Mao: The Man Who Made China

"Mao was arguably the most powerful person of the 20th century because he had absolute power for most of the years between the Communist conquest of power in China in 1949 and his death in 1976. Mao had a penchant for unleashing massively destructive campaigns across China. In the 1950s there was the Great Leap Forward, whose aim was to have China surpass the Western industrial states in industrial output. It didn’t achieve that, but it did trigger a famine, which was the worst famine in the long history of a country that has seen many famines. An estimated 40 million people may have died. Then, in the 1960s, came the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The ostensible goal was to remove what Mao considered to be the principal obstacles to what he defined as communism in China. One of the obstacles he cited was the Communist Party itself, and he purged, persecuted, and sometimes murdered or had murdered, many, many people, including men with whom he had worked closely for decades. The Cultural Revolution turned into a kind of civil war with an estimated 2 million casualties, many lives turned upside down, and the economic and political structure of China devastated. Mao visited on his own country the kind of destruction that generally only comes from the worst kinds of wars imposed by hostile powers. Philip Short is a British journalist and has written a very good one-volume biography of Mao. It’s not short, but Mao’s was a long life. Mao is a difficult person about whom to write a biography. Firstly, not all the facts are known: this is, after all, still a communist country. A lot is known, but the records are not available. Secondly, Mao has been surrounded by so many myths that it’s difficult sometimes to penetrate them. Some of the biographies of Mao, including the one by Jung Chang and her husband, Michael Halliday , are indictments. It’s not that they’re inaccurate, but they’re written mainly to highlight the monstrous qualities of Mao, which were there in abundance. Short is not writing an indictment—though an indictment of Mao is certainly possible to construct from his volume. Yes, he has. He writes very long biographies. This one, which is the only one I’ve read closely, is very well done. Hitler came to power legally in 1933, but he imposed a brutal dictatorship on Germany. He was responsible for starting World War Two in Europe, which was the worst war ever fought on a historically war-torn continent. Any German leader would have tried to revise the post-World War I political settlement that had been devised by Woodrow Wilson and others at Paris in 1919, but it doesn’t seem likely that a different German leader would have gone about it the way Hitler did. Then, of course, Hitler was responsible for history’s greatest crime, the murder of 6 million European Jews, which is known as the Holocaust . Hitler didn’t like to speak about the Holocaust and didn’t take a personal hand in the murder of Europe’s Jews, but there’s absolutely no doubt that he authorized it and that it would never have happened had Hitler not been the leader of Germany."