Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story"

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact. Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao. This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.

Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s "Mao: The Unknown Story"

Benton, Gregor

Chun, Lin

Reference

Routledge

A scholarly and sympathetic treatment of the rise and fall of the British New Left, which was relatively separate from the international movements of the 1960s. Describes the post-war advance of capitalism in which the movement rose during the 1950s, the major writing and thinking, and the evolution of concerns from traditions and culture through society and politics to history and theory. Distributed in the US by Columbia U. Press. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The British New Left

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Edinburgh Univ Pr

A history of revolutionary China in the 20th century China under XI Jingping has been experiencing unprecedented change. From the Belt and Road initiative to its involvement in Great Power struggles with the West, China is facing the world once more in the hope of reclaiming a lost Chinese greatness. But is "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" just neoliberal capitalism under another name? And, if so, how can China reclaim the heritage of the Revolution in this its 70th anniversary? In this panoramic study of Chinese history in the twentieth century, Lin Chun argues that the paradoxes of contemporary Chinese society do not merely echo the tensions of modernity or capitalist development. Instead, they are a product of both the contradictions rooted in its revolutionary history, and the social and political consequences of its post-socialist transition. Revolution and Counterrevolution in China charts China's epic revolutionary trajectory in search of a socialist alternative to the global system, and asks whether market reform must repudiate and overturn the revolution and its legacy.

Revolution and Counterrevolution in China

History

Asia

Verso

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