Culture
A look back in anger
by Tze Ming Mok
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have written a thorough, damning, outraged biography of Mao Tse Tung, but is China listening?
For writing Mao: The Unknown Story with her historian husband Jon Halliday, Jung Chang has been called “a true running-dog bitch” and an “agenda-driven fanatic” by Chinese Internet commentators.
You know, she doesn’t seem like an agenda-driven fanatic. Chang does speak with absolute conviction, but also with measured, genteel grace. Her tiny frame poised at the edge of a vast couch appears about as wide as the 800-page hardback edition of The Unknown Story. In another echo of the book, Chang’s natural diction is intent, emphatic, but above all, precise. Meanwhile, Halliday is a lanky, lively and donnish Englishman, fond of affable anecdote, with a dry-lemonadey wit. Promoting the book in Auckland, they turn their backs on an epic, glistening view of the Hauraki Gulf, leaning in to their interviewer as if proffering sheaves of their dusty evidence accumulated over 10 painstaking years. “Look at what we found!” their postures say. “Can you believe it?!” More than anything, they present as committed history-geeks – Halliday describing how he broke into a sweat over material in the Russian archives, Chang how she haunted Beijing book fairs and second-hand bookstores, buying up every piece of Communist Party documentation she could lay her hands on.
So far the Chinese Government has remained silent on this inflammatory new biography. Says Chang with utmost care, “They haven’t denounced it; they have not said anything.” Though her Wild Swans was banned in China early in the 1990s, Chang has never been prevented from entering China to visit her mother and she wants to keep it that way.
Although the regime also knew that Chang was researching Mao during her yearly trips to China, they “sort of tolerated me doing research … I think most people in the leadership don’t know a lot of the things in the book themselves. I’m curious to see how they react when they realise the truth.” A little spark of nervous excitement shoots between the two authors. When they realise the truth. Such optimism. As scholars, they harbour an unfashionable belief in the power of truth to reach the ears of the wilfully deaf. There is an unspoken hope that the regime is curious about its own history. At the same time, Chang suggests that the Party “may not have realised what a devastating book this was going to be”. Because, at the time, neither did Chang and Halliday. Says Chang, “I knew Mao was bad, but I didn’t know he was this bad.”
With The Unknown Story doubtless to be banned in China, how long will it take for Chinese people to be convinced of this alternate history? “I think as soon as they read the book!” says Chang, with absolute sincerity. “If they’re allowed to read the book and see how persuasive – no – how true the facts are, they will believe it.”
Will they? In China, where Mao is the closest thing to a national religion and one of the last touchstones of the regime’s ideological legitimacy, The Unknown Story would be literally heretical in its revision of early, inviolable myths – those that paint the making of Mao, the Communist Party and the modern Chinese nation as one, indivisible, riotous blooming. Just a few of The Unknown Story’s heresies: the practically biblical story of the Long March was a fraud disguising a bout of Mao’s intra-Party manoeuvring that squandered over 70,000 lives. Bam! Mao welcomed the Japanese invasion, hoping for a Soviet counter-invasion that would split and colonise China. Pow! The massive famine of the Great Leap Forward was not a result of socialist incompetence, but an intentional policy that knowingly traded lives for Soviet nuclear technology. Ka-BOOM! The Unknown Story savages Mao with an army of endnoted, attributed details backed with masses of archival material and eyewitness interviews. Every event is accounted for. Western critics take no issue with the facts unearthed by Chang and Halliday, but instead, questioned the withering glare and furious bitterness apparent in Chang’s prose, worrying that this will reduce the book’s ability to persuade those who need the information the most – the citizens of the People’s Republic. Did Chang and Halliday decide it was less important to seem objective than to be correct? Did they get carried away into character assassination?
“It’s not as though there’s a kind of ‘good Mao’ and ‘bad Mao’,” says Halliday. “I do think we are very, very objective because we made a decision to write about everything.”
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