by Philip Short
One of the major ‘revelations’ of Mao: The Unknown Story is the claim that, during the Long March in 1935, the battle between the Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek's forces to take control of the chain bridge over the Dadu River at Luding – a critical chokepoint where Chiang hoped to wipe out the communist army once and for all – never in fact happened. According to Chang and Halliday, it was a myth cooked up by Mao ‘probably … because [it] looked a good place for heroic deeds’. Their main source was a 93-year-old woman whose family owned a bean-curd shop near the bridge. When Chang interviewed her in 1997, she could remember only sporadic firing and no real fighting. Interviews 60 years after the event are notoriously unreliable, but for what it is worth I also visited Luding, five years before Chang. While there, I recorded an interview with a man in his late sixties who described how, as a ten-year-old, he and two other boys had hidden on the embankment and watched the entire battle. I found his account convincing because, contrary to the version then current in China, he described watching the communist soldiers, not swinging hand over hand along the chains, as Edgar Snow had recounted in Red Star over China, but crawling along them, which Chinese historians now agree is what happened. Chang went on to quote a Chinese newspaper interview with the curator of the local museum in which he was reported to have denied that the nationalists had tried to set the bridge on fire. When I interviewed him, he told me the opposite. As further evidence that the battle never occurred, Chang cites an interview by the British writer, Robert Payne, with Peng Dehuai in 1946, in which, she says Peng ‘did not say one word about fighting or a burning bridge.’ In his memoirs, however, Peng wrote at length about the battle. So did Payne, in an earlier book on his travels in the communist areas, Journey to Red China, which Chang does not cite. She concludes her requisitory with the words: ‘The strongest evidence for debunking the myth … is that there were no battle casualties.’ Yet Liu Binrong's Hong yi fangmian jun jishi, an exhaustive four-volume history of the First Front Army, published in 2003, states that three members of the 22-strong communist vanguard were killed in the assault. Chang prefers instead to quote a bodyguard of Zhou Enlai who overheard that there were no deaths, a story put about at the time as propaganda for the Red Army's invincibility.
So much for the evidence that the battle never occurred. On close examination, none of it stands up. As for the evidence that it did take place, Jung Chang passes over in silence the accounts of numerous contemporaries, including Otto Braun, the Politburo's Comintern adviser – a witness hostile to Mao if ever there was one – and of Yang Chengwu, who commanded the attack. She ignores articles in nationalist newspapers, which reported on the battle shortly after it occurred; documents in the nationalist military archives; and Chiang Kai-shek's telegrams ordering that the bridge be held.
I have dwelt on the authors’ treatment of this particular event because it demonstrates a selectivity in the use of sources which is found throughout the book. Every possible piece of hostile information, whether credible or not, is ‘vacuumed up’, as Andrew Nathan of Columbia University put it; anything which might reflect well on Mao is omitted.
Chang and Halliday take the same approach to citations. Early on in their book, they quote from the marginal comments which Mao wrote as a 24-year-old student on a translation of Friedrich Paulsen's System der Ethik. From one passage Jung Chang deduces that ‘Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. [He wrote:] “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people”.’ Leaving aside the mistranslation – Mao did not write ‘people like me’; he was talking about human beings in general – the real problem is with what follows, which Chang does not quote. Mao added that a key part of ‘duty to oneself’ is helping others who are in need. He went on to explain:
If I see someone in danger and do not try to rescue him, even if not doing so would not be considered wrong, will I really think in my own mind that not helping him is right? The fact that I think it is not right is what makes it my duty to rescue him. We rescue those who are in danger to set our own minds at rest.
Does that constitute misrepresentation? The reader will judge. It is certainly straining the truth. Throughout the book, Mao's words are quoted only when they can be used to damn him or, in the words of one China scholar, when the translation can be made to serve as ‘an offensive weapon’.9 In another passage from the same text, Jung Chang quotes Mao as writing that the actions of a hero are ‘like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a sex-maniac on heat and prowling for a lover [emphasis added]’. Mao in fact wrote that they were like ‘a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one's lover, a force that will not stop.’ This is not a matter of differing interpretations. The terms ‘sex-maniac on heat’ and ‘prowling’ are not present in the Chinese original.10 Chang cites among her sources, in addition to the Chinese text, the first volume of Mao's Road to Power, which contains the definitive English translation of this passage by a team led by Stuart Schram. She would therefore have been aware of how the text should be rendered. Yet she chose to publish a version which served her thesis that Mao was a sexually depraved psychopath.
