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

Sure, there is growing recognition that Mao was responsible for widespread suffering and death. But somehow he is still given credit in the popular imagination for a host of virtues: for being a well-intentioned agrarian reformer, a staunch anti-Japanese fighter, a personally abstemious and incorruptible scholar-king, a progressive thinker intent on junking oppressive remnants of China's feudal past, and a pragmatic nationalist who raised his country to new heights of power and only turned to the Soviet Union after being spurned by the United States. Much of this impression was created by Communist propaganda, making use of Western dupes such as Edgar Snow, author of Red Star Over China, the 1937 book that first introduced Mao to much of the world.

Jung Chang and her British husband, Jon Halliday, have produced a blockbuster that seeks to demolish these myths once and for all. She has previously told her story in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), an international bestseller that set her family's experiences against the tumultuous backdrop of 20th-century Chinese history. Having survived the lunacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (when she was briefly a Red Guard), Chang escaped to Britain in 1978 at age 26. Mao: The Unknown Story is her scathing indictment of the man who tormented her and countless other Chinese. While billed as a dispassionate work of history, it is really a heartfelt exposé and denunciation that has more in common with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (as Arthur Waldron has noted) than with Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History.