Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The most authoritative life of Mao ever written, by the bestselling author of Wild Swans , Jung Chang and her husband, historian Jon Halliday.

Based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of Mao's close circle in China who have never talked before, and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him, this is the most authoritative life of Mao ever written. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao- he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relationship with Stalin went back to the 1920s, ultimately bringing him to power; he welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China; and he schemed, poisoned and blackmailed to get his way.
After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing this dream he caused the deaths of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history. In all, well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao's rule, in peacetime.

Combining meticulous history with the story-telling style of Wild Swans , this biography makes immediate Mao's roller-coaster life, as he intrigued and fought every step of the way to force through his unpopular decisions. Mao's character and the enormity of his behaviour towards his wives, mistresses and children are unveiled for the first time.

This is an entirely fresh look at Mao in both content and approach. It will astonish historians and the general reader alike.

'This a bombshell of a book', Chris Patten, The Times

'The first great political biography of the twenty-first century' Spectator

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Maps
• Abbreviations and a Note
• About Spelling in the Text
• Part 1 --Lukewarm Believer
• 1 On the Cusp from Ancient to Modern(1893-1911; age 1-17)
• 2 Becoming a Communist(1911-20; age 17-26)
• 3 Lukewarm Believer(1920-25; age 26-31)
• 4 Rise and Demise in the Nationalist Party (1925-27; age 31-33)
• Part 2--Long March to Supremacy in the Party
• 5 Hijacking a Red Force and Taking Over Bandit Land(1927-28; age 33-34)
• 6 Subjugating the Red Army Supremo(1928-30; age 34-36)
• 7 Takeover Leads to Death of Second Wife(1927-30; age 33-36)
• 8 Bloody Purge Paves the Way for "Chairman Mao"(1929-31; age 35-37)
• 9 Mao and the First Red State(1931-34; age 37-40)
• 10 Troublemaker to Figurehead(1931-34; age 37-40)
• 11 How Mao Got onto the Long March(1933-34; age 39-40)
• 12 Long March I: Chiang Lets the Reds Go(1934; age 40)
• 13 Long March II: The Power Behind the Throne(1934-35; age 40-41)
• 14 Long March III: Monopolising the Moscow Connection(1935; age 41)
• Part 3 --Building His Power Base
• 15 The Timely Death of Mao's Host(1935-36; age 41-42)
• 16 Chiang Kai-shek Kidnapped(1935-36; age 41-42)
• 17 A National Player(1936; age 42-43)
• 18 New Image, New Life and New Wife(1937-38; age 43-44)
• 19 Red Mole Triggers China-Japan War(1937-38; age 43-44)
• 20 Fight Rivals and Chiang--Not Japan(1937-40; age 43-46)
• 21 Most Desired Scenario: Stalin Carves Up China with Japan(1939-40; age 45-46)
• 22 Death Trap for His Own Men(1940-41; age 46-47)
• 23 Building a Power Base Through Terror(1941-45; age 47-51)
• 24 Uncowed Opponent Poisoned(1941-45; age 47-51)
• 25 Supreme Party Leader at Last(1942-45; age 48-51)
• Part 4 --To Conquer China
• 26 "Revolutionary Opium War"(1937-45; age 43-51)
• 27 The Russians Are Coming!(1945-46; age 51-52)
• 28 Saved by Washington(1944-47; age 50-53)
• 29 Moles, Betrayals and Poor Leadership Doom Chiang(1945-49; age 51-55)
• 30 China Conquered(1946-49; age 52-55)
• 31 Totalitarian State, Extravagant Lifestyle(1949-53; age 55-59)
• Part 5
• 32 Rivalry with Stalin(1947-49; age 53-55)
• 33 Two Tyrants Wrestle(1949-50; age 55-56)
• 34 Why Mao and Stalin Started the Korean War(1949-50; age 55-56)
• 35 Mao Milks the Korean War(1950-53; age 56-59)
• 36 Launching the Secret Superpower Programme(1953-54; age 59-60)
• 37 War on Peasants(1953-56; age 59-62)
• 38 Undermining Khrushchev(1956-59; age 62-65)
• 39 Killing the "Hundred Flowers"(1957-58; age 63-64)
• 40 The Great Leap: "Half of China May Well Have to Die"(1958-61; age 64-67)
• 41 Defence Minister Peng's Lonely Battle(1958

