Chinese History, Communism, Historical Biography - Asia, Labor Leaders, Activists, & Social Reformers, Political Biography, Asia - Political Biography

Mao: The Real Story

Name: Mao: The Real Story
Author: Alexander V. Pantsov
ISBN: 9781451654479

by Alexander V. Pantsov, Steven I Levine

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Overview

This major new biography of Mao uses extensive Russian documents previously unavailable to biographers to reveal surprising details about Mao’s rise to power and his leadership in China.

Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot.

Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death.

Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao’s creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China’s last emperor.

Synopsis

This major new biography of Mao uses extensive Russian documents previously unavailable to biographers to reveal surprising details about Mao’s rise to power and leadership in China.

This major new biography of Mao uses extensive Russian documents previously unavailable to biographers to reveal surprising details about Mao’s rise to power and his leadership in China.

Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot.

Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death.

Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao’s creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China’s last emperor.

About the Author, Alexander V. Pantsov

Alexander V. Pantsov is a professor of history at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. Born in Moscow, Pantsov graduated from Moscow State University Institute of Asian and African Studies in 1978. He has published more than ten books, among them The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927.

Steven I. Levine is Senior Research Associate at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana. Levine has published extensively in the fields of modern Chinese politics and foreign policy as well as American-East Asian relations.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

For most of his life, our knowledge of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) was shrouded by Chinese secrecy and ideological claims and counter-claims. Now the most authoritative biography yet of Chairman Mao arrives via Russia. The recent release of Soviet era archives enabled China expert Steven Levine (Anvil of Victory) and Russian-émigré historian Alexander Pantsov (The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolutions, 1919-1927) to reconstruct the life, or should we say, the lives of this resilient, diabolical leader. Mao: The Real Story plots the Communist leader's bloody path to power, his sudden outburst of utopianism in the misbegotten "Great Leap Forward," his willful subordination to Stalin and his battles with Khrushchev and other Russian leaders. A breakthrough biography of a major historical figure.

Publishers Weekly

While early biographies of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) beginning with Edgar Snow’s 1936 Thunder out of China were worshipful, new biographies have revealed the extent of his ruthlessness. With access to recently opened Soviet and Chinese archives, Russian-émigré historian Pantsov(The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927), together with China expert Levine (Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria), continues this trend, often contradicting previous accounts. They relate in detail how Mao, who joined the Communist Party in 1920, fought his way, often murderously, to its leadership in the 1930s. After Japan’s 1937 invasion, he consolidated his strength while the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, head of the autocratic Nationalist government, took the brunt of the fighting before losing the post-1945 civil war. Taking power in 1949, Mao established a Stalinist autocracy featuring purges, massive social upheaval, and disastrous economic policies. Official Chinese histories extol his fierce independence—even of Joseph Stalin—but Pantsov reveals that Mao took pains to remain a faithful follower until Stalin’s 1952 death. Although dense with the minutiae of Chinese politics, persistent readers will encounter plenty of fireworks in this definitive biography. 16 pages of b&w photos, maps. Agent: Peter Bernstein, Peter Bernstein Agency (Oct.)

New York Review of Books

Comprehensive, judicious, and finely detailed. . . . [A] major study.
— Roderick MacFarquhar

From the Publisher

"Definitive. . . . Thick with detail, this book sets a high bar for future Mao biographers."

—Booklist (starred review)

Washington Post

“A new, important history. . . . The authors’ most serious contribution is probably their insight into Mao’s Stalinist creed and his movement’s complete financial and ideological reliance on the Soviets.”
— John Pomfret

Foreign Affairs

“This fine book is based on extraordinary access to Soviet archives and documents recently published in China and the West, shedding new light on some aspects of the Chinese leader’s life and career. . . . Pantsov and Levine succeed in conveying a balanced image of Mao’s complex persona and revealing the contradictions in his beliefs and actions.”
— Andrew J. Nathan

