of Stalin and Mao are striking. The pervasive use of state terror to acquire and consolidate political power, grain requisitions that left a helpless populace to starve to death, a war against peasants ("Kulaks" in USSR) and intellectuals, collectivization of families into state worker barracks, and party purges -- all carried out in the name of a Communist doctrine that was supposed to free "the people" from the yoke of capitalism. The authors point out, however, that while Stalin's mass murders were largely committed by a professional terror agency (KGB & its predecessor organizations) and in secret prisons and slave labor camps away from the public eye, Mao's atrocities were often carried out by frenzied bands of marauding Communist thugs in staged public gatherings where the victims were "denounced" and abused and tortured before crowds of cheering citizens.
But the extent to which the entire Communist movement in China was controlled and financed by Stalin came as a surprise to me, especially the fawning and subservient role played by Mao. According to the authors, virtually every major decision and policy move made by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the moment of its founding in the early 1920's until Mao's petulant attempts to show his independence in the 1950's was controlled by Moscow. I was not surprised to learn that the Soviets gave unqualified support to Mao after the Japanese were defeated in WWII while the US vacillated and hemmed and hawed in its support of Chiang.
I came away from the book with the feeling that I got only part of the story. For example, it is well known in America (neither of the authors is American, by the way) that the US "supported" Chiang Kai-Chek and his Nationalists in the fitful civil war that ravaged the country from the 1930's until Mao and the Communists drove Chiang to the island of Formosa in 1949. My impression from other readings is that the US support role in the civil war, especially from 1945 to 1949, was substantial and that President Truman's uncertain and bungling efforts to broker a compromise between Chiang and Mao led to the Communists' victory. Yet there is little in this volume describing US policy in China in the 1940's and its effect on the outcome of the civil war. In addition, there is no mention of the internal struggles within the US Government -- for example, the role of Communist sympathizers like FDR's Vice President Henry Wallace and Asian specialist Professor Owen Lattimore in securing Mao's triumph over Chiang.
All in all, the flaws in the book balance its benefits. Most of the text consists of anecdotal stories of Mao's cruelty, his never-ending scheming, and his intimate involvement in state atrocities -- to establish that Mao was a very bad man on a personal level. This theme is constantly embellished by reference to his personal traits and habits - for example, his four "marriages" and many children, for whom he had not the least regard, his elaborate security apparatus involving thousands of personnel, his luxurious life style in mansions constructed to his personal taste in every city in the nation where he might visit, his enjoyment of the benefits of things (e.g., movies and books) denied to his own citizens, and his procurement of young girls for sex much like medieval European kings. Clearly, the authors establish that Mao was a loathsome individual on almost every level of human existence. As they point out, however, his legacy and reputation still dominate the Chinese government, and as we saw in the Beijing 2008 Olympics, his portrait still hangs proudly in Tiananmen Square.
Scary August 21, 2008
77 out of 97 found this review helpful
I must admit, that this is my first biography of Mao, actually my first book on Chinese history; while I have been to China at least 25 times.
Not being a professor of history, I cannot judge the truth of the book, but it certainly seems EXTREMELY well researched. There is no doubt, that the authors despise Mao, they make no apologies about it.
After a bit of a slow start (reading the "first few dozen pages" is not enough!), the book does get very interesting and very scary.
I read biographies of Stalin and of course (being a German) of Hitler. If only 20% of this book is true, both Hitler and Stalin were "harmless" compared to Mao.
One difference between Mao and Hitler / Stalin seems Mao's total lack of purpose, other than his personal power.
The authors do not mention even one good thing about Mao. It is inconceivable to me, that Mao was ONLY bad.....even Hitler built the famous German autobahns. This is the main point against this book.
After having read biographies of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, it is scary, how easy ruthless people can deceive their fellow country men.
( While I am certainly NOT putting Mr. George W. Bush ANYWHREE close to these villains, it is telling, how easily he could get things like Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot's Act passed.......)
Moan August 17, 2008
0 out of 366 found this review helpful
I must say that I was eager to begin reading this widely appreciated biography. Unfortunately, I was turned off by Mao's self indulgent character. Perhaps one day I will pick it up again, but I didn't want to waste a day of my summer vacation by reading about someone I wouldn't care to meet.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
