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My first attraction to this book was the author, because I read "Wild Swans," which she wrote in the early nineties. This book she co-wrote with her husband, a professional editor. I believe he assisted her on "Wild Swans," too, but his role in the writing of this book seems to be more prominent. Not sure what that means, but the contribution is noticeable. This book is well written and very readable.
I can't remember when I have been so conflicted about a book I have read. And it seems I am not the only one. This book has been alternately praised and cursed since it arrived on the scene. Having read the book now, and worked through the frustration I have felt with the brazen assumptions and questionable documentation, I still have to say that I think it is worth reading. I say that because, although the book is seriously flawed, and certainly not as "new," or groundbreaking as it's title seems to claim, it does address questions in it's own flawed way, that demand to be answered.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and Jung Chung is nothing if not angry. Mao's policies deeply hurt her family, and she is determined to get even. This anger, more than any other factor, is the root of this book's inadequacies--inadequacies that overshadow every observation, every conjecture (and boy there are lots of them!), every interview. The bottom line is that this book is tough to evaluate, because it contains so much material that is of questionable origin, obviously designed to support conclusions that are sharply hampered by a poor knowledge of the actual history. According to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, they listed as an interviewee a close personal friend of his who told him that, in fact, she declined to be interviewed. In this sense, the book is aptly named. In ordinary parlance, a book of this kind would be called the "Untold Story." In choosing an unusual name like "The Unknown Story," the authors have, no doubt unwittingly, identified what is the primary weakness of this book. In other words, if the great body of stuff that is thought to be true about Mao were to be divided between that which can be clearly documented, and is known for sure to be true, and that which is largely conjecture or innuendo (gossip, in other words), this book would be the repository of the latter.
But I need to get back to the history problem. This book is not written by people who really know the history, and build the story of Mao into that contextual background. Rather, it is written by people who quite obviously knew very little of the basic historical context before they started writing the book, and built the history by looking for "facts" that supported the conclusions they had started with, and ignoring those which militated against those assumptions. An example might be helpful here:
Regarding the shelling of Quemoy (Jinmen Dao) and Matsu, Chang and Halliday refer to Quemoy at least twice as the "springboard" or "jumping off point to Taiwan." They conclude that Mao must have known he could never take Taiwan , so he must have had an ulterior motive for shelling Quemoy and Matsu, which was to manipulate the Russians into giving him the nuclear weapons he craved. But Chang and Halliday have the story exactly backwards. In fact, Quemoy was not a springboard for China to go to Taiwan; it was a springboard for Chiang Kai-shek to retake the mainland. How they could have missed this is a mystery. Even if we forgive them their complete ignorance of the history surrounding this event, simple geography should have set them straight. If you cannot travel to Xiamen (which, by the way, is a beautiful city), go to Google Earth and take a look at it from the air. Xiamen is mislabeled on the map (Google has it situated on Gulangyu), but Quemoy (Jinmen Dao) is labeled correctly, and has a very distinctive shape. It sits right in the middle of Xiamen Bay, and is not anywhere near Taiwan. Chang and Halliday's suggestion that this was a springboard for the Chinese to take Taiwan is absurd, and betrays a surprising lack of awareness of the known history. Here is the story they should have told:
In August of 1954, Chiang Kai-shek moved 58,000 troops to Jinmen Dao in preparation for retaking the mainland. He also moved 15,000 troops to Matsu (further to the north). China responded with a massive artillery bombardment of the islands. U.S. President Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons in defense of the Nationalist government on Taiwan, and Mao backed off. This is not to suggest that Mao was not interested in "liberating" Taiwan, but to refute the idea that His shelling of Quemoy and Matsu was completely without provocation, and must, therefore, have masked some other motive.
But there is a larger problem with Jung Chang's portrayal of Mao as the sole source of everything bad that happened to China. Generally, in my study of history, I try to operate from the basic rule that only God gets to be God, and only Satan gets to be Satan. To make anyone else God is to completely distort that person's actual contribution to history. To make anyone else Satan is to exonerate a whole host of guilty people. To a just man, clearing the guilty must be as onerous as punishing the innocent.