This is not to say that everything in Mao: The Unknown Story is invention or distortion. Andrew Nathan has described the book as a mix of ‘plastic and jade’. Buried in the text are interesting and original nuggets. The problem is how to recognise them. What are we to make, for instance, of a supposedly verbatim quotation from the diary of Mao's wife, Yang Kaihui, to which is appended a footnote stating: ‘The following words were mostly recalled from memory after reading the document in an archive and some therefore may not be exact’? An archive? We know that a cache of Yang's papers was discovered in 1972 and is conserved in the Central Archives in Beijing, where senior Party researchers have been permitted to consult it: indeed, its existence was first revealed in the West in the first edition of this book. Foreigners are not admitted to the Central Archives, let alone to the restricted section where the original is held, which is off limits even to most Chinese scholars. So where did Jung Chang see it? Or was she briefed on its contents, as I was, by one of the Party hierarchs authorised to see it? If such doubts surround Yang Kaihui's journal, how much credence should we attach to Jung Chang's quotations from the unpublished diaries of Mao's eldest son, Anying? The alarm signal here is the way Jung Chang treated the experiences of Anying's wife, Liu Songlin (whom Chang refers to by an alternative name, Si-qi). This is her account of how Songlin learned of Anying's death in the Korean War:
Nobody informed Anying's young widow [that he was dead] for over two and a half years [until] she asked Mao, who [finally] told her … During those years she had been seeing Mao constantly, spending weekends and vacations with him, and he had not shown any sadness, not even a flicker to suggest that anything was wrong. He had even cracked jokes about Anying as though he were alive.11
Mao: The Unknown Story takes that as evidence of Mao's indifference (notwithstanding the testimony of Peng Dehuai, who was with Mao when he learned of Anying's death: Peng wrote that Mao was devastated. Jung Chang disregards his account). But the issue here is not Anying but Liu Songlin. When I interviewed her in 2005, she told me essentially the same story as Jung Chang relates but gave it a totally different meaning:
Looking back, I feel very, very sorry for Chairman Mao. Why? Because he knew that Anying had been sacrificed, but … in front of me, he kept up the pretence that nothing untoward had happened, that it was all as usual. We often talked about him. He told jokes about Anying when he was small, and I shared my memories too. It must have been terribly hard for him. As an old man who had lost his son: it was so cruel … After he learnt of Anying's death, he told Li Linqiao and Ye Zilong [respectively Mao's chief bodyguard and secretary] that the news must be kept from me. He thought that I was too young and I would not be able to bear it.
In fact the explanation was no doubt simpler. Of all his surviving children, Mao had placed his greatest
hopes on Anying. In grief, the first stage is often denial. After his son's death, denial appears to have become part of Mao's coping strategy: by seeking to protect his daughter-in-law he tried to control the pain he felt himself. But whatever the rationale, indifference was not part of it.
The inescapable conclusion is that little in Mao: The Unknown Story can be taken at face value. I suspect that there is more ‘jade’ in the text than is immediately apparent. But ‘jade’ and ‘plastic’ alike are daubed in such layers of vitriol that, unless each assertion is independently verified or disproved, there is no way of telling them apart.*
China studies will get over this. In fact one can make a case – and a number of academics have – that, regardless of the veracity of their work, Chang and Halliday did the field a huge favour by forcing historians to re-examine what had become, in some cases, fallacious certitudes.
