Helmsman from Hell

Mao

The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Knopf, 814 pp., $35

MAO ZEDONG HAS BEEN DEAD for 30 years, but he continues to cast a considerable shadow over the state he founded, the People's Republic of China. Both his preserved corpse and a giant portrait of him continue to occupy positions of honor in Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing. That's no accident, since today's rulers still trace whatever legitimacy they possess back to the institutions created by the Great Helmsman. Hu Jintao is president, after all, not because he won the votes of most Chinese but because he won the votes of the most influential members of the Communist party's inner circle.

In many ways, of course, particularly in the economic sphere, today's China bears scant resemblance to the one Mao left behind in 1976. But even as a pragmatic philosophy of "market-Leninism" has taken hold, there has never been a real repudiation of Mao. The official line has remained the one laid out in 1981 by Deng Xiaoping (who was raised to the heights of power by Mao, purged, and then rehabilitated)--that Mao was "70 percent right, 30 percent wrong."

Imagine the scandal if a postwar German leader had said that Hitler was "70 percent right." Or if a current leader of Cambodia said the same thing about Pol Pot. Yet, in spite of being responsible for more peacetime deaths (an estimated 70 million) than the other great monsters of the 20th century, Mao has, at least until recently, occupied a different place in Western opinion. Wearing a Mao button or T-shirt is still seen in some quarters as kitschy fun in a way that a tribute to Hitler or Stalin would not be. There's even a bestselling business book called The Little Red Book of Selling. Don't look for the Mein Kampf of Investing anytime soon.