Look, Mao did a lot of really bad things. And it is right and proper to assign blame to him for what he did. But there were lots of injustices that were perpetrated against innocent people a long time before the Cultural Revolution. Watchman Nee (Ni To-sheng), for example, was arrested in '50 or '51. I use him as an example, because he is widely read among Christians in the West, and he spent the last 20 years of his life in prison because of his Christian faith. He is only one among many whose arrests had no connection to the Anti-rightist campaign or the Cultural Revolution. In other words, these human rights abuses were standard fare in the early days of "New China." To blame Mao for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution is appropriate, because whatever may be said about the "Gang of Four" (more on that later), Mao did start the Cultural Revolution, and nobody denies that. But to transfer over to Mao the blame that is due Jung Chang's parents and their cohorts in the vast, diabolical system that devastated so many lives before they got their own comeuppance? No. This we cannot allow. And what about Jung Chang herself? She was a Red Guard. Perhaps she would protest that she never personally tore down any temples. In all the narratives I have read by former Red Guards, they all describe themselves as having been on the fringe of the movement, almost as if they were unwilling participants. Jung Chang is no exception to this (read her book "Wild Swans"). But the fact remains that she voluntarily made herself part of the reckless rabble that destroyed this country. There were decent kids during those days who refused to be part of the nonsense. Jung Chang could have chosen to be one of them. Instead, she chose to follow the crowd. That was not Mao's decision.
Now to the gang of four. Chang and Halliday begin their chapter on Jiang Qing by saying that "she never originated policy, and she was always Mao's obedient servant." It's hard to read such nonsense without laughing. Jiang Qing was sensitive to how far she could push the envelope, and she certainly paid the obligatory homage to her husband, especially before the media. But she unquestionably had her own agenda, and pushed it with energy, much to Mao's consternation. He publicly rebuked her on several occasions. And she showed herself opposed to his agenda in key areas.
Jiang Qing hated Zhou En-lai. He knew this, of course, but was a master at maintaining an equilibrium that made him indispensable to Mao. Zhou was certainly not blind to Jiang Qing's ambition. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, he confided to Sirin Phathanothai, daughter of the Thai diplomat, "We have a dowager empress on our hands."
Jiang Qing also despised Deng Xiao-ping, and tried very hard to destroy him. She failed, because Mao needed Deng, and seemed, throughout the Cultural Revolution, to be determined to keep Deng available, but she certainly made life miserable for him, and was largely responsible for him being purged a second time.
Too be sure, there are those in China who go to the extreme of suggesting that Jiang Qing was the prime mover behind the Cultural Revolution. "It wasn't his fault," one of them told me, referring to Mao. No doubt Jiang Qing was a convenient scapegoat for those who could not come to terms with the fact that the father of their country attacked his own people. But if it is absurd to suggest that Jiang Qing was the architect of the Cultural Revolution, it is just as absurd to suggest that she was merely doing Mao's bidding.
Look, if you are in desperate need for someone to hate, you will love this book. It will give you plenty of excuse to blame all that has gone wrong with China over the last half-century on this one man. If you're a little creative, you might even be able to figure out how Mao is somehow to blame for whatever has gone wrong in your own life. But this kind of thinking does not do service to history. A history that whitewashes Mao's impact on the lives of millions of innocent people is nauseating. But a history that puts all the blame on Mao and lets everyone else off the hook is also less than worthy of high regard. Jesus said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." And if it's not the truth, it won't set you free, no matter how good it makes you feel. And for all of his weaknesses, Mao, after all, was the one chosen by history to build China into an independent country free from domination by foreign powers. We may wonder at the wisdom of Providence, but we would all have to admit that no one before him was able to pull it off.
So what, then, is the value of this book? I believe it's primary attraction is that it is very personal. Sometimes we have to use imperfect sources in our attempt to get at the truth. I read the China Daily every day, because it gives useful insight into the people and places of China. But I am not blind to the fact that it is regulated by the government, so it is not my only source of information about this country.
Put yourself in the place of Jung Chang. You are so angry you can't see straight, but you feel there is a story that needs to be told. Should you recuse yourself because you can't possibly be objective, or should you go ahead and do your best. This book is a very personal, engaging story. It is heavily encumbered by the lack of objectivity with which it was written. But Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have employed archives from the old Soviet Union, the study of which needs to be expanded. This book is a step in that direction, and raises questions that need to be debated. Because of its highly personal nature and readable quality, it will probably be read much more by Chinese people than any other biography of Mao. So it will serve to raise questions which might not otherwise have been discussed. Perhaps it will even open the minds of the powers that be to the importance of openly discussing Mao's part in the history of this great country. When Mao stood on Tiananmen and said, "China has stood up!" he was expressing the exultation of the masses at being finally independent. Could any other leader have achieved this? If this book encourages attempts to answer that and other questions raised, it will be, for all its weaknesses, a contribution to the ongoing study.
