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Once securely in power in Beijing, Mao's taste for savage reprisals against political opponents, real or imagined, expressed itself in two campaigns in the early 1950s, the so-called Three-Anti's and Five-Anti's campaigns. The authors estimate that 200,000 to 300,000 inhabitants of Shanghai committed suicide during these two brutal campaigns. Mao's merciless war on the people of China continued throughout the 1950s in a series of wide-ranging campaigns as irrational as they were almost psychopathic in execution. At one point, Mao told his senior Communist colleagues that he was "at war" with the whole population and that one-tenth of all the villages in China might revolt. Several times he told his colleagues that "not enough brutality" was being deployed. Mao's predilection for murderous reprisals was not confined to China. After the Soviets quelled the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Mao thought that Moscow had been insufficiently ferocious. "We must kill and we say it's good to kill," he said. Mao gave his chief henchman of the time, Deng Xiaoping, an opportunity in 1958 to demonstrate sufficient zeal by implementing Mao's 1958-1959 Anti-Rightist Campaign. As a result, approximately 550,000 people were labeled "rightists," hundreds of thousands of them were consigned to hard labor for 20 years or more, and many of them died.

MAO'S MOST HORRIFYING POLITICAL and social experiment, however, was to take place during the years 1958- 1962. That was when he launched the Great Leap Forward, during which his goal was to surpass in 15 years the steel production of Great Britain and to force China's peasantry into one giant system of collectivization by rural communes. The decline in food production that resulted from these measures resulted in a famine in which calorie consumption by urban housewives plummeted to 1200 a day. By comparison, slave laborers at Auschwitz survived on between 1300 and 1700 calories daily. By 1960, according to a Soviet diplomat informed by China's then-president Liu Shaoqi, 30 million had already died. In 1960 alone, 22 million Chinese died of starvation, the highest death toll in one year from famine in the history of the world. The total number to die by the time the famine ended was estimated at 38 million.

While all this horrific herding and goading of the Chinese was proceeding, Mao was hell-bent on developing nuclear weaponry for China. Chang and Halliday estimate that for the price China paid financially to develop a bomb, every single inhabitant of China would have been able to consume 300 calories more a day.

The most insane social and political experiment launched by Mao was the 1966-1976 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. What most people outside of China probably recall are the photographs of Chinese officials and cultural figures being publicly humiliated by having to wear dunces' hats. What they probably do not know is that in just two months in 1966, during August-September, 33,695 homes were raided in Beijing alone and 1,772 died from beatings or torture. Observing all this from his safe refuge in a Paris cafe, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre labeled Mao's lunatic experiment as "profoundly moral."

Chang and Halliday make clear that the roots of Mao's cruelty are to be found in a perverted egotism that was already expressing itself quite crudely when Mao was in his early 20s. "Of course, there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me," he wrote. Once in power, Mao lived a life of sickening luxury, throwing up residences in different parts of China at enormous cost, but sometimes spending only a couple of days in them. In justifying his sumptuous lifestyle when his own aides and servants -- not to mention vast numbers of Chinese -- were starving to death, Mao explained that this was an appropriate price for the people pay for his service to them as leader. When his Politburo colleagues, with rare courage, challenged his political savagery, Mao replied, "If there's no death, human being can't exist. From (the time of) Confucius to now, it would be disastrous if people didn't die." It is estimated that under Mao Zedong's 27 years in power more than 70 million people died, and that was in peacetime.

Towards the end of his life, when he wasn't indulging in his sexual lusts, Mao was given to bouts of self-pity. He wanted to be recognized by history as a truly great man but he wasn't sure that history would grant him his wish. In that sense, he expressed a rare insight into truth.

The question today is: When will the Chinese people recognize this reality? It may be carping to criticize Chang and Halliday for one weakness of their book. In laying out the incredible extent of Mao's cruelty, they have not refrained from editorializing. The facts would clearly speak for themselves if left alone, but they are seldom allowed to do so. It is as if every aspect of Mao's psychopathic life and rule of China in The Untold Story is printed in capital letters when lower case would have been enough for a whole book of this remarkable scope.

History will recognize Mao as one of the most wicked men ever to hold a nation in his thrall. How long will it be before the Chinese people acknowledge this as well?

topics:
Russia, Nuclear Weapons