Mao

by Philip Short

La China de hoy es una sociedad aparentemente parece conjugar una forma extrema de occidentalización con la pervivencia de los modelos tradicionales, algo que tiene mucho que ver con la visión que tenía Mao de una sociedad ideal unida por un consenso absoluto. La realidad de este inmenso país asiático, que tanto sorprende e incluso inquieta, es muy difícil de entender sin comprender lo que significó el maoísmo y, sobre todo, la figura misma de Mao Zedong, que ha sido interpretada hasta ahora a la luz de patrones occidentales que, inevitablemente, dibujan una caricatura del personaje, unas veces como monstruo y otras como héroe, muy alejada del hombre real que fue. Este libro de Philip Short, corresponsal de la BBC en China durante muchos años, es en parte historia de aventuras, en parte historia intelectual y, en parte, intriga política. Respaldada por una masa ingente de documentos secretos procedentes de los archivos recientemente abiertos del Partido Comunista chino, esta biografía de Mao, que se lee como una novela, de un tirón, nos permite, al fin, comprender en todas sus dimensiones esa figura colosal del siglo XX cuya sombra sigue planeando sobre el siglo XXI.

Genres: History, Biography, China, Nonfiction, Politics, 20th Century, Asia

1048 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Philip Short is a British journalist and author specializing in biographies of historical dictators, he studied at Cambridge University, he worked as a journalist for the BBC for 25 years as a foreign correspondent(1972-97), a job that allowed him to travel widely and experience wildly different cultures, it would prove a great learning experience that still benefits him as an author.

After his work for the BBC, he taught journalism in the University of Iowa, in the US. He now resides in Provence, USA, with his wife and son.

Reviews

[Stefan Mitev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Биографията на най-мащабния убиец в историята със сигурност не е за всеки читател. Мао Дзъдун е основната причина за съвременната позиция на Китай в геополитическия свят. Животът на Мао преминава в дълги години на гражданска война и последваща абсолютна диктатура с катастрофални реформи.

Мао е роден през 1893 г. в малък град в провинция Ханан. Получава традиционно възпитание, базирано на конфуциански ценности. Бързо неспокойният му характер го тласка към екстремизъм. Първоначално определя себе си за анархист и отхвърля традиционни институции като брак и държава. В началото на двадесетте години се сблъсква с преведените наскоро трудове на Ленин и бързо се трансформира в комунист. Участва в създаването на китайската комунистическа партия, но далеч не е от водещите фигури в началните години. След краткотраен алианс с националистическата партия Гоминдан на Сун Ятсен и Чан Кайшъ, последва разрив и гражданска война. Комунистическите войски са поне десет пъти по-малобройни и бързо стигат до единствената възможна стратегия - партизанска съпротива. Чан Кайшъ предприема масивни операции за разбиване на комунистическите крепости. В началото на тридесетте години Мао и сподвижниците му са почти изцяло изтласкани от Южен Китай и започват "Дългия марш" по посока на часовниковата стрелка, през западен до северен Китай, като изминават над 7000 километра. Едва около десет хиляди войници успяват да завършат марша и дните на малобройната комунистическа войска изглеждат преброени. Именно тогава обаче Япония напада Китай и окупира Манджурия. Чан Кайшъ е принуден да се съгласи на общ фронт с комунистите за защита на страната. Парадоксално е, че политическата кариера на Мао се изстрелва нагоре заради японския империализъм.

След края на Втората световна война общият фронт между комунисти и националисти се разпада и гражданската война продължава с пълна сила. Този път обаче Мао е в много по-изгодна позиция и през 1949 г. изтласква армиите на Чан Кайшъ, който е принуден да избяга в Тайван, където основава съществуващата и до днес република Китай (Тайван). Възходът на Мао до председателското място на комунистическата партия въобще не е праволинеен или неизбежен. В различни моменти той заема второстепенна роля, но временните лидери допускат политически и/или военни грешки и биват отстранени. След края на гражданската война започва консолидация на властта и мащабни реформи.

