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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
sources is its comment on a report of the death of Mao’s first wife, Yang
Kaihui. According to the co-authors, the day after Yang was executed
the local Hunan Republican Daily ran a headline ‘Wife of Mao Tse-tung
executed yesterday – everyone claps and shouts with satisfaction’. To
some credulous Western reader, this is an example of how the authors
worked hard to research Chinese sources, as local newspapers in the
1930s were consulted. After citing these words, Chang and Halliday’s
comment: ‘This undoubtedly reflected more loathing of Mao than of
Kai-hui’ (p. 83). The authors do not even contemplate the possibility
that one cannot simply take what the local papers said at that time as
a given fact, when communist activists were hunted down as ‘bandits’
by the then Nationalist government.
Regarding Mao’s relation with Yang Kaihui, The Unknown Story
charges:
During his [Mao’s] assault on Changsha, Mao made no effort to
extricate her and their sons, or even to warn her. And he could
easily have saved her: her house was on his route to the city; and
Mao was there for three weeks. Yet he did not lift a finger (p. 91).
There is no evidence to back up such an extraordinary charge. There
are numerous claims of this nature made in the book without
supporting evidence. For example here is the first sentence in the book:
‘Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of
one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70
million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century
leader’ (incidentally China’s population had for decades been not ‘onequarter’
but a fifth of the world’s). And there are more: ‘In late
September [Mao] started his slaughter’ (p. 91), and ‘Moscow also
appointed Mao head of the state’ (p. 104). ‘Given that escapes were
few, this means that altogether some 700,000 people died in the Ruijin
base. More than half of these were murdered as “class enemies”, or
were worked to death, or committed suicide, or died other premature
deaths attributable to the regime’ (p. 113–4).
The book is filled with accusations like these without any evidence or
sources to back up. How did Chang and Halliday come up with a figure
of 700,000 deaths in Ruijin, for instance? The Unknown Story cites two
sources referring to the population drop of 20 per cent in Red Jiangxi (p.
113). Even if these figures of population drop were true, they do not give
any evidence to the claim that all these people actually died – they could
have migrated to other areas because of the civil war – or the claim that
more than half of them died as ‘class enemies’ of the revolution; some of
them could have been killed by the Nationalists who would not allow
the existence of a revolutionary state within a state.
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