The Long March could have been ended almost before it started, had Chiang Kai-shek not given Mao a free passage to safety.
The marchers faced the daunting prospect of four lines of blockhouses. Yet these turned out to be no obstacle at all.
Chiang hoped to win the support of the warlords by convincing them that the Red Army was a threat to their powers. If that threat disappeared, as a result of Mao's annihilation, the debating point disappeared with it. So the Red Army was allowed to pass the blockhouses and over the Xiang river, creating "one of the enduring myths of the 20th century."
The stories of continual slaughter are so horrifically compelling that they enable the reader of The Unknown Story to ignore the problems of its literary style. To be told that "by the beginning of 1948, the Reds controlled 160 million people" would normally provoke questions about who, why and where.
But the narrative moves on to explain that, according to Mao, 10 percent of the population were "kulaks or landlords" and must be eliminated.
"Hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million, were killed or driven to suicide." Inelegance loses its importance. The murder goes on, page after page.
Killing became an object in itself. When Mao decided to make the Great Leap Forward, which would allow China "to overtake all capitalist countries in a fairly short time and become one of the richest, most advanced countries in the world," he had no qualms about "driving peasants off the land and into factories," even if the sudden shortage of food meant that "half of China may well have to die." The famine which followed killed 38 million people in four years.
Meanwhile, Mao, with or without the support of the Soviet Union, was attempting to extend his power over neighboring territories. Tibet was first courted, then occupied and subjected to the Great Destruction, an attack on the entire Tibetan culture which resulted in the death of half the adult male population. Mao was so successful in imposing his ideas on North Korea that the country's unofficial poet laureate wrote:
"Kill, kill more. For the farm, good rice and the quick collection of taxes."
Mao died in his bed on Sept. 9, 1976, according to The Unknown Story, unconcerned about his legacy to China and its people. However, "Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The communist regime declares itself to be Mao's heir and perpetuates the myth of Mao."
That sentence is the biography's epitaph and, more important, the biographers' stimulus to complete the 10 years of research on which their book is based.
Perhaps "labor of hate" is too strong a term to describe the devotion with which Mao is denounced. The Unknown Story means to inform. Its authors take it for granted that to know Mao is to loathe him.
An 800-page philippic is not an easy read, especially when it is written with such an undiscriminating devotion to detail. But anyone who wants to understand the world should struggle through The Unknown Story. Do not expect to enjoy the experience. It is terrible proof that absolute evil can sometimes triumph.
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