Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I teach Chinese politics at the college level. I assign Jung Chang's excellent autobiography, Wild Swans, to my class. My students love it, and with good reason. It captures the ever-changing complexities of China in the 20th century as few books can. Therefore, I was eagerly anticipating the publication of Mao: The Untold Story. However, not only have I been disappointed, I am appalled! Books like this serve to dumb down the next generation of people with a casual interest in China and Mao. First, the book is written in a style that approximates a book-length version of a Red Guard poster. Every sentence is a polemic. Each paragraph is sure to remind the reader (in case he or she forgot what was written in the previous paragraph) of just how evil and horrible Mao was. Indeed, the thesis of the books is that Mao was so horrible, that he had absolutely no redeeming qualities. Now, no serious China scholar would disagree with the statement that Mao was an unlovable person and an increasingly poor ruler after 1958. In this, the book does not tell us much new (and as the book gets closer to the last decade of Mao's life it becomes somewhat less egregiously inaccurate). But denying Mao his place in history by arguing that he was simply a scheming manipulator whose monstrousness was matched only by his incompetence makes no sense. The Chinese had many potential leaders to choose from after May 4th 1919, and the history of the CCP is full of intrigue. Anybody who rose to the top must have been ruthless and manipulative. But they must also have been extraordinarily competent, if only to survive. If Mao was the imbecile that Chang and Halliday make him out to be, this could simply not have occurred. In addition, the book boasts a list of interviews and interviewees that is quite stunning in its scope and in terms of the incredible access obtained by the authors. Alas, the result is an almost criminal exercise in missed opportunities. Apart from citing Michael Caine (whom I love as an actor) as an expert on the Korean War, and the now-famous 90+ year-old woman in Luding who denied the entire Luding Bridge episode during the Long March, the authors interviewed a number of my senior colleagues in the China field. Instead of listening to the more nuanced accounts that these scholars were attempting to provide, Chang and Halliday (according to several of these China scholars), but especially Chang, simply did not want to hear any information that contradicted her central thesis that Mao was evil and incompetent. As a result, although these China experts are cited in the interviewee list at the back of the book, the data that they were uniquely qualified to provide did not appear in the book itself. I will assign the book in my social science research courses as an example of how NOT to interview experts in the field. One is reminded of the brilliant Monty Python sketch in which there is a TV show featuring as guests Karl Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong and instead of actually holding a substantive discussion, the guests are asked to guess the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest and the nicknames of British soccer teams. [..] Another serious problem in the book is that the authors reinterpret largely settled issues in 20th century China. There is nothing wrong with revisionism per se if it provides new light on a previously misunderstood event. Usually, however, such Perry Mason-like moments in scholarship are few and far between. If a scholar is lucky, he or she can publish one or two books that refute the existing paradigm on a major substantive subject. But in this book, there are dozens of such refutations. This means that either the scholarly community got it wrong and Chang and Halliday somehow got it all right, or that Chang and Halliday played fast and loose with facts and interpretations. Now, I am no believer of maintaining sacred cows in academia, but one cannot but be suspicious of Chang and Halliday's Oliver Stone-like approach to China scholarship, especially given what we can infer from their less-than-disinterested approach to interviewing the participants. This book is the JFK of China studies. The reason why it is important to lay out the problems with this book is because Chang and Halliday have the type of access to the general reading public that most scholars can only dream of, given the success of Wild Swans and the advertising campaign that surrounded Mao: The Untold Story. I would urge people to read The Politics of China edited by Roderick MacFarquhar or Governing China by Ken Lieberthal. If these are too "dry" for the average reader, they should read Philip Short's Mao: A Life or Li Zhisui's The Secret Life of Chairman Mao. [...]