Мао е отговорен за смъртта на най-голям брой хора в историята на света. Той го "постига" без лагери и без масивен репресивен апарат, но по най-жестокия начин - чрез глад. Национализацията на селските стопанства по съветски модел в съчетание със засушаване и последващи наводнения води до катастрофален спад в реколтата. Настъпва масов глад. В някои провинции загиват над 25% от населението. Хора продават децата и жените си за късчета храна. Стига се до убийства и канибализъм. Съвременната оценка на жертвите е между 25 и 30 милиона. По-късно Мао предприема реформи за т.нар. "Културна революция", която има за цел заличаване на старите порядки и въвеждане на нови комунистически ценности. На практика се стига до ситуация на нова гражданска война със стотици хиляди жертви. На много места ученици измъчват и убиват своите учители.

Мао умира през 1976 г. след дългогодишно боледуване. Наследството от престъпното му управление можем да видим и днес. Личността на Мао трябва да се познава, за да се избегнат ненужните жертви в името на тоталитарна идеология.

[strategian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do not waste your time reading this juvenile rubbish. If Mr. Short cannot be bothered fact checking the sources he uses - for example the fictitious testimony of 'Doctor Li' regarding Mao's alleged sexual proclivities - you cannot be bothered reading 600 pages of indulgent fan fiction. Perhaps you can though. If you are looking not to learn but to be lectured, by a man with no particular talent for writing and no honesty or integrity as an academic, and what you want to be lectured on is the terribly savage and autocratic Chinaman, and his predilection for rule by the lasviscous emperor, then you have found your book. One of your books - there's an entire industry dedicated to churning out this garbage.

[Tom Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my second book in a row by this author and this one was much better than the biography of Pol Pot. Even in the book on Pol Pot, some of the most interesting and well written sections were those that featured the Chinese leader.

I think this was a good introduction-800+ page introduction- to the ideology and life of Mao Zedong. It outlined how the communist party was formed and its cooperation and civil war with the Guomindang. The author did his research well enough to show the influence of Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union on the party which informed much of its early politics.

The second half of the book was interesting but was weaker. During the periods of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, I felt like I was listening to hearsay and rumour. This is almost certainly due to documents being much less readily available than in his earlier life. It could feel like the biographer was writing about one person for most of the book and then suddenly someone suffering from multiple personality disorder.

[Jw Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

The typical "great man" biography tends to be either hagiographic or tendentious, especially when dealing with titanic personalities. Mao: A Life is that rare exception. Philip Short has written a balanced, thorough (to a fault, some have said) and very well written. He gives Mao his due as a military strategist, but pulls no punches when addressing such disastrous policies as the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution.

Yes, it is long, but it is far from a slog. So gifted a writer is Short that I was never bored, and so thorough a researcher that no aspect of Mao's long, remarkable life is glossed over. It's obvious that Short cares deeply about China and the Chinese people; Mao's myriad policies and pronouncements are seen not only from the eyes of Mao and his Politburo but also those of that quarter of humanity that witnessed them, and often suffered from them.

Short wisely includes a "Dramatis Personae" section, the better to keep track of the dozens of characters who populate this epic drama.

So don't be intimidated by the length of this book. Its heft is proportional to the long, controversial and momentous career of Chairman Mao.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. Long, detailed -- there are passages where one has to let one's eye skip over the surface like stones on a pond... but for someone who has not read much about his period, I couldn't ask for a better introduction.

The author, focusing on the narrative, manages brilliantly to take the reader -- and seamlessly, from Mao the idealistic, romantic, visionary poet and revolutionary to... A quote near the end says: Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have placed him among the gods; had in died in 1966, he would still have been considered a great man; but since he died in 1976, alas..., what can one say....