Library Journal

Pantsov (history & political science, Capital Univ., OH; The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927) put decades of research into his comprehensive 2007 Russian-language biography of Mao, here translated and adapted by Levine (senior research assoc., Maureen & Mike Mansfield Ctr., Univ. of Montana; China's Bitter Victory), himself the author of key studies on the Chinese revolution. Pantsov not only synthesizes Chinese, Russian, American, and European sources and scholarship but also delves into Moscow's previously closed inner-party files on the Communist Party of China going back to the 1920s, which are stunning in their personal and organizational reporting. China scholars now will have to reassess every element of Mao's career, both his strategies, which were indispensable to revolutionary success, as well as his dependence on Soviet leader Stalin. More important than Pantsov and Levine's scholarly chops, however, is that they spin a balanced and utterly compelling story larded with telling and often newly uncovered anecdotes about Mao's family, wives, comrades, rivals, and victims. The analytical common sense of the authors' judgments on Mao's crimes and achievements builds on their insights into Mao's complex personality (and, yes, sex life). VERDICT One of the most important China books of recent years and a page-turner, too. [See Prepub Alert, 4/30/12.]—Charles W. Hayford, Evanston, IL

Kirkus Reviews

A comprehensive, authoritative new study that challenges the received wisdom regarding Mao's relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union. With rare access to the newly consolidated Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Pantsov (History/Capital Univ.; The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919-1927, 2000) and Levine construct an "up-to-date" take on the Chinese Communist Party and Mao's rise in it as being essentially dictated by Stalin and financially supported by the Soviet Union through the 1950s. Stalin manipulated Mao to his own ends; only after Stalin's death and Mao's increasingly antagonistic relationship with Khrushchev did the Chinese pull away from the Soviet Union as part of an "emancipation of consciousness." The authors' detail is minute and the characters proliferate mind-bendingly, especially in the careful reconstruction of Mao's rise from rube and community organizer to national leader. Pantsov and Levine depict Mao with all his conflicting facets, from the early bookworm and idealist who initially scorned the "stupidity" of the masses, to becoming the party's self-made prophet on the agrarian question, espousing the proletarian confiscation of land from the landlords. He was a man of enormous energy and capacity for love who was nonetheless hardened by the intraparty struggle against Chiang Kai-shek; he was also a utopian socialist who embarked on the modernization scheme of the Great Leap Forward in 1957 after a stimulating trip to Moscow. The great famine that ensued did not dampen Mao's enthusiasm for revolutionary incentives, as played out tragically in the Red Guards' devastation, and his "irrepressible lust for violence" has been largely forgiven by history because he consolidated China's "national liberation." The Great Helmsman fully fleshed, still complicated and ever provocative.

Foreign Affairs

Andrew J. Nathan

“Here finally is Mao in the round: vigorous, idealistic, deluded, and ultimately evil—the full human being in rich personal and political detail. The widest possible use of Chinese sources provides deep insight into Mao’s family, colleagues, and rivals and illuminates the dilemmas he faced and the strategies he chose. New materials from the Soviet archives enrich our understanding of Mao’s formative relationship with Stalin.”

Washington Post

New York Review of Books

"Comprehensive, judicious, and finely detailed. . . . [A] major study."

Patrick Tyler

“Mao’s will for power, his vision as a revolutionary, and his prodigious capacity for cruelty marked mankind. Yet it is impossible to understand the transformation of modern China without absorbing the enormity of one man’s impact. Pantsov and Levine have opened what are perhaps the final vaults of archival treasures to buttress their new and engrossing portrait of the Chinese revolutionary titan. With clear narrative and sparkling anecdote, they have chiseled a more complete Mao, in the full dimension of life as a man, as an eager collaborator with Stalin in the Communist bloc and as the tiger on the mountain who both built and ravaged a nation.”

Alice Miller

“Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine's vividly written and highly authoritative biography, steeped in previously inaccessible Soviet archival sources, forever banishes the myth that Mao’s revolution succeeded as if the Russians had never come.”