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New website tracks flaws identified in Chang and Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Storyis an international best-seller, unusual for a work of historical biography, and an aggressively revisionist history of Mao Zedong, unquestionably the single most important person in 20th century Chinese history. There have been quite a few reviews, positive and negative, and some discussion of whether the book is appropriate for classroom use.

Joseph Esherick, UCSD Hsiu Professor of Chinese Studies, ran an undergraduate seminar in which students"read The Unknown Story with some care, and then attempted to trace the sources of Chang and Halliday’s account, and compare them with other books and articles on modern Chinese history." Six of the essays produced by three of the students are posted in their entirety, complete with endnotes and e-mail addresses for feedback. In Divide and Conquer, for example, Tony Wan checks Chang and Halliday's claim that Mao planned for a Soviet-CCP partition of China against the interviews and other sources they cited as evidence, and found in every case"a flagrant distortion of Mao’s personal perceptions of the international scenario during World War II."

One of the most frequently cited results of Chang and Halliday is Mao's status as the greatest mass murdering autocrat of modern history, with over seventy million deaths to his discredit. Tom Worger looks closely at those figures and finds substantial room for doubt, including double-counting, demographic implausibilities, selective use of questionable statistics, and contradictions with existing scholarship. It is obvious from this, as from the other discussions, that the UCSD project is not intended to be a defense of Mao -- the number of deaths resulting from Mao's policies is still in the millions -- but a defense of responsible historical research.

The Mao site is part of the UCSD Chinese History Resources site.