Tragic, riveting, and expertly told.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wouldn't be the first to say there are times when objective equals boring but to Philip Short's unyieldingly neutral biography of Mao Zedong as a 650 page case in point, maybe. With no sides taken, there are no heroes in this book, only villains and victims, with the subject portrayed, depending on the chapter, as both. If that doesn't sound unattractive, don't let me fool you, the words read drier on the printed page with the hazard, on each, that your mind will wander or, better, shut down.

To my credit, my retention did not fail me completely. Before Mao settled into the role of aging solipsistic control freak he was a progressive campaigner for women's rights, though he would not extend them to his wives, and although he would prove uniquely unfit to run a country he was a brilliant military strategist. Short will beat you over the head with this early phase of Mao's rise to power before antiseptically bullet-pointing the better known atrocities resulting from the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward as, respectively, a failed attempt at diplomacy and an inadvertent genocide. Those horrors feel further diluted by liberal sprinklings of Mao's poetry which, I thought, weren't half bad.

Regarding Mao's one great nemesis, the story takes an (improbably) anticlimactic turn. That Mao was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese has been unanimously propagated but Chiang Kai-shek, the anti-communist Generalissimo of the Chinese Nationalist Party, was no less barbaric. This is unless you play a game of body counts, which Chiang did in the form of collecting heads, though, Short mentions, he perspicaciously settled for just the ears once the heads became too weighty. Despite this sparkling prelude, most of Short's history concerning Chiang occurs before Mao is in a position of real power and, less satisfactorily, once the Generalissimo packs his bags and abjectly flees to Taiwan he is never, in the book, heard from again.

Approaching its conclusion, then, the loss of Mao's capacity for intransigence is made no more apparent than in the description of his thrice self-repealed attempts at choosing a successor, one of which, the young buck, Wang Hongwen, comes off as uncomfortably Palin-esque while the rest are unworthy of mention, even if I could remember their names.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Efecto halo y contrasentidos.-

Género. Biografía.

Lo que nos cuenta. Biografía del líder comunista chino Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung).

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Nadienne Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew! That was one heck of a read...

So, I feel that this was far more of a kind of a combination history of China during Mao's life / a rather cursory biography of Mao. I think I learned more about the Chinese Civil War than I actually did about Mao. And I don't really feel that the author was too sympathetic nor critical of Mao, but I also don't really feel like I got a good look into Mao, aside from the fact that he loved to foster contradictions - and that I'm probably supposed to think that this is a bad thing - but I don't, because I kind of agree with Mao that setting two fundamentally opposed forces at odds with one another is sometimes the best way to find a new / different / better path forward.

I know that this will not be the only book I ever read about Mao Zedong, and I trust that other authors will have different takes, which I would recommend really for just about anyone a person wants to learn about. Multiple sources give the best information, and as objective as someone tries to be, there will always be elements of bias. It's nearly unavoidable.

If this subject matter interests you, go ahead and give it a read. I think, maybe someday, I'll have to revisit this title and provide running commentary on it.

Although, I will say this, one thing that always strikes me is that leftist leaders are typically known for being voracious readers, writers, and consumers of knowledge, and Mao is no exception - my work office, were I ever to be a world leader, would probably resemble his, covered in books...this is something which is often, if not always, lacking, from right-wing leaders.

[Jessica]

This book is WAY TOO LONG. I picked it up from the library today and it's really freaking me out. I might have to put it in the closet, like how I once made my parents do with the Snow White book that had the really scary witch picture in it.

Philip Short must have some weird complex about his name that he should be working on in therapy. Instead, he's completely freaking me out.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

an eye opener to the history of china, and i learnt much about the suffering of the chinese people and the role mao played in it. Extremely well written and was never bored, and yet it seems like the book was still too short. The history of china is simply too complex, but its a good starting point

[Indra Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my summer 2022 book 😍 thanks a level history

[Kuu]

this book. was so thick

[Cool_guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the outbreak of the Korean War, Mao’s son Anying insisted on joining the Chinese volunteer force which marched across the Yalu in 1951 to halt the advance of the Americans. His reasons were similar to those which had led Mao to order the intervention in the first place. Communistic fervor, of course, but also a sense of moral obligation. After all, during the Civil War, had not 100k Koreans fought and died with the Chinese in Manchuria?

