by Philip Short
12. This may help to explain why Stuart Schram, of the Fairbank Centre at Harvard, who was famed for his volcanic outbursts against colleagues with whom he disagreed, treated the book with kid gloves, attributing what he called its ‘rather one-sided views’ to the tribulations of Jung Chang's family in China. Mao: The Unknown Story, Schram wrote, was ‘a valuable contribution to our understanding of the man and his place in history. It is desirable, however, in order to form a more complete and balanced picture, to read one or both of the other relatively recent 600 page books, that by Philip Short and that by Mao's doctor, Li Zhisui.’
13. ‘I'm so Ronree’, in Benton and Lin, p. 82.
14. ‘Science, now under scrutiny itself’, New York Times, June 15 2015.
15. Among those who have succeeded best at this delicate exercise, Geremie Barmé, Rana Mitter and Jeffrey Wasserstrom – and from an earlier generation, Jonathan Spence – come to mind in the field of China studies. Ross Terrill is a case apart: his biographies of Mao and Jiang Qing use some of the techniques of the historical novel (and need to be read accordingly), but like the best of that genre, convey a sense of period that more academic works often fail to achieve. The reader simply needs to remind himself that at times, as Terrill acknowledges, his account is ‘an artistic piecing together of material’ (The White Boned Demon, William Morrow, 1984, p. 401 n. 21) rather than a conventional scholarly text. Others, less gifted, not only Western but Chinese, have tried to use the same technique only to end up producing ‘page-turners’ of distressing shallowness.
16. ‘The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist’, New York Times, May 24 2015.
17. Eastman, Lloyd, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, Stanford University Press, 1984, p. 3.
18. Rawski, Thomas G., Economic Growth in Pre-War China, Oxford University Press, 1989, and Strauss, Julia C., Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927–1940, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998. Franz Michael made some of the same points in 1962, writing of the first decade of Chiang's rule as ‘a time of great progress in many fields – in economic development, in social and educational transformation, in political unification and in the elevation of China's standing in international relations’ (CQ 9, 1962, pp. 124–48). By the 1970s that view had been pushed aside in favour of Barbara Tuchman's portrayal of Chiang's regime as incompetent, dictatorial and corrupt.
19. See also the collection of essays published a year earlier: Defining Modernity: Kuomintang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920–1970, edited by Terry Bodenhor, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2002.
20. Fenby, pp. 501–4.
21. Taylor, pp. 2–3 & 591–2.
22. Foreign Policy, March 24 2014.
23. Cited in Richard Bernstein, ‘Assassinating Chiang Kai-shek’, in Foreign Policy, Sept. 3 2015.
24. See Denton, Kirk A., Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2014, and Rana Mitter, ‘1911: The Unanchored Chinese Revolution’, in CQ 208, 2011, esp. pp. 1019–20.
25. Tanner, The Battle for Manchuria and the Fate of China: Siping, 1946, pp. 214–21.
26. Dikötter, Frank, The Age of Openness: China before Mao, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2008, p. 3.
27. Estimates of the deathtoll caused directly by warfare range from 8 to 10 million (Meng Guoxiang, in KangRi zhanzheng yanjiu, No. 4, 2006), to 14 million, including 2 million combat deaths (Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, 2012, p. 249), to 18 million, based on demographic trends before and after the war (Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 173). Peattie, Drea and van de Ven speculate that the figure may have been more than 20 million (Battle for China, p. 46). Rana Mitter (China's War with Japan, 1937–1945, Allen Lane, 2013, p. 387) posits 14 to 20 million dead and 80 to 100 million refugees.
28. Since the publication of Mao's Great Famine, it has become clear that part, if not most, of the materials from the Chinese archives on which Dikötter relies, were obtained on his behalf by Chinese colleagues, a point rather glossed over in the presentation of his research. The distinction is not anodyne. To the extent that Dikötter was working not with original documents, which he viewed in the archives himself, but with copies made for him by others, it could help to explain some of the errors in the texts he cites.
29. Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 74.
