Mark McCord

When Chinese biographer Jung Chang set about her quest to write the definitive memoir of the life of the father of communist China, Mao Zedong, her fellow historians told her not to waste her time. “The belief was that all that was to be known about Mao was known,” says Chang, the celebrated author of the hugely popular Wild Swans, a gripping account of three generations of women in her family in China. “But that just isn’t true at all,” she said in Hong Kong where she has been promoting Mao: The Unknown Story, a mighty account of the dictator’s life that is the culmination of 12 years work with her co-author husband John Halliday. “What we discovered were complete revelations.”

In a biography as powerful in its condemnation of Mao as it is audacious in its breadth, Chang and Halliday relate the story of a power-greedy dictator willing to sacrifice the lives of half his nation in the name of his own crazed political ideals. Even Hitler or Stalin were no match for Mao’s desire for power or willingness to sacrifice his own people for it, they claim. Ultimately, they argue, Mao not only created a legend that the nation’s ruling Communist Party still reveres to this day, but he also constructed a web of myths to protect that status and to terrify the nation into submission. It is these myths that Mao... destroys with the same brutality as it says their architect created them. “Mao didn’t really believe in communism. He became a communist because he was in the right place at the right time when the Soviets formed the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s,” says 53-year-old Chang. “The biggest myth that survived into the 21st century is the Communist Party’s version of its own history and that of Mao,” adds her soft-spoken husband.

This book claims to blow the lid on a litany of historical falsehoods used to inspire patriotism and keep those people docile. China’s great Long March, for instance, when Mao’s Red Army troops reputedly trekked thousands of miles to regroup under fire from the enemy Nationalist army was a complete fabrication, the duo’s book claims. And in his eagerness to hasten the Korean War, Mao is revealed to have been prepared to send in his now infamous “human waves” of troops — estimated at 300 million soldiers, or half the then population — in the expectation that they would all be killed but would at least bog down the enemy’s advance through the peninsula. “China’s official history is a fraud,” asserts Halliday. “However, what was most shocking to us was that Mao knew the costs of his policies — he knew what the results would be. The great famine for instance — not only did he know how many people were dying but he built the deaths into his policies.”

Chang and Halliday’s project was only expected to take two years but the deeper the historians dug the further they realised they had to go. Progress was hindered by the difficulty in sourcing material. Although the authorities made no effort to prevent the two entering China and approaching former Mao aides, their intended subjects had been forewarned not to cooperate. “The government issued an edict in 1994 warning a small group of Mao’s inner circle that we were coming to write this book and that they must be careful not to co-operate,” says Chang. “Some people were cautious and declined interviews. But others helped.” That set in motion a domino effect of informants who came forward to reveal all about the nation’s former leader. Although the book paints as unflattering a picture of the founder of modern China as is conceivable, the Chinese government has studiously avoided comment. The closest it has come to outwardly recognising the work was to ban distribution in China of an edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review on the grounds that it gave the tome a favourable review. The book will not be made available in China, but Chang and Halliday have no doubts it will be read there thanks to one of China’s subversive talents that Mao might well have approved of: piracy. “There were pirated versions of Wild Swans so there will be pirated versions of this,” says Chang.