Mao was reluctant. In addition to a child who died as a toddler, Mao had two sons, Anying and Anlong, with his second wife, Yang Kaihui. He’d loved her deeply, although he took her for granted and always chose the revolution over this love (it’s funny, writing that. It’s like how someone now would prioritize their nonprofit career over a loving relationship. But the stakes were much, much higher).

The pursuit of revolution had horrible consequences for his family. Anying and his brother, Anlong, were forced to scrounge an existence as homeless street children in Shanghai for many years. Anlong later developed schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital in Dailin; it’s not hard to speculate that his mental illness was an outgrowth of the experience of abandonment.

Yang Kaihi’s fate was worst of all: she was executed by nationalist forces after being captured in the Jiangxi base area. All the while, Mao, separated by his family by the exegesis of revolution, had fallen in love with another woman, He Zizhen. Together they had five children. Three were abandoned as infants, given over to peasant families during the lean years of the Jiangxi base area and the Long March. Another died.

Less than a month after entering the front, Anying was killed in an American bombing run, and buried in a mass grave. Mao only found out three months later, told by the commander of Chinese troops in Korea. Mao began to shake so violently he was unable to light a cigarette.

After a few minutes of silence, he said “In revolutionary war, you always pay a price. Anying was one of thousands … You shouldn't take it as something special just because he was my son.”

In his biography, Philip Short never attempts to psychoanalyze the Chinese dictator. It is a methodical, precise book, working only with the available information, delving into speculation only on rare occasions. It’s an old style of popular journalistic or historical writing that seems to have all but faded away now. During it’s heyday, it was perfected by the British. For many years Short was a journalist for the British press.

Mao ultimately comes across as evil, but not because he was monster. It was Mao’s humanity that led him to make decisions which caused the death of millions and left millions of more lives ruined.

When I lived in China, more than one of my students told me that, for all of his problems, Mao was an incredible poet. I found this quite odd. At the time i knew nothing about poetry, let alone Chinese poetry. Now it makes sense. Mao approached politics with an artist’s sensibility. History was his canvass, and that canvass grew to an unmanageable size as he grew more powerful. It was this attitude that allowed him to believe that, contrary to all Marxist thought, the base could be temporarily exchanged for the superstructure, that through sheer will the Party could change China’s material reality. Reading about Mao’s approach to economics and the Great Leap Forward, I was reminded of D’Annunzio cheering on with moist eyes as if at the opera as he watched wave after wave of Italian peasant throw themselves on Austro-Hungarian lines during the First World War I. Just as a poet, or a philosopher, brings a new world into being with his work, so would Mao through politics. This megalomaniacal approach led to anywhere from 30 to 50 million dead. Never again would Mao grapple with economics.

[Edward Champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am studying every autocrat I can in these dark despotic times so that I can remind others what to look for. And I picked up this big book, on the basis of Short's excellent volume on Putin (which deftly blended biographical details with Russian history), only to find this work to be largely deficient in depth and rigor. Yes, we do learn that Mao was fairly prodigious with his plans. But Short really hasn't presented us with the casus belli for why Mao went more Stalinist in locking away his enemies. The Long March, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution are all, more or less, skimmed over, almost as if Short was writing this book way too fast to meet a deadline. At first, I thought the fault landed with me. But then I jumped to another one of my fat history books, became incredibly engaged with hit, and realized that the problem was Philip Short. I was so disappointed with how cursory this book feels, even at its oppressive length, that I really wish my time had been devoted to a Richard Evans or a Stephen Kotkin treatment instead. There are a few choice bits, but there's no other way of putting it. Short truly comes up short here.

[Foley Stocks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Short provides a precise account of Mao's life, without (at least apparently so) strong biases to either side - there are acknowledgements of Mao's failures and his moments of brilliance. It is a compelling read, and fairly accessible.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally finished. Well, I guess communism doesn't work.

