MAO ZEDONG HAS dominated Jung Chang's life. The former Red Guard saw her parents denounced as class traitors during the Cultural Revolution. Her father was tortured and later died in a labour camp. Since the 1992 release of Wild Swans - whose 10 million copies make it the biggest-selling paperback ever - Chang, 53, and her husband, Jon Halliday, have looked into why a man who was 'as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did' remains fundamental to China's political system.
After poring over archives in China and Russia and interviewing those in Mao's close circle - despite a central government warning about speaking to Chang - the couple released Mao: The Unknown Story on Thursday. The 654- page biography opens with the claim that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 70 million people in peacetime.
Describing Mao as 'ideologically rather vague' from an early age, the authors depict a man contemptuous of human life. Revered for pushing foreign powers out of China, Mao welcomed the Japanese invasion. He believed a Japanese victory would encourage Russia to offer more support for Chinese communists.
The Long March is described as 'the most enduring myth in modern Chinese history, and one of the biggest myths of the 20th century'. Mao was carried in a litter for most of the march and Nationalist chief Chiang Kai-shek left the route open to the communists.
Mao encouraged the Korean war, believing he could bog down US soldiers by sending waves of Chinese to slaughter. The war would allow him to ask Russia for more arms and make China a superpower, the authors claim. He was prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese - then half the country's population - to a third world war or to the famine he caused by preparing for it. He failed to establish a viable Chinese atomic bomb programme, but by exporting food to pay for it and forcing Chinese to participate in the Great Leap Forward, he was responsible for 38 million deaths, the book claims. 'Mao's Bomb caused 100 times as many deaths as both the bombs the Americans dropped on Japan,' Chang and Halliday write.
On his deathbed, Mao was saddened by his failure to rule the world, but could muster sympathy only for other statesmen who had met disappointment, such as Chiang and disgraced US president Richard Nixon.