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

MAO, THE UNKNOWN STORY
After claiming that Shao Li-tzu – a prominent KMT official, who, on
Chiang Kai-shek’s instructions, took the latter’s son to Moscow to
study – was a CCP mole, The Unknown Story declares that ‘Ultimately,
the agents played a gigantic role in helping deliver China to Mao’(p.
139). As if China could just be delivered to Mao with the help of a few
KMT agents. Anyone who believes this kind of stuff is like those who
believe that the Bible is literally the history of humanity.
Further evidence of ‘scholarship’
Jung Chang is said to be the first person from the PRC to have obtained
a PhD degree in linguistics at a UK university. One would expect her
to be familiar with the spelling of Chinese names in English. As an
indication of what kind of scholarship is involved in The Unknown
Story, it is worth devoting a few sentences to the way Chinese names
are spelt in the book. One should not be surprised that ‘Peking’ is still
used in the book instead of ‘Beijing’, since Chang would hate to use a
term that is initiated by a regime that she now hates so much.
However, violation of other conventions that are common knowledge
to even a first-year undergraduate student of Chinese is really
puzzling. Chang, if not Halliday, should know that in Chinese,
surnames comes first and given names come second. However, Chang
chooses to refer to a Chinese person by the given name. Thus Li Lishan,
a party notable, is referred to as ‘Li-shan’ and Mao’s wife Yang
Kai-hui is referred to as ‘Kai-hui’. This is the equivalent of referring to
Marx as ‘Karl’ in scholarly writing.
In spelling Chinese names there are two main systems used all over
the world. One is the old Wade-Giles system invented by the missionaries
and one is the new Pinyin system stipulated by the PRC
government. For cataloguing Chinese resources the Wade-Giles system
used to be the standard. Increasingly the Pinyin system has been introduced
into library cataloguing. In order to cater for both the older and
younger generation of users, some libraries have both systems available.
In academic writing one can either adopt one system or another.
The norm is to adopt one consistent approach, except for names of
well-known figures that have been used for a long time. However, The
Unknown Story is not consistent in using one system or the other. The
authors mix the two systems any way they want.
That is fine, except when their spelling implies erroneous phonetics.
For example in the Wade-Giles system in order to make a difference
between the aspirated versus non-aspirated sound, an apostrophe is
used to indicate aspiration. Thus ‘chi’ has a very different sound quality
to ‘ch’i’. In the Pinyin system this difference of sound quality is made by
spelling ‘chi’ as ‘ji’ and ‘ch’i’ as ‘qi’. However, our linguistics-doctorate
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