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Eric Langager, May 13, 2007
My first attraction to this book was the author, because I read "Wild Swans," which she wrote in the early nineties. This book she co-wrote with her husband, a professional editor. I believe he assisted her on "Wild Swans," too, but his role in the writing of this book seems to be more prominent. Not sure what that means, but the contribution is noticeable. This book is well written and very readable.I can't remember when I have been so conflicted about a book I have read. And it seems I am not the only one. This book has been alternately praised and cursed since it arrived on the scene. Having read the book now, and worked through the frustration I have felt with the brazen assumptions and questionable documentation, I still have to say that I think it is worth reading. I say that because, although the book is seriously flawed, and certainly not as "new," or groundbreaking as it's title seems to claim, it does address questions in it's own flawed way, that demand to be answered.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and Jung Chung is nothing if not angry. Mao's policies deeply hurt her family, and she is determined to get even. This anger, more than any other factor, is the root of this book's inadequacies--inadequacies that overshadow every observation, every conjecture (and boy there are lots of them!), every interview. The bottom line is that this book is tough to evaluate, because it contains so much material that is of questionable origin, obviously designed to support conclusions that are sharply hampered by a poor knowledge of the actual history. According to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, they listed as an interviewee a close personal friend of his who told him that, in fact, she declined to be interviewed. In this sense, the book is aptly named. In ordinary parlance, a book of this kind would be called the "Untold Story." In choosing an unusual name like "The Unknown Story," the authors have, no doubt unwittingly, identified what is the primary weakness of this book. In other words, if the great body of stuff that is thought to be true about Mao were to be divided between that which can be clearly documented, and is known for sure to be true, and that which is largely conjecture or innuendo (gossip, in other words), this book would be the repository of the latter.
But I need to get back to the history problem. This book is not written by people who really know the history, and build the story of Mao into that contextual background. Rather, it is written by people who quite obviously knew very little of the basic historical context before they started writing the book, and built the history by looking for "facts" that supported the conclusions they had started with, and ignoring those which militated against those assumptions. An example might be helpful here:
Regarding the shelling of Quemoy (Jinmen Dao) and Matsu, Chang and Halliday refer to Quemoy at least twice as the "springboard" or "jumping off point to Taiwan." They conclude that Mao must have known he could never take Taiwan , so he must have had an ulterior motive for shelling Quemoy and Matsu, which was to manipulate the Russians into giving him the nuclear weapons he craved. But Chang and Halliday have the story exactly backwards. In fact, Quemoy was not a springboard for China to go to Taiwan; it was a springboard for Chiang Kai-shek to retake the mainland. How they could have missed this is a mystery. Even if we forgive them their complete ignorance of the history surrounding this event, simple geography should have set them straight. If you cannot travel to Xiamen (which, by the way, is a beautiful city), go to Google Earth and take a look at it from the air. Xiamen is mislabeled on the map (Google has it situated on Gulangyu), but Quemoy (Jinmen Dao) is labeled correctly, and has a very distinctive shape. It sits right in the middle of Xiamen Bay, and is not anywhere near Taiwan. Chang and Halliday's suggestion that this was a springboard for the Chinese to take Taiwan is absurd, and betrays a surprising lack of awareness of the known history. Here is the story they should have told:
In August of 1954, Chiang Kai-shek moved 58,000 troops to Jinmen Dao in preparation for retaking the mainland. He also moved 15,000 troops to Matsu (further to the north). China responded with a massive artillery bombardment of the islands. U.S. President Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons in defense of the Nationalist government on Taiwan, and Mao backed off. This is not to suggest that Mao was not interested in "liberating" Taiwan, but to refute the idea that His shelling of Quemoy and Matsu was completely without provocation, and must, therefore, have masked some other motive.
But there is a larger problem with Jung Chang's portrayal of Mao as the sole source of everything bad that happened to China. Generally, in my study of history, I try to operate from the basic rule that only God gets to be God, and only Satan gets to be Satan. To make anyone else God is to completely distort that person's actual contribution to history. To make anyone else Satan is to exonerate a whole host of guilty people. To a just man, clearing the guilty must be as onerous as punishing the innocent.
Look, Mao did a lot of really bad things. And it is right and proper to assign blame to him for what he did. But there were lots of injustices that were perpetrated against innocent people a long time before the Cultural Revolution. Watchman Nee (Ni To-sheng), for example, was arrested in '50 or '51. I use him as an example, because he is widely read among Christians in the West, and he spent the last 20 years of his life in prison because of his Christian faith. He is only one among many whose arrests had no connection to the Anti-rightist campaign or the Cultural Revolution. In other words, these human rights abuses were standard fare in the early days of "New China." To blame Mao for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution is appropriate, because whatever may be said about the "Gang of Four" (more on that later), Mao did start the Cultural Revolution, and nobody denies that. But to transfer over to Mao the blame that is due Jung Chang's parents and their cohorts in the vast, diabolical system that devastated so many lives before they got their own comeuppance? No. This we cannot allow. And what about Jung Chang herself? She was a Red Guard. Perhaps she would protest that she never personally tore down any temples. In all the narratives I have read by former Red Guards, they all describe themselves as having been on the fringe of the movement, almost as if they were unwilling participants. Jung Chang is no exception to this (read her book "Wild Swans"). But the fact remains that she voluntarily made herself part of the reckless rabble that destroyed this country. There were decent kids during those days who refused to be part of the nonsense. Jung Chang could have chosen to be one of them. Instead, she chose to follow the crowd. That was not Mao's decision.
