The world bestseller "The Unknown Mao" is being published in Russia. The Unknown Mao by John Halliday Yun Zhang The Unknown Mao

Do you think that it’s only Soviet history that everyone craps on?
Figurines.

From a review of this book:
Y. Zhang, D. Holliday. "Unknown Mao" M.: “Tsentrpoligraf”, 2007.
http://www.gazeta.ru/culture/2007/09/28/a_2199573.shtml

glamor first:

The work is not special and needs an introduction. "The Unknown Mao" by John Halliday and his wife Yun Zhang is truly an international bestseller, and a very recent one at that - the book was first published in 2005. First places in the book charts of the most famous publications, translation into two dozen languages ​​of the world, many readers, including even George W. Bush. The book was written over ten years based on data from the archives of China, Taiwan, the USA, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, Italy, Albania, Switzerland - in total, the book’s creators combed through the archives of twenty countries. Plus 400 interviews with Chinese citizens and representatives of almost 40 countries of the world. Among them are relatives, old friends and colleagues from the 1910–1920s, girlfriends, secretaries, bodyguards and doctors of Mao, the ruler of Manchuria, Marshal Zhang Xueliang, the spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, US Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, State US Secretary Henry Kissinger, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR Mikhail Kapitsa and many others.

and here is the bitter truth:

From the very beginning, a circumstance that was not advertised by the publishing house was somewhat confusing: the book by John Halliday and Yun Zhang was being boycotted not only by the PRC, but de facto by the entire Chinese world. Thus, the publication of this book in their country was banned not only by Beijing, but also by Taipei; the only Chinese edition was published in Hong Kong. The question immediately arises: What did it take to write a book about Mao Zedong to be banned in Taiwan, inhabited by the descendants of his worst enemies?

All questions are resolved by reading the book. You can retell it in a few words: Mao Zedong is Satan's confidant on Earth, and all the evil in the world happened with his direct participation. He created the most totalitarian state on Earth, which has no analogues either in the past, or in the future, or in the present. It was China, and not the Stalinist USSR, that was even the fiend of hell on Earth. Total number of deaths only from hunger over the 27 years of his reign, the authors estimate an unimaginable figure of 70 million people. True, on the basis of what data the authors came to exactly this number is not very clear. On those rare occasions when the creators of The Unknown Mao deign to explain, we hear something like:

“In one typical Chinese city, Gaoyao, 110 people were driven to suicide. If we extrapolate this figure to all of China's more than 2,000 counties, the number of suicides in rural areas in this short period reached approximately a quarter of a million."

What can we say about the creator of this cannibalistic regime? In an incredible way, he combined all known and only supposed human vices. According to the authors, Mao was not just a worthless politician who ruined everything that could be ruined and did harm wherever he could do harm, but also a disgusting person. John Halliday’s phrase at the recent Russian presentation of the book is very characteristic: “Mao’s associates believed that it was impossible to work with him. He was despotic, unpleasant, and rude. Besides, he was a bore and a grouch.”

There is not a single rumor about Mao, even the most dubious, that the authors would not quote from themselves. Therefore, those who read the book can add: he was also a maniac (“directly observing acts of violence, Mao experienced a kind of ecstasy”), an immoral type (threw himself at all women who were within his sight, after which he destroyed his lovers), a quitter (the entire famous I rode the Long March on a stretcher), and for dessert – “I very rarely washed my hair and brushed my teeth. And I haven’t taken a shower or bath at all for decades.”

If anything bright appears in the book, you can bet it is a reflection of the radiance of the United States of America: “Mao was also worried about the attractiveness of the West in the eyes of members of his own party. His army loved American weapons: his own bodyguards believed that American carbines were much better than Soviet machine guns. “[American] carbines are lighter and shoot more accurately. Why not buy more carbines? - they asked Mao. American cars were awe-inspiring.”

No one argues that Mao was by no means an angel on Earth, and he had a lot of crimes, but for some reason, even Deng Xiaoping, who was imprisoned twice by him, eventually stated that “in his policy, the chairman was 70 percent right and only 30 percent wrong.”

