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Jung chang and Jon Halliday's "Mao: the Unknown Story" contains a number of interesting and enlightening quotations of Mao and other party officials which are mostly unknown to the public.This is pretty much the only valuable aspect of this book. Unfortunately, there are so many outright distortions and factually untrue statements about every issue discussed in this book that one must be wary of everything but direct quotations (as well as they context these direct quotations are put in), which are mainly printed in collections inaccessible to most (especially non-Chinese). My review will be primarily focused on the agricultural politics and economic policies of the Mao era, which occupy a substantial amount of space in this book. The general thrust of C&H's argument is that Mao desired to procure and export agricultural products (as well as other policies which sacrificed food consumption) in order to accumulate industrial capital (as well as finished military products themselves), which was to be used to produce military productts. A strong theme throughout the book is that Mao's military policy did not have defense in mind. Thus, we get a very coherent explanation of Maoist tyranny - people starved so Mao could be the leader of a superpower, and eventually the world. The picture of Mao as uncaring about (and even liking) death which is painted supports this. Unfortunately, the argument utterly fails. My review of agriculture and economic policies will not be exclusively focused on those parts of the book with direct relevance to this thesis. P.327 states "land redistribution was not the main aspect of Mao's land reform. The part that really mattered was...'struggle against the landlords,'.which in reality meant violence against the relatively better off. (In China, unlike pre-communist Russia, there were very few large landowners.)" This is a collection of absolutely ridiculous statements. Landlords comprised 4% of the population and owned 39% of the land in 1949. This more recent western estimate of the extent of landlordism is actually slightly larger than that of the party at the time (who did not yet have the ability to collect adequate statistics). See Joseph Esherick's (who has an unrelated article cited in this book) "Number Games," Modern China, 7.4 (October 1981):387-411; Chris Bramall, "Living standards in pre-war Japan and Maoist China" Cambridge Journal of Economics, 21. (1997):551-570 and his "Chinese Land Reform in Long run Perspective" Journal of agrarian Change, 4.1. (2004) 107-141. C&H give no source for their claim of the low extent of landlordism. Further, while the landlords had their holdings strongly reduced, a class of "Rich Peasants" averaging nearly twice the income of "poor peasants" in every locality remained. The income share of the richest tenth of peasants was only reduced by 2.8% by the end of land reform in 1952(See Bramall "Chinese Land Reform..." p.111). Mao himself in his 1950 speech "Fight for a Fundamental Turn for the Better in the Nation's Financial and Economic Situation" argued for lenience towards rich peasants in order to preserve the economy and prevent them from siding with the landlords: "Accordingly, there should be a change in our policy towards the rich peasants, a change from the policy of requisitioning their surplus land and property to one of maintaining the rich peasant economy in order to facilitate the early rehabilitation of rural production and the better to isolate the landlords and protect the middle peasants and lessors of small plots." The text of this speech is available online (incidentally, the short section of C&H's bibliography for online material lists two different databses in which this speech is located). Basically, the statement of C&H quoted above is wrong in every way. Pgs. 396-7 state that Mao's plans for industrialization "focused exclusively on building up arms industries...According to official statistics, spending...on the military plus arms related industries took up 61 per cent of the budget- although in reality the percentage was higher, and would rise as the years progressed." The only citation is to the official statistics themselves, missing is an explanation of why they underestimate military related spending. And what is an "arms related industry?" Practically any category of industry has relevance to arms. Considering the fact that heavy industry only accounted for a 42% share of all industry in the year in question (1952) which steadily increased to 65% by Mao's death (Chris Bramall "Sources of Chinese Economc Growth 1978-1996" pp.148-9), I expect that their definition of "arms related industry" is quite loose. No more evidence is provided for the assertion that the industrialization program was exclusively military oriented (no one denies that it was heavily military oriented). The authors go on to criticize Mao for allegedly exporting food in order to build up military capacity. They claim that Mao knew his policies would cause starvation and quote him saying that 10% of households face food scarcity (p.400). However, It is well known that Mao exaggerated claims of economic inequality (it was clear at the time that problems of nutrition were a result of distribution and not aggregate food availability, and later western studies such as Alan Piazza's book "Food Consumption and Nutritional Status in the PRC" confirm that the average person in the PRC had an adequate calorie intake in the early 1950s) during this time period in order to justify the collectivization that would eventually take place in the mid 1950s. Even if Mao's figure is right and even if he believed it, he was still pushing programs which were intended to redistribute agricultural produce in such a way as to relieve this problem. The chapter on the Great Leap Forward is abysmal. The "real" goal of the GLF was apparently to take over the pacific. They quote Mao around the time of the leap implying that he would like to take over the pacific, but provide no evidence that this was a goal of the leap (much less the primary one). The authors rightly point out that ridiculous claims about agricultural yields were pervasive in the late 1950s, and that Mao encouraged these exaggerations. They wrongly conclude (without evidence) that the goal was to use the inflated yield figures as a means to procure a greater amount of produce. In relaity, there was a conflict over how quickly the basic program of the Leap should be implemented. Mao felt it should be implemented quickly, and all those who didn't paint a rosy picture of the economy in the late 1950s were branded as "rightists" attempting to discredit Mao's radical programs, and were severely persecuted. It is likely that Mao himself believed this nonsense, as agricultural inputs were reduced in accordance with the