[Crossett Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jared

[Connor Keir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly informative. Broad overlook of the life. End of the book there was a quote that summed it up well, if he died earlier he would have been an immortal, died a little later A hero and given when he died it’s hard to say

[Chronics · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book starts with Mao's roots, his early life, his education and his upbringing, all of which provides a basis for the remainder of the book. It discusses his early anarchist tendencies and how with the aid of fellow students and teachers this develops into socialist activism and ideology. The remainder of the book covers the more well known subjects including the beginnings of the Chinese Communist party and their relationship with the Guamindong nationalists, the Long March, the civil war, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution.

The notes and references at the end show that Philip Short could quite easily have made this 1000+ pages, but he's clearly put effort into sticking to prescient topics for the average reader who has limited knowledge of Chinese history and modern day China, which is precisely what makes it an excellent and well developed introduction into Mao and the life he led. He doesn't pretend to read Mao's mind or attempt to make this into a fictional historical page turner but rather sticks to the core events that transpired to have an effect on Mao and China as a whole between the early 1900s to the 1970s. That said, he doesn't skimp on detail being a 700 page book.

What really makes this a fascinating read is the way the author expresses a cold neutrality to Mao as a person, a politician, and the legacy he has left behind, its refreshing for a political biography when so many similar type of books consciously or unwittingly attempt to impose their authors biases on the reader. He allows the reader to pretty much form their own opinion on who exactly Mao was and what he did for China. If there is a downside it would probably be for those who already have a detailed knowledge of Chinese history and may feel their isn't much new to learn, but its difficult to judge as it really covers a lot of events. Overall highly recommended whether you have any interest in modern Chinese history or not.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read very little Chinese history, and knew little about Mao and the context of his life before reading this book. I therefore have very little to compare it to, and against which to assess Philip Short's approach to the subject.

Accepting that caveat, this is a very readable narrative covering Mao's life and from his family background through to his death in 1976. As a by-product it tells the story of China through the end of imperial China, the rule of the nationalists and Chiang Kai Shek, and the eventual victory of the communists.

Short narrates the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution with an awareness of the devastating impact, but without slipping into polemic. This contributes to his overall assessment too, where Short reaches what seems like a reasonable balance between highlight the massive loss of life and devastation in China against the dramatic changes brought about by Mao and how it contributes to the development of modern China.

Overall a good introduction, very readable, and despite the size it does not feel over long.

[Syed Emir Ashman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting and action-packed. There are perhaps only a handful of figures whose portrait can arouse as strong a feeling as that of the enigmatic founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong. There is no denying Mao’s import as a historical figure. He was a ruthless politician, a brilliant military strategist, and a studious philosopher.

Before I started reading this excellent biography, I thought Mao was a foolish, uneducated tyrant. I was surprised to learn that in fact, he was a serious scholar who even dabbled in poetry. In my mind, it was his filiality to erroneous Marxist revolutionary principles, including (but not limited to) class warfare, materialism, and an aversion to tradition, that led to the hundreds of millions of lives lost during his reign.

Short’s afterword, which includes his thoughts on other works on modern Chinese history, was much appreciated. All in all, this is a readable, academic and reliable account of the man who made modern China.

[Cai Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's real. Everything happened, Mao Zedong once was a original listener and then became a total dictator. At that time, all the horrible, crazy things are truly happened, but if we do not bear in mind that history, do not have our own moments of quiet introspection, everything will be repeated in the near future.

这的确是真实的，所有的一切都发生了。毛泽东从原来的倾听者变为十足的独裁者。在那个时代,一切恐怖的、狂热的事情都真实地发生了,但如果我们不将那段历史铭记、不去静静地反思那段历史，一切都会在不久的将来重演。

Mao's bloody revolution revealed
Written by Philip Short
Directed by Adrian Maben

Mao's Bloody Revolution revealed is a faithful historical documentary, all the clips are from real history, shocking to my heart.