The summary is simple - propaganda.
(end of quote)
LJ user brought me to the review

MOSCOW, September 20 - RIA Novosti. The book “The Unknown Mao” by British authors John Halliday and his wife of Chinese origin, Yun Zhang, published in Great Britain in 2005 and already becoming a world bestseller, is being published in Russian, the Tsentrpolygraph publishing house told RIA Novosti.

“Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the author spent 10 years researching the life of the Chinese dictator. He worked in the archives of about 20 countries, including classified ones. In addition to Halliday himself and his Chinese wife Yun Zhang, they worked on the book research groups of historians and scientists from different countries,” the publication’s executive editor, Yulia Shengelaya, told RIA Novosti.

The documentary basis of the story is made up of materials from the archives of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, the USA, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, Italy, Albania, Switzerland and a number of other countries. Holliday also worked in document storage facilities in Russia.

The book includes about 400 interviews with Chinese citizens and representatives of almost 40 countries around the world. The authors managed to collect interesting testimonies from people who personally knew Mao, including his relatives, old friends and colleagues from the 1910-1920s, girlfriends, secretaries, bodyguards and doctors.

The ruler of Manchuria, the legendary Marshal Zhang Xueliang, the spiritual leader of Tibet the Dalai Lama, US Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, USSR Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Kapitsa and many others also shared their memories.

“Mao is striking in his bloodthirstiness, he actually revived mass torture in China. For some period of time, he kept the Chinese people in panic. At that time, a terrible famine reigned in the country, people were dying out in villages. 38 million died in peacetime because of politics Mao’s Great Leap Forward,” says the editor of the publication.

However, Mao Zedong appears to the reader as not at all a fanatical or insane leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

“He absolutely clearly understands what he needs and at the same time calmly goes towards the goal. The slogan “the end justifies the means” fits absolutely harmoniously into his concept, he strives to rule the world. Mao has no feelings for his friends either. He ruined all his wives, except for the last one, all his brothers. Every living thing dies next to him,” Shengelaya notes.

The book is a grandiose political investigation of 800 pages. It is written in lively language and reads like a sharp political detective story.

“It has a place for everything: the relationships of world political leaders, as well as the personal life of Mao and his associates. At the same time, the dictator’s private life is illuminated very clearly; there are simply “stunning things,” the agency’s interlocutor emphasizes.

The book describes in detail the years of Mao Zedong's youth and reign, and ends with the death of the "great helmsman" in 1976. At the same time, the authors focus on the three passions of the Chinese dictator: power, sex and reading.

“When he became blind in old age and realized that he could no longer read, he burst into tears. It hit him hard,” says the editor of the Russian edition.

Official Beijing did not welcome the creation of an uncensored biography of the founder of the People's Republic of China and banned the publication of the book "The Unknown Mao" in China.

Its author, John Halliday, was born in Dublin. Graduated from Oxford. He studied at universities in Italy and Mexico. In the 1990s, he researched the Korean War at King's College London. He is the author of the script for a 6-hour film about the Korean War, filmed in 20 countries in the 1980s.

The book "The Unknown Mao", which John Halliday wrote with his wife Yun Zhang, was first published in England in 2005 and the United States, and has been published in 30 countries.

Yun Zhang, John Halliday. Unknown Mao / Trans. from English I. Igorevsky. – M.: Tsentropoligraf, 2007. – 846 p.

Finally, Russia is starting to live in step with the whole world. What becomes an event in literature in the West comes to us relatively quickly. In 2005, a biographical epic about Mao Zedong, written by Yun Zhang and her husband John Halliday, made a splash there. This year the book was published in Russia.

“The Unknown Mao” is a stage both in the creative biography of the Chinese writer, now living in England, and a stage in the world awareness of the history of the 20th century, the history of China, the history of communism. In terms of the power of influence on public opinion, the breadth of generalizations, the accuracy of the characteristics, the unexpected drama in the story of what would seem to be a long-known work, the work can be placed on a par with “The Gulag Archipelago.” Let us immediately note that in China “The Unknown Mao” is under censorship ban, as is “Wild Swans” - the writer’s first experience, which made her world famous (surprisingly, “Swans” has still not been fully translated into Russian!).