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

On the Cusp from Ancient to Modern (1893-1911 H age 1-17) Mao tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. He was born into a peasant family in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China. The date was 26 December 1893. His ancestors had lived in the valley for five hundred years. This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic age. Buddhist temples dating from the Tang dynasty (ad 618-906), when Buddhism first came here, were still in use. Forests where nearly 300 species of trees grew, including maples, camphor, metasequoia and the rare ginkgo, covered the area and sheltered the tigers, leopards and boar that still roamed the hills. (The last tiger was killed in 1957.) These hills, with neither roads nor navigable rivers, detached the village from the world at large. Even as late as the early twentieth century an event as momentous as the death of the emperor in 1908 did not percolate this far, and Mao found out only two years afterwards when he left Shaoshan. The valley of Shaoshan measures about 5 by 3.5 km. The 600-odd families who lived there grew rice, tea and bamboo, harnessing buffalo to plough the rice paddies. Daily life revolved round these age-old activities. Mao's father, Yi-chang, was born in 1870. At the age of ten he was engaged to a girl of thirteen from a village about 10 kilometres away, beyond a pass called Tiger Resting Pass, where tigers used to sun themselves. This short distance was long enough in those years for the two villages to speak dialects that were almost mutually unintelligible. Being merely a girl, Mao's mother did not receive a name; as the seventh girl born in the Wen clan, she was just Seventh Sister Wen. In accordance with centuries of custom, her feet had been crushed and bound to produce the so-called three-inch golden lilies that epitomised beauty at the time. Her engagement to Mao's father followed time-honoured customs. It was arranged by their parents and was based on a practical consideration: the tomb of one of her grandfathers was in Shaoshan, and it had to be tended regularly with elaborate rituals, so having a relative there would prove useful. Seventh Sister Wen moved in with the Maos upon betrothal, and was married at the age of eighteen, in 1885, when Yi-chang was fifteen. Shortly after the wedding, Yi-chang went off to be a soldier to earn money to pay off family debts, which he was able to do after several years. Chinese peasants were not serfs but free farmers, and joining the army for purely financial reasons was an established practice. Luckily he was not involved in any wars; instead he caught a glimpse of the world and picked up some business ideas. Unlike most of the villagers, Yi-chang could read and write, well enough to keep accounts. After his return, he raised pigs, and processed grain into top-quality rice to sell at a nearby market town. He bought back the land his father had pawned, then bought more land, and became one of the richest men in the village. Though relatively well off, Yi-chang remained extremely hard- working and thrifty all his life. The family house consisted of half a dozen rooms, which occupied one wing of a large thatched property. Eventually Yi-chang replaced the thatch with tiles, a major improvement, but left the mud floor and mud walls. The windows had no glass--still a rare luxury--and were just square openings with wooden bars, blocked off at night by wooden boards (the temperature hardly ever fell below freezing). The furniture was simple: wooden beds, bare wooden tables and benches. It was in one of these rather spartan rooms, under a pale blue homespun cotton quilt, inside a blue mosquito net, that Mao was born. Mao was the third son, but the first to survive beyond infancy. His Buddhist mother became even more devout to encourage Buddha to protect him. Mao was given the two-part name Tse-tung. Tse, which means "to shine on," was the name given to all his generation, as preordained when the clan chronicle was first written in the eighteenth century; tung means "the East." So his full given name meant "to shine on the East." When two more boys were born, in 1896 and 1905, they were given the names Tse-min (min means "the people") and Tse-t'an (tan possibly referred to the local region, Xiangtan). These names reflected the inveterate aspiration of Chinese peasants for their sons to do well--and the expectation that they could. High positions were open to all through education, which for centuries meant studying Confucian classics. Excellence would enable young men of any background to pass imperial examinations and become mandarins--all the way up to becoming prime minister. Officialdom was the definition of achievement, and the names given to Mao and his brothers expressed the hopes placed on them. But a grand name was also onerous and potentially tempted fate, so most children were given a pet name that was either lowly or tough, or both. Mao's was "the Boy of Stone"--Shisan yazi. For this second "baptism" his mother took him to a rock about eight feet high, which was reputed to be enchanted, as there was a spring underneath. After Mao performed obeisance and kowtows, he was considered adopted by the rock. Mao was very fond of this name, and continued to use it as an adult. In 1959, when he returned to Shaoshan and met the villagers for the first--and only--time as supreme leader of China, he began the dinner for them with a quip: "So everyone is here, except my Stone Mother. Shall