Tyrant of the people

BY JUNG CHANG AND JON HALLIDAY

Jonathan Cape, 650pp, 25

WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS THE publishing phenomenon of the 1990s, Wild Swans sold more than ten million copies and was translated into 30 languages. Its author, Jung Chang, became a literary superstar.

Telling the tale of her family's suffering in 20th- century China, a country ruled by suspicion and terror, the book touched and gripped the reading public. It told a story of family misfortunes under oppression - her father, a Communist Party high-ranker, was denounced by the Maoists, cast into madness, a broken man. Her mother was forced to wear a placard of self-accusation and walk through the streets in political shame. In the 1960s, at the age of 14, Jung herself became a Red Guard. But, faced with everyday privations, fearful of sleep in case she mumbled indiscretions in her dreams, she too, as her parents had before her, became disillusioned with the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao.

Twelve years ago, with Jon Halliday, the historian who had helped her write Wild Swans (they married in 1991), she began her follow-up, the keenly awaited expos entitled: Mao: The Unknown Story. It is, at 650 pages, a detailed account of the Chinese dictator's improbable rise to power.

Reading Wild Swans is not a prerequisite for reading the Mao biography, but it helps. The memoir makes personal the effects of Mao's social and economic initiatives, while painting the human picture, the foreground of individual lives in the throes, for example, of Mao's "Great Leap" in the 1950s, or under his talons during the Cultural Revolution. In the aftermath of Wild Swans, Jung Chang asserted that her Mao book would "be more devastating still". As prophecies go, this is almost certainly a significant understatement.

Proponents of Mao may demand a retrial. After all, they will argue, how could the author of such a powerful condemnation as Wild Swans remain impartial when coming to grips with the life of the man who had caused her family such personal pain? The answer lies, at least in part, in the authors' method. Readers dubious of Chang's and Halliday's partiality should start where the narrative ends: with the book's screed of footnotes, its list of interviewees spread over 38 countries (a cast of more than 350), its bibliographies listing more than 1,000 sources. She and Halliday have, if nothing else, been both scrupulous and rigorous in their pursuit not merely of Mao, but of vital sources of previously hidden information, all part of the pointillist approach to building a three-dimensional portrait of a two-dimensional demagogue.

It is this, the clear emergence of a dictator of such single-mindedness that he sheds no moral complexity in any sphere of his long and destructive life, that so astounds. From the very beginning, with his mocking manipulation of his father, Mao showed a capacity for discovering others' weaknesses, and exploiting them to advantage. His baseline philosophy is contained within the annotated notes he scribbled in the margins of his copy of Friedrich Paulsen's A System of Ethics:

"I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others ..."; "People like me want to ... satisfy our hearts to the full and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are there only for me."

And, he goes on: "People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people."

Judged by his deeds, this simple, but riveting, philosophy came from his core and ran through his life. At every stage we encounter evidence - from the pattern of his actions, from his disclosures to colleagues and allies, from secret files and from Mao's own notes - of his pragmatic, embedded cynicism. Ideology served his needs, but he was driven by personal power. Using the Russians under Stalin (one of the first to spot his potential as a motive force for communism in China), Mao hatched a plan to rule his country, increase its military might and become a figure of global dominance.

His beginnings were inauspicious. Growing up in a land of predators (tigers, leopards) in a remote region geographically cut off from China's mainstream, Mao was the bane of his father's life. Expelled from school, uncouth, misanthropic, he finally qualified as a teacher, trying his luck for work in Peking, returning home jobless. He joined the Communist Party in 1921, one year after it was founded (official history in China has been doctored to register Mao as one of the founders), but his initial impact was slight. He was excluded from the Party's Second Congress for ineffectiveness at organising labour but restored to the fold a year later. At this time the party was barely a splinter in the Chinese body politic, with a membership less than 1,000 nationwide.

Urged by Stalin to take up arms, the Chinese Communists turned to banditry, with Mao adopting the role of brigand leader and, in cahoots with Moscow's diktats, currying favour inside the Kremlin. Deploying guerrilla tactics, Mao conducted raids against the forces of the Nationalists, who were then led by Chiang Kai-shek, in a widespread hit-and-run civil war carried on for two decades. This taxing period, which is charted by the authors with great fastidiousness, catches Mao in a series of clever machinations within the Party, while forging closer ties with Moscow and building a power base across the land.

Once in power, Mao wasted no time in promoting his interests and those of Russia, shoring up Kim Il Sung's dictatorship in Korea - a ploy to consume American lives and persuade the Russians to back his campaign to boost Chinese armaments. In the 1950s and 1960s he sought the Soviet Union's help in acquiring nuclear installations, an objective which, indirectly, cost the lives of almost 40 million Chinese.

In parallel with Mao's international dealings, the book amply illustrates his personal life with its equally mechanistic, self-serving modus operandi: his four marriages, his callous disregard for his children's welfare (when Stalin threatened to take one son hostage, Mao replied: "Keep him"), his flagrant sexual indiscretions and the creation of more than 50 private estates with opulent villas - all on a whim - expressed his old credo that: "people like me only have a duty to ourselves". The authors' interviews with survivors from Mao's inner circle have proved a rich vein of information. Russian archives yielded extensive corroboration (and sometimes correction of Chinese sources thought to be "fishy").

In sum, Mao: The Unknown Story is a mammoth piece of work, by turns a see-sawing tale of adventure, a book of intrigues and a dark tragic story depicting a country shrouded in fear, suspicion, mass crime and verging at times on the brink of hysterical collapse. The country's history in the 20th century, patchily recorded, is riddled with gaps and inconsistencies. Jon Halliday and Jung Chang have produced a persuasive, coherent version which explodes the myth of Mao as a fatherly icon, and answers many unanswered questions. Will it find its way into China? Being banned will almost certainly guarantee that.

Today's mass publishing world spews out thousands of inconsequential works every year. It is therefore gratifying to read a book such as Mao: The Unknown Story, which might potentially, and for the better, affect the fates of countless millions.