There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
-Shakespeare
Part adventure story, part intellectual history, part political intrigue; journalist Phillip Short has written a biography of Mao Zedong that reads like a novel. Neither idolizing nor demonizing its subject Mao: A Life is a good read for people who are open-minded about Mao and his contribution to modern China. For readers unfamiliar with the Chairman's life, it is the stuff that literature is made of.
Born into a peasant family in Hunan Province, Mao talked his traditional Chinese father into sending him to school instead of making him run the family farm. As a student, Mao came in contact with both Confucian classics and powerful ideas from abroad -writings by Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Charles
Darwin, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and, eventually, Karl Marx. Short illustrates how the combination of the ideas Mao was exposed to in his student days and the heady events he witnessed - the fall of the Qing Empire, the establishment of the Chinese Republic, China's humiliation at the hands of the Japanese and the Western Powers - drove him all of his life.
Short chronicles Mao's life as a guerrilla fighter, by turns charismatically leading the rag-tag Red Army
against Chiang Kai-Shek's well-groomed fighting forces, and then meting out strict political discipline among the party members. Short points out the little known fact that as early as 1930, mirroring many campaigns to come, hundreds were executed in a bloody purge to ferret out members of a mysterious counter-revolutionary group, the "A-B tuan." Short draws parallels between the methods and goals of the
Yan'an Rectification Campaign of the early 1940s, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
The book's handling of the Great Leap Forward is less satisfactory. Short focuses on the reasons Mao had for proposing some of the extravagant and bizarre elements of the Great Leap's agricultural and economic policies, but uses statistics rather than personal accounts to describe their impact on the Chinese people. The numbers themselves cannnot evoke the tragedy or senselessness of that historical period and the book suffers for not explaining how Mao's policies wreaked havoc at the grassroots level (this omission is particularly glaring in light of the fact that Short cites such material as it was gathered by Jasper Becker for his book, Hungry Ghosts). We learn that "In 1959 and 1960, some 20
million Chinese starved to death..." but the connection between the Great Leap policies and the famine is not made clear.
Short characterizes the Cultural Revolution as Mao's most sophisticated political campaign. Burned by experimenting with economic policy in the Great Leap Forward, Mao decided to focus on political ideology. According to Short, Mao strove to create in the Chinese people a blank slate upon which could be written
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thinking that would influence China for generations to come. The methods he chose to achieve this goal were the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. Some scholars have described Mao's Cultural Revolution as a good idea that got away from him. Short paints a fascinating picture
that shows Mao in control every step of the way.
Another worthwhile part of the book is Short's depiction of Mao's relationship with Deng Xiaoping. Mao recognized Deng's intelligence and ability. When Deng was (frequently) purged for political mistakes, Mao made sure he was not completely eradicated, but kept in a state where he could be
rehabilitated, in case he was needed later. As we all know, Deng had the
last laugh. "Mao had been right about Deng Xiaoping," Short writes,
"improbable though it had seemed at the time, he was a 'capitalist roader'
all along...."
Short uses many devices to downplay the history and emphasize the story in
his book. Footnotes, which regularly populate an historical work, are left
out. If readers are curious about the source of some of Short's more
controversial statements - such as the claim that the Politburo in Yan'an
never denied Mao's wife Jiang Qing an active role in Chinese politics - they can check
the page number, turn to the back of the book, and in a section titled
"Notes," try to find the reference. There is no bibliography. However, there
is a "who's who" list at the back of the book, titled "Dramatis Personae."
Bottom line: if you are looking for a serious historical work, this may not
be the book for you. However, if you are looking for an enjoyable
introduction into the life of one of the most powerful men of the 20th-century, there are few better choices than Mao: A Life.
Mao: A Life is available at Amazon.com.