inflated claims of increased productivity. This of course severely reduced output (as there were no such productivity gains) and was a major cause of the famine (Xizhe Peng "Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China's Provinces" Population and Development Review,13.4.Dec 1987) C&H's evidence that Mao couldn't have believed in August 1958 that China had a great surplus of food is that in January he said there wasn't enough food. This following a few pages discussing the claims of extravagant agricultural output in the intervening months. No evidence is provided that Mao didn't believe these claims. A more Bizarre argument relates to the massive mobilization of labor inputs during this period, which the authors regard as slavery. Mao did this because he "wanted to raise output without spending any money, he latched on to methods that depended on labour, not investment." (p.447) In relaity, labor was mobilized very much, but so was investment! The Chinese investment share was 24.9% in 1957, 33.9% in 1958, 43.8% in 1959, and 39.6% in 1960, followed by three years of less than 20% investment in the aftermath of the famine. The rate of investment during the famine years dwarfed the Maoist era average of 27.1% and in some years even the 36.7% average of 1978-1996. The investment share in 1959 was the highest in Chinese history. this was actually an obvious cause of the famine. C&H (pp. 456-7) estimate 38 million famine deaths on the basis of a 4.34% mortality rate in 1960 and a 2.83% rate in 1961. The 1960 figure is nearly twice the level given in the data from the massive census in the early 1980s (the figure given by the 1980s census for 1961 is indeed more than twice as small) but "the official statistics published in 1983 are recognized as partly defective, because local policemen understated the number of deaths in the years 1959-61 after some were purged for over-reporting deaths." Partly defective? Their estimate requires the census data to be so radically defective as to be useless. They cite a Chinese study as their source, which contradicts basically every other study on Chinese mortality ever written anywhere. They don't mention how these precise figures were arrived at, and anyone familiar with the enormity of the census from the early 1980s (which investigated demographic trends in the past as well) must be skeptical of how anyone could arrive at an estimate not heavily based on the census. Most Western estimates say 30 million died in the famine. C&H's estimate is only 8 million above this, but such a comparison hides the radical nature ofthe author's mortality estimate. Mortality had been rapidly decreasing in the years leading up to the famine, and continued to decrease afterwards. Most demographer's find around 30 million deaths in excess of what would be predicted by the trends. If C&H applied their absurd mortality figures to this more common method, they would probably get a figure of around 50 million. However, they simply calculate deaths in excess of those actually realizeed in the years surrounding the leap. The authors argue that no one would have died if grain wasn't exported. "During..1958-9, grain exports [of] 7m tons would have provided the equivalent of over 840 calories per day for 38 million people - the difference between life and death...Had this food not been exported (and instead distributted according to humane criteria), very probably not a single person in China would have had to die of hunger." As if its so easy to identify exactly how many calories any person needs so as to only distribute that food over a gigantic country of hundreds of millions of people to only the 38 million who need it to survive, despite the fact everyone is consuming dangerously low levels of food! More distortions deserve mention. they quote Mao's hostile statements in 1959 about peasants who were alleged to be hiding grain. While they cite Dali Yang's excellent "Calamity and Reform," they conveniently leave out Mao's later statement, quoted in Yang's book, that "I certainly hope [peasants are hiding grain], I'm afraid they have nothing to eat at all!" This omission is especially surprising considering that on page 401 the authors quote Liu Shao-chi statements in 1951 about the need of peasants to have consumption goods, and comment that "This was the kind of language Mao never used." I will make one comment about their discussion of the Cultural Revolution: They repeat the line established by the party in 1981 that the CR was a struggle among the party elite. They say that Mao manipulated the Red Guards into trying to destroy his political enemies (typically, the authors don't distinguish between the Loyalist Red Guards and the Rebel Red Guards, the two violently opposed factions whose battles accounted for much of the chaos). In reality, the CR was a struggle which arose out of the fact that a new priviledged "red" class had been created since the establishment of the PRC, and that huge anatagonisms had built up. It was this priviledged position that the rebles rebelled against. Mao gave confused and contradictory support to both sides (although primarily the rebels) while the rest of the party sided with the loyalists. The major players in the CR were the people, not the party elite! (See Anita Chan "dispelling Misconceptions about the Red Guard Movement" Journal of Contemporary China" 1.1. Sep 1992) The biggest problem with this book is that they ignore Mao achievements, arguably as or more spectacular than his failures. They call most irrigation programs a "stupendous waste" while giving an unbalanced review of a small number of them. For a good discussion of their costs and benefits, see Bramall "Sources..." pp. 140-7. While the problems of flooding and drought weren't solved, they were reduced far below the scope of the devastating natural disasters which killed millions upon millions in the century prior to communist rule. Microlevel data show yields pervasively increasing with irrigated area. Since "Stabilization" in 1952, redistribution nearly halved the death rate by 1957. By thee end of the Maoist era, the death rate was a third of its 1952 level. this was a result of Maoist redistribution and health care. As Judith Banister concludes in her classic study (other Banister work is cited by C&H) "China's Changing Population": "Much of the improvement in China's health and mortality conditions since about 1968 may be attributable to the preventive and curative work of the barefoot doctors." Chang herself was a barefoot doctor, according to the back flap, but does not discuss their achievements. The legacy Maoist economic program is a major cause of China's fast economic growth of the last quarter century, as Bramall's book meticulously documents. To the authors' credit, they make a convincing argument that Mao said alot of really stupid stuff.