Last week I went to hear Jung Chang and Jon Halliday talk about their new biography of Mao Tse-tung at a lecture in memory of the Great Helmsman of Moderation, Roy Jenkins. Almost every claim made in favour of Mao, they argued, is untrue — that peasant villages rose up in support of the Communists (not a single one did, say the authors), that the Communists bravely fought and defeated the Japanese, that the Chinese Communist party was a popular mass movement in China (in fact it was the creature of Stalin). When I was at boarding school in the early Seventies, almost the only free literature readily available was propaganda from the Chinese chargé d’affaires in London. We sent off for copies of the Little Red Book and for magazines which showed pictures of peasants studying it in the fields like secular versions of Millet’s ‘Angelus’. For us, it was mostly a joke. None of us felt towards Mao the frisson of horror we were all taught to feel for Hitler. In our occasional arguments on the subject, the pro-Mao faction would say, ‘Yes, he is repressive, but at least the peasants don’t starve.’ The anti-Mao faction (of which I was one) accepted the point about the peasants not starving but continued to argue that the repression was wrong all the same. In fact, the peasants did starve. Jung Chang and Halliday calculate that 32 million of them died in the Great Leap Forward which ended in the early Sixties. Of course, we were ignorant schoolboys, but what still shocks is how few grown-ups in the West sought out the truth. Even today, until this book, it has been muted. It was clever of Mao to call his last great policy of repression, purge and death a Cultural Revolution.
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