Now to the gang of four. Chang and Halliday begin their chapter on Jiang Qing by saying that "she never originated policy, and she was always Mao's obedient servant." It's hard to read such nonsense without laughing. Jiang Qing was sensitive to how far she could push the envelope, and she certainly paid the obligatory homage to her husband, especially before the media. But she unquestionably had her own agenda, and pushed it with energy, much to Mao's consternation. He publicly rebuked her on several occasions. And she showed herself opposed to his agenda in key areas.
Jiang Qing hated Zhou En-lai. He knew this, of course, but was a master at maintaining an equilibrium that made him indispensable to Mao. Zhou was certainly not blind to Jiang Qing's ambition. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, he confided to Sirin Phathanothai, daughter of the Thai diplomat, "We have a dowager empress on our hands."
Jiang Qing also despised Deng Xiao-ping, and tried very hard to destroy him. She failed, because Mao needed Deng, and seemed, throughout the Cultural Revolution, to be determined to keep Deng available, but she certainly made life miserable for him, and was largely responsible for him being purged a second time.
Too be sure, there are those in China who go to the extreme of suggesting that Jiang Qing was the prime mover behind the Cultural Revolution. "It wasn't his fault," one of them told me, referring to Mao. No doubt Jiang Qing was a convenient scapegoat for those who could not come to terms with the fact that the father of their country attacked his own people. But if it is absurd to suggest that Jiang Qing was the architect of the Cultural Revolution, it is just as absurd to suggest that she was merely doing Mao's bidding.
Look, if you are in desperate need for someone to hate, you will love this book. It will give you plenty of excuse to blame all that has gone wrong with China over the last half-century on this one man. If you're a little creative, you might even be able to figure out how Mao is somehow to blame for whatever has gone wrong in your own life. But this kind of thinking does not do service to history. A history that whitewashes Mao's impact on the lives of millions of innocent people is nauseating. But a history that puts all the blame on Mao and lets everyone else off the hook is also less than worthy of high regard. Jesus said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." And if it's not the truth, it won't set you free, no matter how good it makes you feel. And for all of his weaknesses, Mao, after all, was the one chosen by history to build China into an independent country free from domination by foreign powers. We may wonder at the wisdom of Providence, but we would all have to admit that no one before him was able to pull it off.
So what, then, is the value of this book? I believe it's primary attraction is that it is very personal. Sometimes we have to use imperfect sources in our attempt to get at the truth. I read the China Daily every day, because it gives useful insight into the people and places of China. But I am not blind to the fact that it is regulated by the government, so it is not my only source of information about this country.
Put yourself in the place of Jung Chang. You are so angry you can't see straight, but you feel there is a story that needs to be told. Should you recuse yourself because you can't possibly be objective, or should you go ahead and do your best. This book is a very personal, engaging story. It is heavily encumbered by the lack of objectivity with which it was written. But Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have employed archives from the old Soviet Union, the study of which needs to be expanded. This book is a step in that direction, and raises questions that need to be debated. Because of its highly personal nature and readable quality, it will probably be read much more by Chinese people than any other biography of Mao. So it will serve to raise questions which might not otherwise have been discussed. Perhaps it will even open the minds of the powers that be to the importance of openly discussing Mao's part in the history of this great country. When Mao stood on Tiananmen and said, "China has stood up!" he was expressing the exultation of the masses at being finally independent. Could any other leader have achieved this? If this book encourages attempts to answer that and other questions raised, it will be, for all its weaknesses, a contribution to the ongoing study.
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We welcome your comments and ideas, but we ask that you refrain from:- Obscenity
- Spam
- Illegal content
- Copyrighted material
- Commercial solicitations
By posting your comments you are granting the good people of Powells.com the right (but not the obligation) to make your comments available to others over the Internet, and to copy and distribute your comments via other media, in each case on a royalty free basis. These terms govern the rights and obligations of the person posting comments and Powells.com; there are no intended third party beneficiaries of these terms. Posted comments are subject to monitoring, editing, and removal at any time. Please see our Terms of Use for our complete terms and conditions.Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
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