Chang and Halliday do not accept the idealistic explanations for Mao's rise to power or common claims for his rule. They portray him as a tyrant who manipulated everyone and everything he could in pursuit of personal power. They state that from his earliest years he was motivated by a lust for power and that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, regardless of their relationship with him. During the 1920s and 1930s, they write that Mao could not have gained control of the party without the patronage of
Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the
Soviet Union, nor were Mao's decisions during the Long March as heroic and ingenious as
Edgar Snow's
Red Star Over China claimed and thereby entered the mythology of the revolution. Areas under Communist control during the
Second United Front and
Chinese Civil War, such as the
Jiangxi and
Yan'an soviets, were ruled through terror and financed by
opium. They say that Mao sacrificed thousands of troops for the purpose of getting rid of party rivals, such as
Zhang Guotao, and he did not take the initiative in fighting the Japanese invaders. Despite being born into a wealthy peasant (
kulak) family, Mao had little concern for the welfare of the
Chinese peasantry when he came to power in 1949. Mao's determination to use agricultural surplus to subsidize industry and intimidation of dissent led to murderous famines resulting from the
Great Leap Forward, exacerbated by allowing the export of grain to continue even when it became clear that China did not have sufficient grain to feed its population.
Long March Chang and Halliday said that the
Long March was not the courageous effort portrayed by the Chinese Communist Party and that Mao's role in leading it was exaggerated. Chang refers to the march as a myth that has been tweaked and exaggerated throughout the decades by the Chinese government. They write that today the Long March's validity is questionable, because it has diverged so far from reality. Officially portrayed as an inspiring commander, the authors write that he was nearly left behind by the March and only commanded a fairly small force. He was apparently disliked by almost all of the people on the March and his tactics and strategy were flawed. They also write that Chiang Kai-shek allowed the Communists to proceed without significant hindrance. They provided the communists with maps and allowed them to escape the clutches of his army because his son was being held hostage in
Moscow and he feared he would be killed if the Communists failed. Mao is also portrayed, along with the Communist elite, as a privileged person who was usually carried around in
litters and protected from the suffering of his subordinates, rather than sharing their hardship. Despite the high level of casualties amongst ordinary soldiers, supposedly no high-ranking leaders died on the journey, regardless of how ill or badly wounded they were. The book says that, contrary to revolutionary mythology, there was no battle at
Luding Bridge and that tales of a "heroic" crossing against the odds was merely propaganda. A witness,
Li Xiu-zhen, told Chang that she saw no fighting and that the bridge was not on fire. In addition, she said that despite claims by the Communists that the fighting was fierce, all of the vanguard survived the battle. Chang also cited
Kuomintang (KNP), the Chinese Nationalist faction during the
Chinese Civil War, battleplans and communiques that indicated the force guarding the bridge had been withdrawn before the Communists arrived. A number of historical works, even outside of China, do depict such a battle, though of less heroic proportions.
Harrison E. Salisbury's
The Long March: The Untold Story and Charlotte Salisbury's
Long March Diary mention a battle at Luding Bridge, but they relied on second-hand information; however, there is disagreement in other sources over the incident. Chinese journalist
Sun Shuyun agreed that the official accounts were exaggerated. She interviewed a local blacksmith who had witnessed the event and said that "when [the troops opposing the Red Army] saw the soldiers coming, they panicked and fled — their officers had long abandoned them. There wasn't really much of a battle." Archives in
Chengdu further supported this claim. In October 2005,
The Age newspaper reported that it had been unable to find Chang's local witness. In addition,
The Sydney Morning Herald found an 85-year-old eyewitness, Li Guixiu, aged 15 at the time of the crossing, whose account disputed Chang's claims. According to Li, there was a battle: "The fighting started in the evening. There were many killed on the Red Army side. The KMT set fire to the bridge-house on the other side, to try to melt the chains, and one of the chains was cut. After it was taken, the Red Army took seven days and seven nights to cross." In a speech given at
Stanford University earlier in March 2005, former
U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski mentioned a conversation that he once had with
Deng Xiaoping. He recalled that Deng smiled and said: "Well, that's the way it's presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation."