Ten years later, the sinological fur is no longer flying as fast. Most China scholars have moved on. Yet perhaps they have done so too quickly. For the episode has raised important questions, one of which was posed bluntly in a short but devastating review of Was Mao Really a Monster? by Michael Schoenhals, widely regarded as being, with Roderick MacFarquhar, the leading Western historian of the Cultural Revolution. It is worth quoting at some length:
Contributor A [Andrew Nathan] shows why a depiction of a ‘regime that engaged in fifty years of mass torture, killing and destruction for no good purpose’ is ultimately a welcome ‘revelation’, even if and when, as he admits, it amounts to ‘a possible but not a plausible’ account of Mao Zedong's life based on extensive use of ‘sources that cannot be checked … [or] are openly speculative or are based on circumstantial evidence … [or in some cases] untrue’. Contributor B [David Goodman] performs an exercise in a similar vein, setting out to explain how a book can be a ‘vast compendium of information about its subject’ even though it is saturated with ‘pretension … pomposity and … poor scholarship’. Contributor C [Lowell Dittmer] critiques a book that, as he points out immediately, is ‘not a work of objective scholarship’ but a ‘vacuum-cleaner assemblage of every bit of information conceivably damaging to Mao's revolutionary reputation’; yet he comes out concluding that it paints ‘a cumulative picture [that] is convincing and in my view quite devastating – it could conceivably alter forever our historical picture of the revolutionary origins of the PRC’. And contributor D [Arthur Waldron] admits to searching in vain for certain ‘facts’ established and ‘issues’ raised in the mainstream Sinological literature, but all the same is full of admiration for a work that ‘expose[s] Mao Zedong as one of the greatest criminals in human history’.
The question which Schoenhals raised was why some of the best-known names in China studies tied themselves in knots to find worth in a book whose methods they admitted were at best untrustworthy. His answer was ‘political correctness’.
That term may cover a multitude of sins, but in the case of Chang and Halliday's book, four in particular spring to mind: a sense of guilt among mainstream sinologists that, with hindsight, they had been too soft on the undoubted horrors which accompanied Mao's revolution, and were therefore ill-placed to criticise those who (even if for the wrong reasons) were now speaking out more frankly; a reluctance to be seen defending the founder of a regime which had become associated in the public mind with dictatorship and human rights violations; a desire, common to all corporative endeavours, of which academe is one, not to get too far out of line from the emerging political and public consensus that China, and everything connected with it, should be subjected to more searching and hostile scrutiny than had been the case before; and last but not least, a desire to appear ‘fair’, particularly on the part of scholars who have written extensively about Mao, lest their criticisms be seen as the sour grapes of academics whose work could never hope for the kind of commercial success that Jung Chang's books enjoyed.12
Yet there were obviously other factors at work as well. None of the foregoing explains why Mao: The Unknown Story struck such a chord with opinion makers and with the public at large. Geremie Barmé wrote that it was ‘tailor-made for the Age of Terror’.13 Today the Bush years are behind us, but Western concerns about China's emergence as a great power, and a correspondingly jaundiced view of its political system and of the history that created it, live on.
The changing social and intellectual climate also played a part. Revisionism is in vogue. In the English-speaking world (though not in France or Germany), the term has lost its former, negative connotation and has acquired instead a brave, new positive gloss. Questioning the Holocaust is still out of bounds but that is a rare exception. Everything else is fair game. Challenging orthodoxy has become an end in itself. Anything is better than what one reviewer called ‘the tired, old, standard version’, even when that tired, old version is more credible than any other. To make his or her mark, a historian has to come up with something new. Nor is it just historians. The number of articles retracted after publication from mainstream science journals because of suspicions that data have been faked, ‘massaged’ or plagiarised has grown exponentially in recent years. Among the main reasons is ‘the pressure to publish attention-grabbing findings.’ 14
Overturning conventional wisdom is accepted all the more readily because, throughout the West, mistrust of the political and intellectual establishment encourages the belief that there is a ‘truth behind the headlines’ which the authorities wish to conceal. Arthur Waldron, writing in Commentary, appears to have had this in mind when he accused his fellow China specialists of having ‘shamefully’ suppressed the evidence of Mao's depravity ‘lest it undermine the fantasy of a humane, caring leader’.
Beyond all these elements lies a deeper problem. The British historian, Norman Davies, put it this way:
History is too complicated. The past is too big, there is too much of it. Mythology is what is created because people prefer a simple, straightforward explanation of what happened to this awful, complicated mess.