We, taking advantage of the fact that Moscow is several decades ahead of Beijing in political development, will allow ourselves to talk about Mao. The authors accomplish the main thing - they present the great helmsman as who he really was, and not as a dreamy sage, a lonely monk, a great national leader, as Western intellectuals and liberals saw him. But in reality he was the most significant mass murderer in history; the genocide of his compatriots organized by him has no analogues in the annals of China. Before Mao, the “record” was the death of thirty million Chinese in the mid-19th century during the Taiping Rebellion; the CCP leader doubled this figure with his policies of the “Great Leap Forward” and people’s communes, not to mention the civil war and post-revolutionary terror he unleashed. The execution of 460 Confucians under Qin Shi Huang seems like child's play against the backdrop of the total destruction of the “old” intelligentsia by the Communists. It is this debunking of illusions about Mao and communism, and most importantly, the belief in the possibility of a revolutionary and conscious reorganization of the world, that left-liberal critics cannot forgive the authors.

But these are, in general, a minority. The success of the book is obvious, and positive reviews prevail. At the beginning of the 21st century, the world can afford to admit the obvious - the communist experiment not only failed, but was also initially “charged” with genocide. And in its worst (except for Cambodia under Pol Pot) and mass form, it was carried out in China.

The authors of “The Unknown Mao” open the eyes of the general reader to many things previously unknown to him. We learn that the “Long March” was a fiction, since Chiang Kai-shek, in fact, did not fight the communists, opening the way for them to the north so that they would quickly leave and so that Stalin would release his son from the USSR. (The fate of the Generalissimo's son, who is taken hostage, is the book's special dramatic plot.) Yoon and Halliday tell the story of the mass cultivation of opium by the Communists in the "Special Border Region."

The authors pay much attention to the question: why did Chiang Kai-shek lose China to Mao Zedong? The answer they give is multifactorial. They note the role of Soviet assistance - highly secret and therefore until recently little known in the West, and the significance of American stupidity, when both Special Envoy George Marshall and President Truman himself did everything to protect the Communists from defeat and put a spoke in the wheels of the Kuomintang. The story of how the Communists fooled Americans with disinformation about a “split” between the “liberal” Zhou Enlai, who must be supported, and the “radical” Liu Shaoqi, and that Mao actually dreams of friendship with America, is one of the most instructive. After all, many historians are still trying to prove that Tito, Mao, Ho, and Castro were just moderate nationalists, and if not for the anti-communism of the Americans, the Cold War could have been avoided.

The authors also got it from the cunning Kissinger and Nixon, whose policy of friendship with China appears in a new light. It was not they who “divorced” Beijing, but the old and decrepit Mao who forced the leaders of the superpower to sometimes play the role of jesters in his chambers.

And, of course, a comparison is made between Mao and Chiang. Yong Zhang and John Halliday's conclusion is clear: “Chiang always allowed personal feelings to guide his political and military decisions. He lost China to a man completely devoid of such weaknesses.” Since the twenties, when the future generalissimo was still the head of the Whampoa military school, many communist “moles” were introduced into his circle, regularly supplying information to Mao Zedong and undermining the efforts of Chiang Kai-shek. The authors are the first to point out their role and name them.

The Unknown Mao is a biography of the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, by husband-and-wife team writer Yong Zhang and historian John Halliday. The book credits Mao with being responsible for more civilian deaths than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

Before writing the book, the authors conducted extensive research, over ten years they interviewed people close to Mao and those who knew him; examined already published memoirs of Chinese politicians, and also studied declassified archives in Russia and China. Zhang lived during the Cultural Revolution, which she described in her book Wild Swans.

The novel quickly became a bestseller in Europe and North America, receiving an unprecedented number of positive reviews in newspapers. Feedback from Chinese scientists was mostly critical. It is unprecedented both in the volume of sources used and in the number of historical discoveries. The documentary basis was made up of materials from the archives of Taiwan, the USA, Japan, Russia and a number of other countries. The authors managed to gain access to the archives of the People's Republic of China, despite the fact that official Beijing did not welcome the creation of an uncensored biography of Mao. The book revealed to the world community the personal phenomenon of the communist tyrant.

