The crap about the battles in the Long March never hgappening mentioned in this review show how reliable this source is, against the two sources cited we have the personal witness of thousands of people who participated in the March and its battles. It's not worth discussing. This book is obviously toilet paper.
There is a lot of stuff harshly critical of Mao that is actually reliable. Startw ith Spence, I can provide other references.
Mike P, if we all agree to say just for the sake of argument that 20th Century Communism ina ll its manifestations was a mistake,a crime,a disaster, and everyone connected with it was a dupe or a criminal, will you just give this shit a rest?
jks
--- Michael Pugliese <michael.098762001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://news.independent.co.uk
>
> The truth about Mao
>
>
> By Jonathan Mirsky
>
> 28 May 2005
> >... In their decisive biography, Mao: the Unknown
> Story, Jung Chang
> and Jon Halliday leave Mao for dead...
>
> Chang's previous book, Wild Swans, which is said to
> be the biggest-selling
> non-fiction paperback ever, and worth every penny,
> showed the effects of Maoism
> on her family and herself. Halliday, her husband, is
> a specialist on Soviet
> archives. His best-known book, written with Bruce
> Cumings, is Korea: the
> Unknown War, which was turned into a vivid
> television series. Chang and
> Halliday use the word "unknown" again in their new
> book.
>
> The central thesis of this biography is that Mao was
> as evil as Hitler and
> Stalin. Some will dismiss this is a hatchet job,
> meaning that Mao cannot have
> been that bad. He was. Chang and Halliday have taken
> a wrecker's ball to Mao,
> but they use the scalpel too. They have investigated
> every aspect of his
> personal life and his career, peeling back the
> layers of lies, myths, and what
> we used to think of as facts. Many of these facts
> were really lies, usually
> originating in the titanic autobiographical lie that
> Mao fed the American
> journalist Edgar Snow in 1936 for his scoop, Red
> Star Over China. For decades,
> that series of lies underpinned all that Chinese and
> foreigners knew about Mao.
>
> Here is a startling example of what Chang and
> Halliday discovered during their
> decade's research. The central heroic narrative of
> Mao's life, indeed of the
> Communist Party's life, is the Long March, 1934-35,
> long before Mao came to
> power in 1949. A Chinese Odyssey, it goes like this:
> the Red guerrillas escaped
> from the encirclement of President Chiang Kai-shek's
> Nationalist forces and,
> over terrible terrain, often attacked by the
> Nationalists and hostile local
> people, and after almost 90 per cent losses, finally
> reached safety in the
> remote north-west. From their guerrilla stronghold
> at Yanan they built up their
> reputation as land-reforming revolutionaries and
> went on to conquer China in
> 1949. For years Mao was given the credit - largely
> from what he told Snow, who
> thought him "Lincolnesque" - for commanding the Reds
> during that epochal
> ordeal.
>
> And of all the ordeals along the way, the worst was
> crossing the Dadu River, by
> way of a bridge over the deep gorge. The
> Nationalists on the other side had set
> the bridge alight, the story goes, and if the Reds
> had stalled there, exhausted
> and diminished as they were, the Long March would
> have probably ended in
> annihilation. But in the Mao legend, volunteer
> soldiers scrambled hand over
> hand along the suspension chains, through the
> flames, and although some fell to
> their deaths in the rapids below, the survivors got
> to the other side, drove off
> the enemy, the bridge was repaired, and the Reds got
> across and survived.
>
> It didn't happen. Not didn't happen like that, but
> didn't happen at all. "This
> is a complete invention," write Chang and Halliday.
> "There was no battle at the
> Dadu Bridge." There were no Nationalist soldiers
> there, "Chiang had left the
> passage open for the Reds," there were no flames and
> "the Red army crossed the
> bridge without incurring a single death". How do
> Chang and Halliday know this?
> They interviewed "a sprightly 93-year-old" woman who
> ran a bean curd shop right
> next to the bridge in 1935 and saw the whole thing.
> They also read an interview
> with Peng Dehuai, a senior commander at the time,
> who could recall no fighting
> or a burning bridge. The widow of Zhu De, Mao's
> closest comrade in arms on the
> March, mentioned no fighting at the Dadu gorge.
>
> As for Mao, the inspiring commander, he now emerges
> as nearly left behind by the
> March, disliked by almost everyone, wrong-headed in
> both tactics and strategy,
> and, most disgracefully for the legend, a survivor
> of the Long March only
> because President Chiang let the Reds go. At one
> point the Nationalists left a
> truck at the side of the road loaded with food and
> detailed maps of the route
> ahead. Chang and Halliday maintain that Chiang
> spared the Reds partly because
> Stalin was holding his son hostage. Mao and the
> other leaders were carried in
> litters. A survivor told Chang and Halliday that the
> elite "lounged about in
> litters, like landlords". Not a single high-ranking
> leader, no matter how ill
> or badly wounded, died along the March, although
> most of the soldiers perished.
> This was an early example, Chang and Halliday
> assert, of "the stony-hearted
> hierarchy and privilege under Mao's dominion".
>
> The final nail in the coffin of the guerrilla years
> is that Mao rarely fought
> either the Nationalists or the Japanese during that
> period, and when his
> commanders did fight Chiang's forces, just twice,
> Mao was furious.
>
> For several years Mao oversaw the growing of opium
> poppies and the extremely
> lucrative sale of "the black product" in areas
> outside his control. He told
> Premier Chou En-lai that the business was worth six
> times the official Yanan
> budget. The Russians, whose sources on Mao's career
> are Halliday's most
> significant contribution to the biography, estimated
> sales then at $60m "or
> some $640m (£350m) today," a humiliating admission
> for a patriotic movement
> that based its hatred of imperialism on the British
> export of opium into China
> in the 19th century.
>
> And there are many other well-documented assertions:
> Mao was not dragged into
> the Korean war by the Communist leader Kim Il Sung
> and the American assault on
> the north: he wanted the war and knew Chinese losses
> would be astronomical, but
> was willing to trade hundreds of thousands of
> soldiers' lives for Stalin's help
> - he didn't get it - in building a Chinese arms
> industry. Later he lured
> President Nixon to China and persuaded, beguiled and
> dazzled the president and
> Kissinger into offering him secret intelligence on
> the Soviet Union.
>
> All this knocks big holes in the Mao legend. But the
> ultimate target of Chang
> and Halliday's onslaught on Mao is the cold heart
> that drove his pitiless
> behaviour. Four times married, he abandoned, one way
> or another, all his wives
> and most of his many children. The three wives of
> his adult life seemed to have
> been crazy about him no matter what. His surviving
> children tended to go mad.
> For a man once famed among women's liberationists in
> the West, he exploited and
> devoured numbers of women right up to his final
> senile, unwashed, toothless
> days. I knew one such woman, who as a teenage air
> force soldier attended Mao's
> dancing parties in the late Sixties where the great
> moment was being invited
> into the Chairman's bedroom to "make me some tea".
>
> What about Mao the national leader? Actually, he
> cared little for peasants and
> during the worst famine ever, suggested they eat
> leaves while he sold their
> produce abroad, partly to give the impression that
> China was thriving.
>
> As for his close comrades from the guerrilla days,
> Chou En-lai, Liu Shaoqi, Peng
> Dehuai, Zhu De and the rest, Mao turned on them all.
> Of Premier Chou En-lai,
> famed among Western leaders for his courtly manners,
> and believed still by many
> Chinese to have saved certain people from Mao's
> wrath,
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