30. Ibid., p. 87 and Yang Kuisong, CQ 193, 2008, p. 117. The citation is from a letter of which a copy is held in the Sichuan provincial archives, addressed by Mao to Deng Xiaoping and other leaders on April 20 1951. The following month Mao ordered that ‘mass executions should be halted immediately’. According to Li Changyu, a former ‘rightist’ from Shandong, quotas were used because Mao ‘feared that once the killing started, it would be difficult to prevent unrestrained bloodshed [and that this] would give rise to popular indignation’ (China Rights Forum, 2005, No 4, pp. 41–4; see also the CC directives of May 8 and May 16, cited in Yang, pp. 117–19). That might sound self-serving, but Li, himself a victim of the quota system, was no friend of the Chairman, whom he condemned as ‘evil and ruthless’. If it was indeed Mao's aim to limit the number of deaths, it failed abysmally, for local officials systematically over-fulfilled the quotas to try to prove themselves to their superiors. Yang Kuisong argues that blame for excessive killing should be apportioned equally between Mao, who presided over the command system which made it possible, and the zeal of grassroots cadres. All sources agree that the campaign ended armed opposition to the regime but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.
31. In the first edition of this book there were a number of ‘howlers’, which Ross Terrill and Alain Roux, among others, were good enough to point out. I would like to hope that they have been corrected in this new edition but it is all too probable that a few undetected bloopers have managed to get through beneath the radar. That is true of almost every non-fiction book that any of us reads. Jay Taylor's The Generalissimo, whose account of the Chinese nationalists draws on meticulous research in the Russian and Guomindang archives, is bedevilled by factual errors when he strays from his main subject and discusses the communists’ role. In most cases such mistakes are due to that most common of human failings, carelessness, and have little or no effect on the underlying argument. In Dikötter's case, they systematically reinforce it.
32. He writes, for instance, that Mao ‘abandon[ed] his third wife for younger company’, when, as we have seen, it was the other way round. He describes Mao living in Yan'an ‘in a large mansion with heating specially installed for his comfort’, whereas in fact he shared a courtyard with other leaders. He claims that Luo Ruiqing, who would become Mao's Security Minister, won the Chairman's trust by the ‘crudeness, savagery and maliciousness’ with which he purged the Fourth Front Army, led by Mao's one-time rival, Zhang Guotao. The less than objective source turns out to be Zhang himself in an interview with Time magazine. Nor was Luo in the 1950s a sinister-looking individual who never smiled because a wartime injury had left ‘his mouth frozen in a permanent rictus’. His facial paralysis was the result of his suicide attempt during the Cultural Revolution. In Mao's Great Famine, Dikötter describes Mao's bedroom at his home in Zhongnanhai as being ‘the size of a ballroom’. The bedroom, which also served as a study and salon, was the size of a reception room in a Chinese ministry at that time or a large sitting room in a country house in Europe. Big as a ballroom it was not. The book ends with a description of a tense meeting in July 1962, after Mao ‘had been urgently called back to Beijing by Liu [Shaoqi]’. Not only was it the other way round – Mao had summoned Liu – but the Chairman had returned to Beijing on the warpath without even informing his colleagues. The error is consistent with Dikötter's mistaken claim that Mao had lost power in 1962, but it shows a curious misunderstandi
ng of the relationship between the Chairman and those Dikötter calls his ‘underlings’. No one summoned Mao to go anywhere: the others went to see him, wherever in China he might happen to be, and then only if he agreed to receive them.
33. Mao's Great Famine, p. 41.
34. Ibid., pp. 56–8.
35. Ibid., p. 299.
36. Ibid., pp. 116–17. Yang Jisheng, in Tombstone (p. 61), gives a slightly different version.
37. Mao's Great Famine, p. xii.
38. So do most other serious studies of the period. Professor Robert Ash of the China Institute at SOAS in London, who has studied the Great Leap from an economic rather than a political standpoint, has noted that whereas the famine in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s ‘reflected a knowing wilfulness on the part of Stalin, famine conditions in China … had their origin in misguided extraction policies based on serious misinformation about the true level of the grain harvest in 1958’ (‘Squeezing the Peasants: Grain Extraction, Food Consumption and Rural Living Standards in Mao's China’, CQ 188, 2006, pp. 959–98).