we wait for her?" Mao loved his real mother, with an intensity he showed towards no one else. She was a gentle and tolerant person, who, as he remembered, never raised her voice to him. From her came his full face, sensual lips, and a calm self-possession in the eyes. Mao would talk about his mother with emotion all his life. It was in her footsteps that he became a Buddhist as a child. Years later he told his staff: "I worshipped my mother . . . Wherever my mother went, I would follow . . . going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper money, doing obeisance to Buddha . . . Because my mother believed in Buddha, so did I." But he gave up Buddhism in his mid-teens. Mao had a carefree childhood. Until he was eight he lived with his mother's family, the Wens, in their village, as his mother preferred to live with her own family. There his maternal grandmother doted on him. His two uncles and their wives treated him like their own son, and one of them became his Adopted Father, the Chinese equivalent to godfather. Mao did a little light farm work, gathering fodder for pigs and taking the buffaloes out for a stroll in the tea-oil camellia groves by a pond shaded by banana leaves. In later years he would reminisce with fondness about this idyllic time. He started learning to read, while his aunts spun and sewed under an oil lamp. Mao only came back to live in Shaoshan in spring 1902, at the age of eight, to receive an education, which took the form of study in a tutor's home. Confucian classics, which made up most of the curriculum, were beyond the understanding of children and had to be learnt by heart. Mao was blessed with an exceptional memory, and did well. His fellow pupils remembered a diligent boy who managed not only to recite but also to write by rote these difficult texts. He also gained a foundation in Chinese language and history, and began to learn to write good prose, calligraphy and poetry, as writing poems was an essential part of Confucian education. Reading became a passion. Peasants generally turned in at sunset, to save on oil for lamps, but Mao would read deep into the night, with an oil lamp standing on a bench outside his mosquito net. Years later, when he was supreme ruler of China, half of his huge bed would be piled a foot high with Chinese classics, and he littered his speeches and writings with historical references. But his poems lost flair. Mao clashed frequently with his tutors. He ran away from his first school at the age of ten, claiming that the teacher was a martinet. He was expelled from, or was "asked to leave," at least three schools for being headstrong and disobedient. His mother indulged him but his father was not pleased, and Mao's hopping from tutor to tutor was just one source of tension between father and son. Yi-chang paid for Mao's education, hoping that his son could at least help keep the family accounts, but Mao disliked the task. All his life, he was vague about figures, and hopeless at economics. Nor did he take kindly to hard physical labour. He shunned it as soon as his peasant days were over. Yi-chang could not stand Mao being idle. Having spent every minute of his waking hours working, he expected his son to do the same, and would strike him when he did not comply. Mao hated his father. In 1968, when he was taking revenge on his political foes on a vast scale, he told their tormentors that he would have liked his father to be treated just as brutally: "My father was bad. If he were alive today, he should be 'jet-planed.' " This was an agonising position where the subject's arms were wrenched behind his back and his head forced down. Mao was not a mere victim of his father. He fought back, and was often the victor. He would tell his father that the father, being older, should do more manual labour than he, the younger--which was an unthinkably insolent argument by Chinese standards. One day, according to Mao, father and son had a row in front of guests. "My father scolded me before them, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I called him names and left the house . . . My father . . . pursued me, cursing as well as commanding me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer . . . My father backed down." Once, as Mao was retelling the story, he laughed and added an observation: "Old men like him didn't want to lose their sons. This is their weakness. I attacked at their weak point, and I won!" Money was the only weapon Mao's father possessed. After Mao was expelled by tutor no. 4, in 1907, his father stopped paying his son's tuition fees and the thirteen-year-old boy had to become a full-time peasant. But he soon found a way to get himself out of farm work and back into the world of books. Yi-chang was keen for his son to get married, so that he would be tied down and behave responsibly. His niece was at just the right age for a wife, four years older than Mao, who agreed to his father's plan and resumed schooling after the marriage. The marriage took place in 1908, when Mao was fourteen and his bride eighteen. Her family name was Luo. She herself had no proper name, and was just called "Woman Luo." The only time Mao is known to have mentioned her was to the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, when Mao was strikingly dismissive, exaggerating the difference in their ages: "When I was 14, my parents married me to a girl of 20. But I never lived with her . . . I do not consider her my wife . . . and have given little thought to her." He gave no hint that she was not still alive; in fact, Woman Luo had died in 1910, just over a year into their marriage. Mao's early marriage turned him into a fierce opponent of arranged marriages. Nine years later he wrote a seething article against the practice: "In families in the West, parents acknowledge the free will of their children. But in China, orders from the parents are not at all compatible with the will of the children . . . This is a kind of 'indirect rape.' Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children . . ." As soon as his wife died, the sixteen-year-old widower demanded to leave Shaoshan. His father wanted to apprentice him to a rice store in the county town, but Mao had set his eye on a modern school about 25 kilometres away. He had learned that the imperial examinations had been abolished. Instead there were modern schools now, teaching subjects like science, world history and geography, and foreign languages. It was these schools that would open the door out of a peasant's life for many like him. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, Jon Halliday All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Jung moves from the personal-her huge best seller, Wild Swans, inter-twined her story of life in Communist China with the stories of her mother and grandmother-to the political. Halliday chimes in with his University of London credentials. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Jung Chang, author of the award-winning Wild Swans, grew up during the Cultural Revolution; Halliday is a research fellow at King's College, University of London. They join forces in this sweeping but flawed biography, which aims to uncover Mao's further cruelties (beyond those commonly known) by debunking claims made by the Communist Party in his service. For example, the authors argue that, far from Mao's humble peasant background shaping his sympathies for the downtrodden, he actually ruthlessly exploited the peasants' resources when he was based in regions such as Yenan, and cared about peasants only when it suited his political agenda. And far from having founded the Chinese Communist Party, the authors argue, Mao was merely at the right place at the right time. Importantly, the book argues that in most instances Mao was able to hold on to power thanks to his adroitness in appealing to and manipulating powerful allies and foes, such as Stalin and later Nixon; furthermore, almost every aspect of his career was motivated by a preternatural thirst for personal power, rather than political vision. Some of the book's claims rely on interviews and on primary material (such as the anguished letters Mao's second wife wrote after he abandoned her), though the book's use of sources is sometimes incompletely documented and at times heavy-handed (for example, using a school essay the young Mao wrote to show his lifelong ruthlessness). Illus., maps. (Oct. 21) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This lengthy accusative biography condemns Mao Zedong as a Machiavellian scourge of the Chinese nation and people. Chang portrays Mao as a rebellious, devious son of a Hunan peasant family, who from childhood sought to leave his mark on the world. Egotistical ambition rather than selfless idealism steered Mao into a burgeoning communist movement during the 1920s, and ruthless maneuvering for power highlighted Mao's rise to the zenith of Chinese communist hierarchy in the 1930s. During WW II and the following Chinese civil war, according to Chang, Mao employed all possible means, however malevolent, toward consolidating his absolute authority over the Chinese communist regime and directing China's destiny. Mao imposed a merciless personal dictatorship over mainland China in the name of revolution. By constant political cleansing, he tamed the populace and eliminated suspected dissenters from within and without his regime. He drove fanatical campaigns for socialist construction at disastrous human and physical costs. Although a passionate work of Mao bashing, this book fails to sound as convincing as Chang intended, due to his reliance on recycled data from already-known literature and the use of hard to verify circumstantial information. This account of Mao's life provides little explanation of why Mao was a powermonger. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. General readers/public libraries. G. Zheng Angelo State University

Booklist Review

This biography of the giant of twentieth-century Chinese history boasts a monumental marshaling of detail and historiographically overturning revelations. It takes time to get through and more time to digest, but there is no time when its value is not apparent. Chang is the author of the hair-raising family history Wild Swans (1991), and she and coauthor Halliday prepare a vastly comprehensive accounting of Mao's entire life. The first sentence of their startling book underscores the point of view to follow: Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. Obsessed with both power and personal safety, Mao engineered his way through the collapse of the Chinese social order in the wake of the collapse of the imperial regime with horrendous cynicism and ruthlessness. While analyzing Mao's life, from the beginning of his career to his dying breath, the authors clear up several myths--actually deceptions--perpetuated about him, including the real nature of his status as peasant leader. For all contemporary history and government collections. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2005 Booklist