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

Whether it’s the news that Mao never actually marched in long
stretches of the Long March but was, instead, carried in a
bamboo litter he designed himself, or of the scale of his purges
and executions, this is a catalogue of disclosures that overturns
almost all our received wisdom. The impact will be substantial.
It’s an impressive achievement.
(Hutton 2005)
‘Chang’s new book is actually a vast work of scholarship rather than
an emotionally-charged personal attack,’ asserts Thorpe (2005). Chang
and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in
Mao’s tumultuous life, claims Yahuda (2005), a veteran scholar of the
London School of Economics.
Scholarship, what scholarship?
Of course, anyone can make any claims about anything. What is
special about Mao: The Unknown Story is that the claims are supposed
to have been backed up by scholarship and painstaking research. What
has impressed journalists, political commentators and some academics
alike is that Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim to have consulted
something like 1,200 written sources, the majority of them in Chinese,
and to have interviewed 400 people. The book has an impressive
display of 68 pages of notes. It took the husband and wife co-authors
more than a decade to finish the book, we are told.
The interviewee list
THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
Let us first start with the impressive list of people whom the authors
claim to have interviewed. These include dignitaries such as András
Hegedüs, a prime minister of Hungary, Prince Mikasa, brother of the
Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Eugenio Anguiano, a certain Mexican
ambassador to Beijing, Frank Corner, a foreign minister of New
Zealand, and Lech Walesa, former President of Poland. Of course His
Holiness the Dalai Lama must be included in the list. With enormous
financial resource and prestige from the success of Wild Swans, Chang
could interview anyone she wished. But the question is: what does
Lech Walesa or a prime minister of Hungary know about Mao or
China?
The list of course also includes many who do or could claim to
know about Mao or China, such as Joseph Needham, Steven Fitzgerald
(first Australian ambassador to PRC China), Mao’s daughter Li Na,
Mao’s grandson Mao Xinyu, or Liu Shaoqi’s widow Wang Guangmei.
At first sight such an extensive list might make the book appear
[ 66 ]