MAO: THE UNTRUE STORY WATCH

Mao: The UNTRUE Story Watch

Here's a couple of excerpts from a bourgeois article on the new slander on Mao that passes itself off as scholarship. The article repeats a lot of the previous lies about Mao but it does have some interesting things. The scholarship of the authors of Mao: The UNTRUE Story is so bad that it's even raising eyebrows among anti-Mao academics. You can read the entire article here.

Excerpts:

China scholars across the world are questioning the veracity of historical accounts in a controversial biography of Mao Zedong, writes Hamish McDonald.

A TINY widow aged 85, living in two rooms, an electric rice cooker her only modern appliance, may be a crucial witness to a key dispute involving wealthy Chinese author Jung Chang, who lives in great comfort in London's plush Notting Hill from the proceeds of her worldwide bestselling book Wild Swans.

The dispute is one of many being picked by some of the world's most eminent scholars of modern Chinese history, who say Chang's latest blockbuster book, Mao - The Unknown Story, co-authored with her British historian husband Jon Halliday, is a gross distortion of the records.

[...]

But many agree with Thomas Bernstein, of Columbia University in New York, that "the book is a major disaster for the contemporary China field"."

Because of its stupendous research apparatus, its claims will be accepted widely," he said this week. "Yet their scholarship is put at the service of thoroughly destroying Mao's reputation.

The result is an equally stupendous number of quotations out of context, distortion of facts and omission of much of what makes Mao a complex, contradictory, and multi-sided leader."

-Out-