Mao's Bloody Revolution revealed是一部忠实历史的纪录片，所有的片段都来自真实的历史记录，震撼到我心.

[Andy Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Occasionally a tough read, but overall Philip Short's biography of a beloved dictator is an exemplary example of historical writing. Probably not recommended for the casual reader but a great insight into the psychology of a mind that managed to inspire so many and wreak so much terror and suffering on the majority.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the best overview of Mao, but it is a hard read.

[P.H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great insight into the life, times, and mind of a successful, albeit psychotic and at times deadly, revolutionary.

[Michael Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friends of the HHI library Find. I read this in the summer of 2010. It is well written and helps to understand the thinking of the Chinese people and accordingly the Chinese government.

[Diego · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente, no se moderniza un pais sin costo. No comparto nada con la izquierda pero creer que en el mundo político actual no pasa lo mismo solo que sin tanta sangre es mera inocencia.

[Nicholas Little · Rating 5 out of 5]

A first rate biography of a fascinating man at an incredible time and place in human history.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

This promises a sweeping biography of one of the most important people of the 20th century. It mostly achieves that, although it goes painfully deep into certain subjects and not deep enough into others. It’s an odd feeling to finish a book this long and feel like it didn’t tell you enough.

Short’s portrait of Mao is of a man who was radicalized young by his experiences in an unjust and collapsing society, and then slowly stripped of all humanity through decades of war and the isolation that comes with power. The first half of the book gives a meticulously detailed account of the military history of the Chinese civil war. This had to be a major part of the book — the thing went on for like 30 years! — and the sheer brutality the book describes helps explain how China gave rise to an era like Mao’s later rule. I feel like I learned things about military tactics and strategy. But that isn’t something I particularly care to learn about, and there are diminishing returns to trying to keep track of exactly who has formed a temporary alliance with which warlord and how those battles went.

Mao may or may not have been born as the brutal person he bcame. But he was clearly destroyed during the war. He had a taste for righteous violence from early in his political life, and gradually lost any sense of the righteousness part of it, as Short describes here:

“Terror, Mao argued (as he had in his report on Hunan in the winter of 1926), was indispensable to the communist cause, and Red execution squads must be formed ‘to massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction’. But the use of terror should be directed exlusively against class enemies. Notwithstanding such caveats, the distinction between enemy and friend gradually became blurred. Inevitably, sooner or later, the methods applied to one would be used against the other.”

As the book proceeds, it gives convincing accounts of China’s souring relationship with the Soviet Union (which comes off as quasi-colonial), and Mao’s behavior as he rises to total power, through campaigns like the ‘Hundred Flowers’ era (ostensibly designed to foster free speech and a dynamism that the Soviet Union lacked), the massive famine caused by the government’s rigid approach to collectivist farming, and the Cultural Revolution (an historically brutal purge of the government and society in an attempt to achieve pure Maoism.)

The descriptions of Mao’s increasingly futile attempts to live by any principle but the pursuit of his own power are illuminating. Here’s Short on the Hundred Flowers-era:

“The tragedy of the ‘Hundred Flowers’ was that Mao genuinely did want the intellectuals to ‘think for themselves’, to join the revolution of their own free will rather than being forced to do so….Yet that formula, in practice, proved utterly self-defeating. By the mid-1950s, Mao was so convinced of the essential correctness of his own thought that he could no longer comprehend why, if people had the freedom to think for themselves, they would think what *they* wanted, not what *he* wanted .... In practice discipline always won out; independence of mind was crushed. The uprooting of ‘poisonous weeds’ would lead to total stultification.”

I kind of expected the main event to be the Cultural Revolution. But if the war was overdescribed, the Cultural Revolution is the opposite. I did get a sense of the vast and meaningless brutality inflicted by Mao’s shock troops upon any Chinese people accused of straying from the path. But I didn’t come away with a strong understanding of how exactly Mao went down this path. This may be a result of a thin documentary record of an era that the government still tries to suppress. And, to be fair, the book isn’t entirely without analysis about this. Short writes that the Cultural revolution was a way for Mao to re-create the glorious struggle of his youth, even if instead of pushing against an oppressive system in search of new freedoms this one ended up pushing against any freedoms or unorthoxies that threatened the system they were defending. But this is arguably the most important era in recent Chinese history, and the account was the most unsatisfying part of the book.