39. Mao's Great Famine, p. xvi and 236–8.
40. Ibid., p. 292.
41. White, Theodore H. and Jacoby, Annalee, Thunder Out Of China, William Sloane, New York, 1946, pp. 166–78.
42. ‘Memory, Loss’, New York Times, November 30 2012.
43. Mao's Great Famine, pp. xi & 85.
44. Ibid., p. 71.
45. Dikötter wrote: ‘Mao ordered that a third of all grain be procured, far above previous rates.’ What Mao actually said, according to the text Dikötter cites, which has been published by Zhou Xun (The Great Famine, pp. 23–5), was: ‘As long as the amount of grain being procured does not go above a third [of grain produced], peasants will not rebel (emphasis added).’ Thomas Bernstein points out that he did not make clear whether he was referring to gross or net procurements (the latter term denoting the grain initially seized less that subsequently returned to the communes from state granaries). The context suggests the former, in which case – at a time when some rural cadres were seizing more than half the grain crop – Mao's remarks were a call for moderation, or, as he put it himself, to be ‘relentless … but not vicious’, rather than an exhortation to take more (China Perspectives, 2013, No 2, pp. 80–2). It was certainly not ‘far above previous rates’: 25 per cent had previously been the official target but in practice it had frequently been exceeded. Robert Ash has argued that throughout Mao's time in power, Chinese peasants were living at a marginal subsistence level and that Mao, like Stalin, systematically demanded a higher proportion of extraction from agricultural production to finance industrial development than the rural population could reasonably bear. Only after Mao's death, he writes, did this pattern change. The Great Leap, in this sense, carried to an extreme a problem of over-extraction that existed both before and afterwards (‘Squeezing the Peasants’, supra).
46. Ibid., p. 88.
47. Dikötter cites as his source the ‘Minutes of Mao's talk, Gansu [archives], 25 March 1959’ (p. 374, n. 16). In fact the remark was made, not during Mao's speech on the 25th, but during the discussion which followed on March 26 and 28.
48. Quoted in ‘Hard facts and Half-truths: The new archival history of China's Great Famine’, by the Australian scholar, Anthony Garnaut (China Information, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 223–46, esp pp. 235–8 & nn. 61–2).
49. Dikötter himself cites another statement conveying a similar thought in March 1958, in which Mao mused on the extravagant plans of two radical provincial leaders for huge irrigation projects. If they were implemented, Mao said, they would cause tens of thousands of deaths; on the other hand, with a more modest objective ‘maybe nobody would die’ (Famine, p. 33).
50. According to Thomas Bernstein (China Perspectives, 2013, No 2, pp. 74–6), despite the insistence on maintaining secrecy, Mao's comment about ‘letting half of the people starve’ soon appeared in a wallposter in Shandong. A county Party secretary in Sichuan was quoted as saying: ‘A few dead is nothing …. Our socialist system determined that death is inevitable. In the Soviet Union, in order to build the socialist system, about 30% of the people died.’ Ralph Thaxton, in a study of the Great Leap in a small village in northern Henan, has argued that the brutality of the local leadership there, and its indifference to the suffering of the population, was directly linked to the extreme violence they had endured in the war against the Japanese and the subsequent civil war (Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward, Cambridge University Press, 2008).
51. Mao's Great Famine, p. 347. His criticisms are all the harder to understand because, as Garnaut notes in his critical review of the two books (idem.), Dikötter has made substantial, unacknowledged (and not always accurate) use of Yang's research, published two-and-a-half years earlier. He goes out of his way to praise the work of other, inferior, writers and gives the impression that he regards Yang as his one serious rival whom he wishes to discredit at all costs.
52. Yang, Tombstone, p. 12.
53. Ibid., p. 125 and 495–6.
54. Ibid., pp. 398–9.
55. Ibid., p. 133.
56. There are exceptions to the rule. Felix Wemheuer, in a remarkable essay in The China Quarterly (No. 201, 2010, pp. 176–194, ‘Dealing with Responsibility for the Great Leap Famine in the People's Republic of China’). discusses memories of the famine and attributions of blame by elderly peasants and retired local cadres whom he interviewed in Henan. The peasants blamed the Party; the local cadres blamed each other or the provincial leaders, and were often bitter that the higher-ups in the provincial committees were never held to account.
