BOOK REVIEWS

Xing Ziling, Mao Zedong quanzhuan

This substantial (over 2,000 pages), four-volume book by Xing Ziling, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, a former soldier in the People's Liberation Army, a specialist on military matters and a close acquaintance of Deng Xiaoping, is not merely as the title suggests, a “comprehensive biography of Mao Zedong”. It is also a political account of China from the early twentieth century through to the late 1970s and the end of the Maoist period. The Chinese Revolution is seen and recounted through Mao's political career, from his early days through to the acquisition and exercise of power (1). But the originality and true strength of this book are to be found in the disclosure of its sources, particularly the documents (reports, directives, letters, etc.) penned by Mao himself, and also those written by other significant military and political leaders who embraced his ideological, strategic and political ideas, or even by those who opposed them, such as Wang Ming, Deng Xiaoping or Marshal Peng Dehuai. These documents are supplemented by extracts from journals, notebooks (riji), memoirs or even other biographies, which, in some cases, are quoted extensively with complete passages being cited. These provide food for thought and prompt further reflection on the different ideological and political stages that marked Mao's turbulent political career. Moreover, they show that at the central level, the leadership crises which, quite rightly, the author sets in the context of the Third International and developments in Sino-Soviet relations, were significant times of ideological and strategic debate on crucial issues such as the policies of modernisation and collective farming. The author thus avoids reducing the story of Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution to a simple matter of personal disagreements and power struggles, intense and hard-fought though they were. Above all, Xing Ziling's work creates and raises questions of methodology, which detract from any pretensions it may have had of being a scientific piece, which is a great pity indeed. These problems are partly due to the absence of any information on the origins of most of the sources concerning the decision-making processes of the Central Committee and its Politburo. To a certain extent, these omissions may be explained by the confidential and “sacred” nature of the records concerned, but this is not unique to the Party (consider for example the case of the French archives on the Algerian War). Another explanation may be found in the preface where Xing Ziling sets out the book's objectives and his conception of history's role, which, according to him, should allow “truth to be more clearly distinguished from falsehood”. He thus establishes himself as a judge of the past, called to defend and to justify the legitimacy of Deng Xiaoping's reformist policies and the soundness of his theories. Having thus defined the political objectives, the author then confines himself to a very detailed chronological account of Mao's political life, set against a backdrop of political activism and the revolutionary-minded worker and peasant movements that were initiated and run by the Party. For all that, he repeatedly emphasises Mao's serious mistakes in his understanding of Marxism-Leninism at a time when both the pace and scope of the great collective farming campaigns were being stepped up. Given the political nature of the work, one does not expect to find either bibliographic references or methodological and analytical processes that would enable the reader to better figure out how things worked at the very top of the Communist Party machine, and its development as a function of the context created by the combination of forces and the reactions of the people and, more fundamentally, of the Party. A certain amount of deliberation and questioning would at least have compensated in part for the shortcomings with regard to the origins of the sources used by the author and to bestow this work with a genuine scientific quality. Nevertheless, the work remains useful and rich in information and documentation.

Translated from the French original by Bernie Mahapatra