Mao Zedong

"He’s an incredible figure, in almost any way you think about it, to have led this transformative revolution that turned China upside down and inside out, and then go on to lead the country for the first 27 years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. So he was involved in dramatic events, he was a larger-than-life figure, and also there are distinct stages in his life in which he operates in different ways. We see him first as a rebel figure and then also as an almost godlike holder of enormous power. So it’s not hard to see why a lot of biographers would be drawn to the drama of that kind of a life. I think there are actually two kinds of Mao biography that come to mind. Those two that you mention do present Mao as a despicable figure – a monster more than a man. But before that probably the most famous biography of Mao was Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China , which is a very romanticised vision of Mao’s life. It focuses on Mao the rebel, before he came to power, whereas the more demonising biographies tend to focus on Mao’s life after taking power. Or, in the case of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s, they take the most evil period of Mao’s life and then read his entire earlier life through the prism of his most brutal actions while in power. What I like about Spence’s biography, which is very short, is that it presents us with a very human Mao, both in his accomplishments and in the tragedies that he foisted on the country. So you get a more rounded picture – but that doesn’t mean impartial, that it’s a balance sheet of positives and negatives. The book is driven by a vision of a flesh-and-blood individual who accomplished some amazing things, and made some very terrible mistakes. Not one that would make for compelling reading! Though I recently wrote a piece for Time magazine about how when Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao, he seemed in comparison a more down-to-earth, unexciting and pragmatic character – but now, in comparison to Hu Jintao, Deng seems positively charismatic. So we’ve had a kind of steady progression away from larger-than-life Chinese leaders."