Mick Hartley

If you don’t have the time, patience, or energy to wade through the 700 pages or so of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s “Mao: The Unknown Story“, then this review by Keith Windschuttle (via Milt’s File) may be the next best thing. As you’d expect from him, he doesn’t waste the opportunity to condemn Western fellow-travellers, from journalist Edgar Snow to the group of Parisians around the journal Tel Quel, who were duped by Mao’s socialist dystopia. Snow’s “Red Star over China” in particular was hugely influential in establishing the picture of Mao as heroic national liberator. Windschuttle wonders if Chang and Halliday’s book may not be equally influential:

Chang and Halliday’s book will be impossible to ignore. It will no doubt be banned in China, but will still circulate secretly and be more sought after for that. The tens of thousands of Chinese students now studying at Western universities will see it in the bookstores. The story its authors tell is so awful it will both shock the Chinese people and confirm many of the private anecdotes and rumors passed down within families. Rather than being the man who made the ancient Middle Kingdom stand up again, Mao was the one who brought it to its knees. This is a powerful story which Mao’s heirs will have great difficulty denying or suppressing. Just as Snow’s book helped install the regime, Chang and Halliday’s could help bring it down. If any single book in our own time has the capacity to change the course of history, this is it.