Book report: Mao
I just finished “Mao” by Michael Lynch. I pilfered it from my niece’s bookshelf the last time I was in Colorado. It clocks in at 235 pages, so it is short.
When I was in high school, I bought a copy of Mao’s red book (in English) from a senior. Since the book and Mao had been very much in the news during the previous decade because of the Cultural Revolution, I was interested in seeing what all the fuss was about. And of course there was the faint whiff of contraband, owning a copy of the red book in Oak Ridge during the Cold War. In the event, it proved to be a huge disappointment. I don’t know if it was a bad translation or if Mao really passed off such drivel as motivational speaking, but I gave up after a few pages out of sheer boredom. I even skipped ahead to see if it got better later. Nope.
I’ve had a longtime fascination with Cold War history, partly because of growing up in Oak Ridge and partly from coming of age near the end of the Vietnam war. Over the years, I read The Long March (Harrison Salisbury), Stillwell and the American Experience in China (Barbara Tuchman), China Wakes (Nick Kristof) and Out of Mao’s Shadow (Philip Pan), so I thought it was high time I read a biography of Mao.
Lynch is a lucid and effective writer. He is balanced in presenting Mao’s strengths and weaknesses. Above all, he situates Mao as a creature of his time and place, growing up middle class in a nation that was politically, economically and militarily backward with a history of foreign exploitation. Mao faced down the Nationalists of Chaing Kai-shek, the Imperial Army of Japan and Stalin’s Comintern to seize power in 1949 at the head of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao was ruthless, and ultimately responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. As Lynch puts it: “Hitler killed people for what they were, Stalin for what they did, and Mao for what they thought.” I’m not a fan of counterfactuals, so it is impossible to say what China and the world would look like today if Mao had not caused the deaths of so many of his own countrymen in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But there is no question that, under Mao, China became an industrialized nation, a nuclear power and a rival to the USSR.
I’ve read biographies of Stalin, Fidel Castro and Karl Marx. This book is much shorter than those, but it filled in some important history for me and in a way that helped me see past the two-dimensional reporting I grew up with.
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