LACKING IN NUANCE

The long march to Mao (Peter Wilson, The Australian, June 14, 2005)

Mao's portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where government leaders proudly present themselves as his heirs, and Western politicians, from Kissinger to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, who were so thrilled to visit Mao, have still failed to understand his ghastly nature, she (Jung Chang) says.

"This is the greatest mass murderer in history, a man we calculate killed at least 70 million people and was prepared to let many, many more die if necessary to pursue his mad policies."

Halliday says Whitlam was one of many leaders delighted by their brush with history in meeting Mao, even though Australian ambassador Stephen FitzGerald was probably the best, most knowledgeable and informed ambassador any country had there.

"There was always an amazing desire among those Western leaders to say: 'I have a special relationship with Mao' or 'He spent more time with me than with others,"' he says.

"I would fault them for presenting him as some sort of moral voice or philosopher. There was a vanity on the part of [former US president Richard] Nixon and Whitlam and others that somehow they had broken open China [when] it was not true."

The Chinese Government has declared that Mao was 30 per cent wrong and 70 per cent right, and most foreign analysts -- including his high-profile Western visitors -- have cast him as a significant statesman, philosopher and military leader, but Chang and Halliday have produced an unremittingly negative portrait.

They present him as a coward and military incompetent who cared little for China's peasants or even his own family. They say his patriotic image was a facade, accusing him of doing little to fight Japan during World War II and even collaborating with Japanese intelligence. Chang and Halliday insist that Mao was brought to power by a foreign power: Joseph Stalin's Russia.

The Great Famine of 1959-61, which they estimate killed 38 million Chinese, occurred only because of Mao's determination to export food to Russia to buy military technology in the hope of dominating the world, Chang says.

"He was much worse morally than I expected. I always thought it was mismanagement, but after 10 years of work we can say it was worse than that; he knew that so many people were going to die because he was exporting food but he decided to do it anyway to buy nuclear technology for his own dream of becoming a military superpower. He just didn't care," she says. [...]

Philip Short, a British author and journalist who published a book on Mao in 1999, says that Chang and Halliday have come close to a hatchet job. Speaking by telephone from northeastern China, where he is lecturing and conducting further research on Mao, Short says it does nobody any good to exaggerate the obvious monstrosities of Mao.

"I fear this is a case of writing history to fit their own views; doing what the Chinese call cutting the feet to fit the shoes," Short says.

"Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there's no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan. Do we really gain in understanding by denying his complexity, his perversity, his genius and reducing him to a one-dimensional caricature?

"Mao was a tyrant, but [also] much more than that. He was the reverse of a one-dimensional man. He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius. He had great skills and enormous failings. Let's not oversimplify and pretend he was just a monster. The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Mao who cooked it up; almost every other Chinese leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain."

Surely we can all agree that his poetry redeems him. Just like with Hitler’s paintings.