Mass Murderer

Mao: The Unknown Story is no ordinary book. Reaching for comparisons, one looks inescapably to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. His was not the first negative account of Soviet Communism, and Mao is not the first book to present Mao and his collaborators as criminals. But like the Gulag, Mao, while factual, is much more than that; resting on a mass of evidence, overwhelmingly accurate and well-supported, it conveys its story in the voice not of the bloodless scholar but of the novelist and the moralist. Already Beijing is terrified of this book, going so far as to ban an issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review that contained an account of it. But we can be certain that pirated copies will soon be circulating in China, if they are not doing so already. Chang and Halliday may not be the first to expose Mao’s crimes, but their work, even with its limitations (of which more below), cannot be ignored. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, it delivers a death blow to an entire way of thinking...more here