In September, for the first time in Russia, a book was published that shocked the whole world with its facts - “THE UNKNOWN MAO” by John Halliday and Yong Zhang - a brilliant historical detective story and, at the same time, a grandiose political investigation.
The book has already been translated into 20 languages ​​of the world, and was presented in Russia for the first time by the Tsentrpoligraf publishing house.

The Great Mao, if he were truly a brilliant seer, would have found a little girl named Yong Zhang in Sichuan Province and would have killed her and all her relatives up to the ninth generation.
But the girl grew up, moved to Great Britain, married the writer and journalist John Halliday, with whom they wrote a terrible and shockingly detailed biography of the great ruler of China, Mao Zedong.

Yun Zhang was able to gain access to unique information classified as “top secret” in the archives of a number of countries whose history is closely intertwined with China! And John Halliday, as an excellent writer, was able to describe as fully as possible the path of ruler Mao and China in the first half of the twentieth century in an accessible and very interesting form.

"The Unknown Mao" by John Halliday is a panoramic, large-scale look at the life of Red China and its "friendship" with its "big brother" - Russia - yesterday, today and perhaps tomorrow.

This book is the result of ten years of meticulous interviews and painstaking searches in the archives of many countries whose history is inextricably linked with China. She completely destroys Mao's image. Another monster appeared to the world, who stood on a par with Stalin and Hitler, completing the series of great dictators of the 20th century.
It is not surprising that the Chinese government banned not only the book, but also those issues of journals in which its reviews and annotations are given.

The biography presents unique information, and it is so original and fascinating that “The Unknown Mao” is read avidly all over the world.
The book combines many genres: a detective plot is transformed into a political investigation, dry archival documents turn into love correspondence, military campaigns and “spy games” are replaced by reasoning or short stories about the life of the Chinese. Mao's personality itself is presented in the context of the tragic history of China at the turning point of two eras.
“Without destruction there is no creation. Destruction is criticism, it is revolution. Destruction requires clarification of the truth, and clarification of the truth is creation,” said the “great helmsman” of the Celestial Empire. The destruction and chaos brought by the Cultural Revolution became the foundation of the powerful and unpredictable empire that Mao created.

According to Mao's teachings, China's living space can move far beyond its borders. A unique fact - today in Chinese school geography textbooks a number of Far Eastern regions of Russia are depicted within the borders of China!
Mao is part of the founding mythology of the Chinese state. In a number of Chinese provinces, peasants even began to create traditional religious shrines in his honor. Ironically, an atheist became a god.
Mao easily sacrificed millions of people. During his 27 years of rule, 70 million people died from starvation alone, although news programs at the time reported sky-high harvests in China. This figure alone could become a merciless verdict on Mao Zedong as a statesman.
Mao's dictatorship was built on fear. He introduced public executions and forced people to watch and participate in them.

Mao had three passions - power, women and... books! He received the same pleasure from reading as from sex. The bed on which his unimaginable dirty fantasies were satisfied was covered with books. The only time the great dictator Mao cried was when he became blind. I cried because I couldn't read anymore.

“The Unknown Mao” by John Halliday, presented in Russia by the publishing house “TSENTRPOLIGRAF”, is one of those few books that should change the way we look at history.

Reviews

I still don’t understand what is the “unprecedented unusualness of the new look at Mao”, which is supposedly described in the book under review. Judging by your quotes and paraphrases, it is a completely ordinary little book, one of many published about Mao.

The only noteworthy passage for me was yours: “He got the same pleasure from reading as from sex. The bed on which his unimaginable dirty fantasies were satisfied was covered with books.”

What, this is how I orgasmed continuously all those long hours that I spent reading?! Something is hard to imagine...

And how can you satisfy your “dirty fantasies” on a bed covered with books? Try it yourself - it's quite difficult! Unless they were thin brochures with soft covers, evenly lying on the bed... What, Mao didn’t read hardcover books at all?