Mao
The Real Story
-
- 17,99 €
-
- 17,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
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- migr 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.
