[FairfieldLife] Re: Cho, I mean Che

[Jason Spock]

 
   
               The Original Chinese Fake 
 
      A rivetting, first league biography of Mao, that tells the man from the 
self-manufactured myth, says Ashok Malik  
 
  Posted online: Sunday, July 31, 2005 
  
      IT is a measure of just how thoroughly Jung Chang and Jon Halliday 
researched their subject that their footnotes and index stretch to 153 pages. 
The 659 pages that make up the main story are packed with facts, information, 
revelations about, really, not just Mao but the tempestuous history of China 
from the end of the Manchu empire — in a decade when imperial orders from 
Turkey to Germany to Austria collapsed — to years of civil war, to the surreal 
violence of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to 1975 and 1976, when, 
within 17 months of each other, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung died and ended 
one of history’s great rivalries. 
  
      Yet the strength of this book is not just in what it says but how it says 
it. Jung Chang and Halliday have produced a first-class biography, a rivetting 
read that, in some sections, resembles a thriller. In particular, chapter 52 — 
‘‘Falling out with Lin Biao’’ — is racy cloak and dagger stuff. It ends with 
Lin Biao and his wife and son fleeing China, only to die in a ‘‘mysterious’’ 
air crash. 
  
      This chapter, more than most others perhaps, brings out the mad dystopia 
that China had become in Mao’s last days. In seems an almost unreal world 
today; yet it is so remarkably evocative of the shadowy and conspiratorial 
inner chambers of Cold War-era dictators. 
  One manifestation of this was in the use of language. When Lin sought to 
ridicule a Mao protege — ‘‘the party no. 7, Zhang Chunqiao’’ — he called him 
‘‘the Cobra... partly because he wore glasses, and partly because of his 
snake-like qualities’’. Lin’s coterie demanded ‘‘the Cobra be ‘put to the death 
of the thousand cuts’.’’ 
   
        Lin’s son Li-guo, nicknamed the ‘‘Tiger’’, is the book’s doomed tragic 
hero —‘‘His parents worshipped him, and his mother had sent agents all over 
China to look for the most beautiful young woman to be his wife. Tiger chose a 
sexy fiancee who was intelligent... With her he listened to Western rock music, 
which he adored, and told her: ‘There will be a day when I will let the Chinese 
know there is such wonderful music in the world’.’’ 
   
        In 1971, Lin’s son produced ‘‘Outline of Project 571’’: ‘‘Tiger chose 
the name because ‘571’ — wu-qi-yi — has the same pronunciation in Chinese as 
‘armed uprising’.’’ The paper was an indictment of Mao — called ‘‘B-52’’ by 
Tiger, because he ‘‘had a big stomach full of evil thoughts, each one like a 
heavy bomb that would kill masses of people’’ — who deserved assassination. One 
plan was to ‘‘fly helicopters on a suicide mission against Mao on Tiananmen 
Gate’’. 
   
        Tiger, say the authors, ‘‘saw right through Mao ... as evil’’. Indeed, 
establishing this assessment is the principal theme of the book. Jung Chang and 
Halliday take pains to tell the Mao the man from his self-glorifying myths. 
They point out he happily invented the ‘‘heroic’’ crossing of the Dadu river 
during the Long March, with — as Edgar P Snow wrote, being fed the version by 
Mao — ‘‘Reds... moving forward on their hands and knees, tossing grenade after 
grenade into the enemy machine-gun nest’’. 
  
      The book debunks the story: ‘‘There was no battle at the Dadu Bridge... 
There were no Nationalist troops... no battle casualties.’’ The 22-man vanguard 
‘‘who, according to the myth, stormed the bridge in a suicide attack’’ were all 
alive and well at a celebration the following week. In truth, Mao simply 
‘‘walked across the Dadu Bridge on 31 May 1935’’. 
   
        The Dadu Bridge (non)-episode was characteristic of a man 
‘‘ideologically rather vague’’ with no ‘‘heartfelt commitment’’ to anything 
other than himself. 
   
        Indeed Mao joined the Party only when it asked him to manage a 
bookshop: ‘‘Mao had become a Communist — not after an idealistic journey, or 
driven by passionate belief, but by being at the right place at the right time, 
and being given a job that was highly congenial to him. He had been effectively 
incorporated into an expanding organisation.’’ 
  So in the end, the greatest Communist was only a careerist. There’s hope yet 
for the UPA government.
   
    by Ashok Malik
   
     
   
   


 
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