The desire for simple answers to complicated questions is hardly new. But in the second half of the twentieth century, and above all in the last two decades, it has become more pronounced. At one level that is part of the downside of what in other respects is among the more positive developments of recent times: the democratisation of knowledge. In a broader sense, it has to do with the way modern life is lived: we try to cram more into less. As in all trade-offs, there is a price to pay. Broadcasters use a simplified vocabulary, books and newspaper articles are condensed, information is conveyed by news flashes, headlines and ‘tweets’. Brevity can be a strength: think of the beauty of haiku. But today the goal is often not concision but pandering to a limited attention span. People are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available. It has to be boiled down to manageable proportions. To appeal to a broader public, academics are tempted to put a premium on liveliness and accessibility. That is not necessarily a bad thing: it is certainly better than jargon. But it is difficult to combine with scholarship and it is rarely conducive to nuanced writing or to the separation of fact and opinion.15
China, more than most countries, defies reduction to simple, let alone simplistic, formulae. Yet specialist publications apart, that is all too often how the recent history of China is now written: in reductionist, bite-sized mouthfuls with the depth of a cardboard cut-out.
Lest that judgement appear too abrupt, let me quote from the opening paragraph of an article in the New York Times in 2015, which asserted baldly: ‘ In 20th-century totalitarian systems, tyrants like Stalin, Hitler and Mao murdered millions in the name of outlandish ideologies.’16 The authors were not journalists: they are both well-regarded professors – Sergei Guriev from Sciences-Po in Paris and Daniel Treisman of the University of California. Jung Chang's narrative has taken root. Marxism and Nazism are different sides of the same coin. Stalin, Hitler and Mao were monsters together and that is all there is to be said.
As though by symbiosis, while Mao's
image has been blackened, that of his great rival, Chiang Kai-shek, has acquired fresh lustre. By the late 1970s, when China had become America's de facto partner against the Soviet Union, Chiang's supporters in the United States had been silenced. Attempts by the so-called China Lobby to show that Chiang would have won had it not been for the perfidy of Roosevelt and Truman who ‘betrayed [him] by withholding support and material aid at critical junctures of the Civil War’ had bitten the dust, thanks in part to a best-selling book by Barbara Tuchman, Sand in the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. She argued that the nationalists had lost because they were authoritarian, inept and corrupt, had no mass base and were debilitated by their obsession with the communists. The United States, she wrote, despite heroic efforts by General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, Roosevelt's choice for US Commander in the China theatre until 1944, had been unable to prevail because Chiang Kai-shek's army was unreformable without a wholesale change of system which the Generalissimo was unwilling to make. After two decades of Chiang's dictatorial and sometimes brutal rule on Taiwan, most American opinion-makers were inclined to agree with her.17
In Chiang's case too, however, the pendulum swung too far and needed to swing back. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars like Thomas Rawski and Julia Strauss argued that the Generalissimo's record before the war in building the institutions of a modern state had been better than most Western writers were prepared to admit and that his administration was not uniformly corrupt.18 But the first major work to challenge systematically the prevailing consensus on Chiang was Hans van de Ven's War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (Routledge Curzon, 2003). Van de Ven refuted Tuchman's thesis and effectively demolished the Stilwell myth, arguing that the American's military tactics were misguided, that he had no understanding of China or its people, and that his presence hampered rather than helped the war effort which the United States was pledged to support. Chiang, in van de Ven's view, was a better strategist than his American ally. After the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932, the Generalissimo had started trying to create a modern army and to build a centralised State with a disciplined bureaucracy and a solid political economy. The problem, van de Ven wrote, was that it was too little, too late. While the nationalists – not the communists – bore the brunt of the fighting against the Japanese, Chiang was hamstrung by his inability to achieve complete control over his forces, whose loyalties remained divided. Although officially they were all now part of the Guomindang, each unit was under the sway of an individual warlord. In such circumstances, van de Ven concluded, far from being incompetent, Chiang did better than expected, but he was not equipped to fight a modern war and his regime emerged from the conflict so badly weakened that by 1945, if not earlier, his chances of defeating Mao in the civil war which was to follow were seriously impaired.19
