Last year, a weighty new biography of Mao Zedong was published by Jung Chang, author of the best-selling family auto-biography Wild Swans, and her husband Jon Halliday. Entitled Mao: The Unknown Story, the book received great publicity and instant praise from media critics. Recognized as a savage indictment of Mao and the Chinese revolution, reviewers found it “mesmerizing,” “magnificent… [a] stupendous work,” an “atom bomb of a work.” Its renown was sufficient that President George W. Bush has recently added it to his evening reading. Clearly this is a book whose influence is and will continue to be broad and deep for some time to come.

The book is not only long (631 pp. of text in the American edition), it also carries an extensive scholarly apparatus: a 14 pp. list of persons interviewed, a table of archives consulted in 11 countries plus unnamed archives in China, 85 pp. of notes and a 52 pp. bibliography. The authors say that it took twelve years to research the book, and reviewers have been impressed by their efforts, calling the book “a superb piece of research,” and describing the “detail and documentation” as “awesome.” A minority of specialists, however, have raised questions about the documentation and the reliability of some of Chang and Halliday’s sources – most notably Andrew Nathan in the London Review of Books, and a series of scholarly reviews in the China Journal in Australia.

This Web Site is designed to continue the discussion of the scholarship of Mao: The Unknown Story, and in particular the ways in which Chang and Halliday have reached conclusions which directly challenge much past scholarship on Mao and the Chinese revolution. The research presented here began as an undergraduate seminar at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). All of the students read The Unknown Story with some care, and then attempted to trace the sources of Chang and Halliday’s account, and compare them with other books and articles on modern Chinese history. Several of their final papers have now been edited and shortened for posting on this web site. In these initial posting we have attempted to focus on some of the most important sections of Chang and Halliday’s account: Mao’s aims during the War of Resistance against Japan, Mao’s role in the Korean War, the assertion that Mao was responsible for 70 million civilian deaths during peacetime. Further sections will be added as the papers are completed.

We have designed this web site with the hope of generating a broader examination of Mao: The Unknown Story among interested readers. In addition to the contributions by UCSD students, we will shortly add links to published reviews and other media discussions of the book. And in a comments section, we will invite others to offer their comments, reactions, or findings about the book. (In this preliminary version of the site, viewers can e-mail their comments to the authors of the separate contributions.) Because this book is long, detailed, complex, and documented in ways that are not altogether transparent, we particularly invite submissions from readers familiar with some of the sources on which the book relies (including Chinese and Russian materials) that would help all of us to assess the reliability of Chang and Halliday’s account.

It must be admitted that we initiate this discussion with a certain degree of trepidation. Because, as viewers will see below, we are generally critical and skeptical of many of Chang and Halliday’s claims in their critical portrait of Mao, we recognize that some may portray our project as a defense of Mao and his revolution. Let me assure you that that is not our purpose. The terror and brutality of Mao’s revolution are beyond dispute. The suffering of the Chinese people was enormous. But we are convinced that as historians and scholars, we will best understand Mao and the Chinese revolution by an honest and accurate adherence to established historical methodologies. Our aim is not to defend Mao, but to defend the search for truth about modern China – a truth that may never be fully knowable given the nature of the sources, but a truth that must be sought with all means at our disposal.

Joseph W. Esherick

Professor of History

Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Professor of Chinese Studies

jesheric@ucsd.edu