Hysteria in the making

One reviewer said it 'will shake the world'. Another, in a less flattering vein, called it 'an 800-page polemic'. One year on and the furore surrounding Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, shows little sign of abating.

And with the mainland preparing to next month mark the 30th anniversary of the death of the man who founded communist China, the literary public continues to discuss the latest probe into the legacy of one of the formative figures of the last century.

Having sold more than 500,000 in hardback, a behind-the-scenes debate shows no sign of easing, as western Sinologists steadily pick apart the book and question its startling conclusions.

The book has been translated into 25 languages, is about to be released in Chinese, and has rightly or wrongly made Jung one of the world's most influential writers on China - except, of course, in the one country where Jung has said she most wants the book to be published. Apparently read by members of China's Politburo, the work has been labelled 'maximum-level dangerous'.

'Of course it re-ignited the debate over Mao,' says Richard Baum, a China historian at the University of California and moderator of an e-mail chat forum where the book has been heatedly debated. 'This is the first revisionist work on Mao that is credible from a research point of view. [The authors] gathered a lot of research, triggering debate among historians who then ran to their reference books to check the sources.'

Some did not like what they found. 'One would expect careful and responsible analysis of source material in such an iconoclastic work, but Chang and Halliday have taken great liberties in this regard, distorting, stretching and quoting their sources out of context,' wrote University of Western Ontario professor Alfred Chan in an article published in the academic journal Pacific Affairs.