Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

on China and as a consultant for businesses and government
agencies.
(Columbia Education Resources Online
http://cero.columbia. edu/help/authors.html)
The other, Anne Thurston, a self-claimed ‘independent scholar’, is a
consultant to the National Endowment for Democracy and host of
Views and Perspectives on Voice of America (Johns Hopkins University
http://apps.sais-jhu.edu/faculty_bios/faculty_bio1. php?ID=56).
The book
HOW A MEDICAL DOCTOR DOCTORS HISTORY
The Private Life of Chairman Mao is supposedly written by Mao’s
personal physician of 22 years and close confidant. Simultaneously
published by Random House in English and the Chinese Times
Publishing Company of Taipei in Chinese, the book purports to reveal
Mao’s private life, and to denounce the Mao era as an unmitigated
disaster under the dictatorship of an evil monster. That the publication
of this book has such a purpose is confirmed by the review headlines
‘The tyrant Mao as told by his doctor (Bernstein 1994), ‘Unmasking the
monster’ (Mirsky 1994), ‘Mao the monster (Elegant 1994) and ‘The
emperor has no clothes: Mao’s doctor reveals the naked truth’ (Wills
1994). The book was highly acclaimed by prominent academics like
Lucian Pye, who thinks ‘this work has tremendous value’ (DeBorja and
Dong 1996: 2), and Andrew Nathan, who in his Foreword praises the
book’s ‘unique’ and ‘most revealing’ value.
For those who are familiar with the literature in Chinese, there was
in fact very little that was really new in the book when it hit the Western
market. For the significant figures and events described in Li’s
book, memoirs and biographies published previously in China and
Hong Kong have revealed as much, if not more. For instance, it was
widely claimed in published volumes that Mao behaved like an
emperor and almost every word of his was taken as an imperial edict.
Decisions were made by personal whim and those around him were
expected to pick up the pieces afterwards. Jiang Qing was hysterical,
paranoid, unpredictable and vicious. Because she was Mao’s wife,
even top-ranking CCP leaders tried not to offend her. Lin Biao was
presented as being chronically sick and having used every opportunity
to praise Mao so that he could gain more power. Zhou Enlai was
depicted as acting subserviently to Mao so as to save his own skin.
The ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign was Mao’s plot to lure the intellectuals
out so that he could strike them as ‘rightists’. The Great Leap
Forward was Mao’s personal fantasy, which led to the death of
millions as result of starvation. The Cultural Revolution was a power
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