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

4 Mao, The Unknown Story: an
intellectual scandal
Introduction: hyper-promotion of a book
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday became a
best seller soon after it was released in the UK, Australia and New
Zealand in 2005. The book was promoted by such media frenzy that
one of the reviews by the British Guardian is titled ‘The book that will
shake the world’. The BBC programme Off the Shelf – more commonly
devoted to fiction – gave a ‘dramatic’ reading of excerpts of the book
in a ‘voice dripping with cynicism and irony’ (Weil 2006). One of the
reviewers calls the book ‘a work of unanswerable authority. … Mao is
comprehensively discredited from beginning to end in small ways and
large; a murderer, a torturer, an untalented orator, a lecher, a destroyer
of culture, an opium profiteer, a liar’ (Hensher 2005).
The Australian newspaper, a broadsheet paper, collected various
trend-setting writers and journalists in Australia and asked them to
choose a 2005 Book of the Year. One of the choices by a senior journalist,
Nicolas Rothwell is Mao: The Unknown Story. This is what he
said: reading the book about ‘the 20th century’s most bloodstained
dictator was a litmus event. … I cannot recall finishing a book that
inspired in me such sharp feelings of nausea, horror and despair’
(Rothwell 2005: R5)
Jonathan Mirsky (2005a, 2005b), a seasoned journalist who writes
for papers such as the British Observer and New York Times states that
the book proves that Mao ‘was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as
much damage to mankind as they did’. Montefiore (2005) declares,
‘Mao is the greatest monster of them all – the Red Emperor of China’.
‘China’s Monster, Second to None’ is the title of another review in the
New York Times (Kakutani 2005), whose author declares that the book
makes ‘an impassioned case for Mao as the most monstrous tyrant of
all times’. In the New York Times Book Review Nicholas D. Kristof
(2005) declares the book is ‘magnificent biography’ and a ‘magisterial’
work. The last Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Pattern, and the
influential German Spiegel declared their endorsement of the book.
Andrew Nathan could not bring himself to endorse the blatant violation
of scholarly norms in the book but still thinks the book contains
jade (Nathan 2005). For Willliam Hutton (2005), an influential British
political commentator:
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