Opium production The book claims that Mao did not just tolerate the production of
opium in regions that the Communists controlled during the
Chinese Civil War but participated in the trade of it as well to provide funding for his soldiers. According to Russian sources that the authors state they found, at the time the trade generated around $60 million a year for the Communists. This was stopped only due to overproduction driving down the price and Communist officials other than Mao deciding that the practice was immoral.
Campaigns against Mao's opponents Mao is alleged to have exposed men under his command to unnecessary suffering just to eliminate his opponents.
Zhang Guotao, a rival in the Politburo, was sent with his army in 1936 on a hopeless mission into the
Gobi Desert. When it inevitably failed Mao ordered that the survivors be executed. Chang and Halliday suggest that Mao used other underhanded means in eliminating opponents. Apart from general purges like the
Hundred Flowers Campaign and other operations like the
Cultural Revolution, he had
Wang Ming (another Politburo rival) poisoned twice; Wang had to seek treatment in Russia.
Sino-Japanese War Chang and Halliday write that contra official history provided by the Chinese authorities that Communist forces waged a tough guerrilla war against the
Imperial Japanese Army, in truth they rarely fought the Japanese. Mao was more interested in saving his forces for fighting against the Chinese Nationalists. On the few occasions that the Communists did fight the Japanese, Mao was very angry.
Communist sleeper agents Notable members of the KMT were claimed to have been secretly working for the Chinese Communists. One such
sleeper agent was
Hu Zongnan, a senior
National Revolutionary Army general. Hu's son objected to this description and his threat of legal action led Chang's publishers in
Taiwan to abandon the release of the book there.
Korean War Rather than reluctantly entering the
Korean War as the Chinese government suggests, Mao is shown to have deliberately entered the conflict, having promised Chinese troops to
Kim Il Sung (then leader of
North Korea) before the conflict started. Also, the book details Mao's desperation in needing economic and military aid promised by the Soviets, as the prime motivating factor in backing Kim Il-sung's invasion of
South Korea. Halliday had previously conducted research into this conflict, publishing his book
Korea: The Unknown War.
Number of deaths under Mao The book opens with the sentence: "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader." He referred to the peasants as "two shoulders and a bum" because at any given time they could be killed but even more would be left alive. China scholars agree that the famine during the
Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions of deaths but disagree on the exact number, which may be significantly lower or higher but within that same range. Chang and Halliday write that this period accounts for roughly half of the 70 million total. An official estimate by
Chinese Communist Party's high-ranking official
Hu Yaobang in 1980 put the death toll at 20 million, whereas Mao's biographer
Philip Short in his 2000 book
Mao: A Life found 20 to 30 million to be the most credible number. Chang and Halliday's figure is 37.67 million, which historian
Stuart Schram indicated that he believes "may well be the most accurate."
Yang Jisheng, a Communist party member and former reporter for
Xinhua, puts the number of famine deaths at 36 million. In his 2010 book ''
Mao's Great Famine'', Hong Kong-based historian
Frank Dikötter, who has had access to newly opened local archives, places the death toll for the Great Leap Forward at 45 million, and describes it as "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history." Dikötter's
historical revisionist work has been criticized by mainstream China scholars for his problematic use of sources, including criticism by Short. In 2005, political scientist
Rudolph Rummel published updated figures on worldwide
democide, stating that he believed Chang and Halliday's estimates to be mostly correct, and he had revised his figures for China under Mao accordingly. While Rummel's general conclusions remain relevant, his estimates of democide remain on the high-end of the spectrum and have been criticized by scholars as biased, inflated, or otherwise unreliable, and his methodology has been questioned. ==Reception and impact==