57. The 40th anniversary of the launching of the Cultural Revolution in 2006 was passed over in silence in China. A small group of foreign and Chinese scholars, including some from the Academy of Social Sciences and its offshoots, met for an unofficial three-day symposium in March, the minutes of which were later published abroad (Hao Jian [ed.], Wenge sishi nian ji, 2006, Beijing. Wenhua dageming yantaohui quanjilu, Fellows Press of America, Fort Worth, 2006). But no official conference was held and there was no reference to the anniversary in the mainstream Chinese press. For a different view of Chinese attitudes to the Cultural Revolution, see Suzanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, ‘In Search of a Master Narrative for 20th-Century Chinese History’, CQ 188, 2006, pp. 1070–91.
58. Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai, p. 165.
59. New York Review of Books, May 28 2009.
60. Tsoi Wing-mui, who speculates in her book Zhou Enlaide mimi qinggan shijie [The Secret Emotional World of Zhou Enlai] (New Century Press, Hong Kong, 2015) that Zhou may have been a closet homosexual and was married ‘in name only’ was evidently unaware that their only child died at birth in 1927.
61. More informative than Gao's book, but unfortunately not available in English and therefore less well-known, is Xin faxian de Zhou Enlai, a much longer, highly critical account by two gifted non-professional Chinese historians, using the pseudonyms Sima Qingyang and Ouyang Longmen (Mirror Books, Hong Kong, 2009).
62. Pantsov and Levine, p. 1.
63. For example, Pantsov writes that Mao and his fellow students in Changsha in 1921 ‘were unable to comprehend that all of Bolshevism [is] founded on a lie’. As a post-communist perspective that is certainly a defensible proposition – and only too understandable coming from a Russian writer – but somewhat anachronistic when applied to China in the early 1920s. Similarly Pantsov's use of the Russian term kulak – which, as he acknowledges, has no direct equivalent in the Chinese language or in Chinese society – to designate small landlords, rich (and, on occasion, middle) peasants can be confusing: whatever else Mao may have called the AB-tuan in the early 1930s, he did not refer to them as ‘kulak scum’! That said, and despite his evident detestation of totalitarian regimes, he is at pains to distinguish Mao from Stalin. Mao, he concludes, for all the crimes he committed, was ‘a national hero who … compel[led] the entire world to respect the Chinese people … That is why he re
poses in an imperial mausoleum … He will be there for a long time, perhaps forever.’
64. A partial exception is Liu Liyan's Red Genesis: The Hunan First Normal School and the Creation of Chinese Communism, 1903–1921, State University of New York Press, 2012. Ms Liu's book adds much new information about Mao's teachers, notably Yang Kaihui's father, Yang Changji, about his close friends, Cai Hesen and Xiao Yu, and about the intellectual climate of the time, but it does not break significant new ground about the role of Mao himself.
65. Cited by Roderick MacFarquhar.
66. Davin, Delia, ‘Dark Tales of Mao the Merciless’, in Benton and Lin, Was Mao Really a Monster?, p. 20.
67. Pankaj Mishra, ‘Staying Power: Mao and the Maoists’, New Yorker, Dec 20 2010.
68. Mitter, Rana, China's War with Japan, 1937–1945, Allen Lane, 2013, pp. 13 & 229.
69. Cited in Tanner, p. 86; Guo Tingyi and Jia Tinghi, eds., Bai Chongxi xiansheng fangwen jilu, Zhongyang yangjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, Taipei, 1984, Vol 2, p. 874.
70. Pankaj Mishra, idem.
71. Jay Taylor has speculated that, were Chiang alive today, he would see the current Chinese leaders as ‘modern neo-Confucianists’ like himself, with the same goals for China that he would have adopted had he been in a position to do so (The Generalissimo, p. 592). The implication is that Mao's successors have succeeded in implementing Chiang's vision where the Generalissimo himself failed. If one accepts Taylor's premise – which I find debatable – it can be interpreted either way: as showing that Chiang's ideas have triumphed (‘lost the battle but won the war’); or as vindicating the system Mao founded which has put those ideas into effect (‘game, set and match’).
