Chairman Monster

"Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty," Chang and Halliday write. "He explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. . . . Mao did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally." He viewed himself, they write, as one of society's "Great Heroes," who lived by their own rules. In fact, they argue, the young Mao was lazy, hated physical labor, failed when he attempted to learn foreign languages and exhibited no leadership skills.

The middle of the book is devoted to Mao's resistible rise. Chang and Halliday portray Mao as perhaps the most disastrous example ever of the Peter Principle: He fails at everything, and yet, because of his ruthlessness, he is cultivated by Soviet agents and destined for prominence. Chang and Halliday argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Mao was a creature of Soviet communism. From the age of 27, they write, he was on the Comintern's payroll.

This point is a significant one. For decades, Western scholars and China buffs -- starting with Edgar Snow -- have sought to emphasize Mao's independence from the Soviet Union. But Chang and Halliday, relying on archival material from Moscow, show that, time and again, Soviet influence, money and weapons saved Mao from his Chinese comrades.

Unfortunately, some of the "scoops" that Chang and Halliday claim for themselves actually belong to others. For example, Chapter Eight focuses on the first bloody purge launched by Mao in Jiangxi province in southern China in 1930, arguing that the purge was "in many ways the formative moment of Maoism" and that it "is still covered up to this day." In fact, in 2000, Gao Hua, a Chinese historian from Nanjing University, published a book in Hong Kong that told this story at length, arguing that the Jiangxi purge created a paradigm for all subsequent Maoist political campaigns. (Gao's work is included in the bibliography, but he is not cited in the text.)

Worse, when Chang and Halliday depart from their Chinese and Soviet sources and engage in historical guesswork, the book borders on the unbelievable. One of their central tenets is that Mao didn't truly love China; rather, he loved power, and therefore the real patriot of 20th-century China was Mao's nemesis, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist Party, who fled to Taiwan in 1949 as the communists seized power. As such, the book downplays the massive corruption that infected Chiang's party and government and turns him into a hero of sorts. The book concocts a fanciful argument that the reason Chiang's troops did not destroy the communists during the Long March and other military campaigns was not incompetence on the part of the Nationalist forces but that Chiang, petrified that Stalin would kill his son if the Nationalists crushed their leftist foes, pulled his troops back.

The latter half of the book is devoted to Mao's years leading China. There again, when the book hews close to original Chinese research, it provides much that will be new to American readers. (For instance, Chang and Halliday make a strong case, contrary to conventional wisdom, that Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, the leader of the notorious Gang of Four who led the Cultural Revolution, rarely if ever acted on her own and was, as she claimed in her 1980 trial for "counter-revolutionary" crimes, nothing but Mao's "dog.") But when it swerves into speculation, the story again breaks down. Take the way the book treats the Great Leap Forward, Mao's disastrous 1958-60 campaign to "surpass Great Britain and catch up to America" that left millions dead of starvation. Chang and Halliday allege that the real cause of the famine was not bad agricultural policies but Mao's obsession with getting the atomic bomb. Mao, the book alleges, exchanged China's harvests for nuclear technology, thereby beggaring the countryside. In fact, there is no strong evidence that China was a major food exporter then.

Chang and Halliday also do not explore the effect Mao has had on Chinese society, choosing instead to end their book by reminding readers that his body and portrait "still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." This would be a rich area to probe because Mao's nihilism still exerts a powerful influence on a rising China today.

Chang and Halliday's work is destined to become a classic, but it's a flawed classic. Mao is a great read but not worth believing wholesale. Nonetheless, their central point -- that Mao was a monster and should be remembered as one of history's great villains -- is right on the money.

John Pomfret was The Washington Post's Beijing bureau chief from 1998 to 2003. He is now its Los Angeles bureau chief.