All in all, this is a rich history of a country and a convincing description of how a person became a monster. It’s written dryly and probably could have been shorter without losing much. But the main points come across.

[Alessandro Fasanaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mao Tse-tung è stato uno dei personaggi più influenti della storia del XX secolo, il Grande Timoniere di un paese che da solo componeva un quarto della popolazione mondiale e si estendeva su una superficie grande due volte l’Europa, un politico capace di ricattare URSS e USA e mito generazionale anche in Occidente. Ma anche figura arcana, uomo che non dava confidenze a nessuno e ordiva intrighi assurdamente sottili. Ieratico e disumano, che ordinava massacri con assoluta nonchalance e spazzava via chiunque gli si mettesse contro.

La biografia-fiume di Philip Short è molto coraggiosa: potrebbe limitarsi a fare quello che han fatto altri, cioè constatare l’immensa complessità del personaggio, oppure (come fece Snow) riconoscergli quel quid irrazionale che è la ‘forza del destino‘. Invece il giornalista inglese va oltre e tenta di offrire una possibile spiegazione della psicologia maoista, del perché Mao pensasse o facesse certe cose; dei suoi meccanismi mentali e della sua costituzione culturale. La parte iniziale del libro (a mio giudizio, la più affascinante) ci accompagna alla scoperta delle origini del leader cinese, della sua infanzia contadina, del suo odio per il padre, nel contesto di una Cina arretrata e confuciana; si passa ai suoi studi, invero assai tormentati per le ristrettezze economiche, ai suoi lavoretti per procurarsi da mangiare, alle sue aspirazioni. Si scopre, della giovane società cinese a cavallo tra i due secoli, un quadro piuttosto inconsueto, ricco di giovani speranzosi per il futuro, odiatori della tradizione, affascinati dall’Occidente. Uno dei punti forti del libro è questo: la dimostrazione di come Mao non sia stato un unicum, bensì l’esponente più fedele della sua generazione.

Secondo Short, Mao sarebbe stato ossessionato per tutta la vita da un pensiero, come molti di noi hanno un tarlo che li rode senza mai placarsi: la vita come eterno conflitto tra gli opposti, e quindi, in un certo senso, l’identità, degli opposti. Un’idea che gli è nata – udite udite – non dalla tradizione cinese (l’odiato Confucio parlava di armonia, tra gli opposti) ma dalla lettura dei filosofi occidentali (es. Rousseau, Dewey, A. Smith) e persino da Clausewitz, di cui Mao ripeterà spesso l’aforisma ‘la guerra è la politica fatta con le armi, la politica è la guerra senza armi‘. Non c’è discorso politico, saggio, articolo in cui Mao in maniera più o meno esplicita non ripeta questo ritornello. Ed è questa idea ossessiva che, secondo Short, avrebbe reso Mao un pessimo governante una volta finita la guerra: perché, per lui, la guerra non finiva mai davvero, e l’eccessiva pace gli destava sospetti.

Al di là dell’espressione apatica e del pragmatismo estremo, il Mao di Short è stato un uomo profondamente inquieto. Una vittima dello scetticismo filosofico e della fame di cibo e di vita con cui ha dovuto fare i conti in gioventù. Ma anche, nonostante tutto (e intendo davvero TUTTO, compresi i crimini) vero artefice della Cina insaziabile e irrequieta dei decenni successivi alla sua morte.

“Noi siamo favorevoli all’abolizione delle guerre; non vogliamo la guerra. Ma non si può abolire la guerra se non mediante la guerra. Affinché non esistano più fucili, occorre il fucile”
(Mao Tse-tung)