Mao Zedong profoundly influenced the destiny of the Chinese people more than any other Chinese leader since the First Emperor of Qin unified the country and built the Great Wall. He has inspired many biographies. Philip Short's is probably the best. Well researched, rich in detail, and beautifully written, it provides an illuminating and accessible portrait not just of the Great Helmsman but of China during the turbulent 20th century.
The reader gets a real sense of the man who, from rural beginnings, rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party and led the Great March across China to win victory for the revolution in 1949. Mao was an enigma, someone who could write beautiful poetry but remain insensitive to the suffering of the millions who perished as a result of his actions. To his people he was the supreme being; in private he was boorish, lowering his trousers in front of guests to look for lice, and in later years sharing his oversize bed with several young women at a time. Of the three great tyrants of the 20th century, Mao caused the most deaths of his own people. But, unlike Stalin and Hitler, he remains a political icon in his own country. Mao's portrait adorns the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, taxi drivers hang his picture from their windscreens, and banknotes carry his moonlike features. One reason is that his party remains in power and to dump him completely would undermine its legitimacy. But mainly Mao did one big thing for the Chinese. He ended its shame. Mao's lifetime spanned the transition of China "from semi-colony to Great Power; from millennial autarky to socialist state; from despoiled victim of imperialist plunder to permanent member of the UN Security Council."
Even to his closest comrades Mao was always hard to fathom. In hindsight a pattern can be found. The young Mao drew from Confucius key ideas which were to prove fundamental to his later thought, including the need for a strong centralised state. From the beginning he was ruthless in pursuit of the cause. Mao resorted to terror long before he came to power, playing a leading role in the murderous purge of 700,000 suspected "AB" (anti-Bolshevik ) spies inside the party in 1930. He drew his strength from sheer political will, and his belief in its force - and the need for constant change - became the source of his grossest errors. The movements which he initiated - the Hundred Flowers campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution - were the inevitable consequences of his lifelong convictions.
When the socialist transformation of agriculture was accomplished ahead of plan in 1956, Mao concluded that, given the will to succeed, material conditions need not be decisive. Thus he blundered into the Great Leap Forward of 1958, designed to pull China ahead of the industrialised West. Peasants had to build backyard steel furnaces, and villages were left without metal implements. Sparrows were exterminated and insects multiplied. Deep ploughing caused soil erosion. The result, along with harvest failures, was the worst famine for centuries when peasants ate each other's children to avoid eating their own. Over 20 million people died. Compared to Stalin's exterminations and Hitler's holocaust, the famine was a crime of omission rather than commission, but Mao must carry the full blame. Intolerant of any criticism, he purged General Peng Dehuai for daring to tell him of the mistakes being made. Mao then launched the Cultural Revolution to unleash the masses against the party itself, to make China a blank sheet of paper. He whipped up a revolt against authority among people convinced of his infallibility. It was the AB purge on a nationwide scale, made worse by his deviousness. "Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices," wrote Defence Minister Lin Biao, who died in an air crash in Mongolia when fleeing Mao's wrath, "and tomorrow he puts them to death for some fabricated crimes."
BUT the Cultural Revolution, concludes Short, gave the Chinese people such an overdose of ideological fervour as to immunise them for generations to come. All it produced was a cruel, sterile society. The book incidentally portrays Mao's sidekick, Chou En-lai, as a supine accessory to his crimes, rather than the decent revolutionary of popular acclaim. Jonathan Spence's book is a pocket Mao, more a monograph than a life. It is written with authority and style, as one would expect from the best historian of China in English, and Spence sheds light on Mao's development by examining what he read and what he wrote, particularly during his early years. As one of a series of "Lives" which also includes Crazy Horse, Marlon Brando and James Joyce, it is all-too-brief and lacks an index.
The 1999 version of the official Chinese encyclopaedia repeats the Communist Party verdict on Mao which appeared shortly after his death. It credits him as the main founder of modern China but criticises his arrogance and arbitrary decisions, and in particular his treatment of General Peng. For the first time in 20 years it drops the conclusion that "Mao's merits to China's revolution far exceed his mistakes." Even today's leaders who pay lip service to Mao Zedong no longer really buy the line that he was 70-30 correct. It is a pity that both these excellent books will not be available to Chinese people so that they can decide for themselves. Censorship in China, arising from a deep distrust of the people by the Communist Party, is, alas, one of the legacies of Mao's revolution.
Conor O'Clery is Asia correspondent of The Irish Times