Just finished reading the biography about Mao by Jung Chang (Wild Swans). Excellent book and very hard hitting. She dispells many myths about the man and you are left wondering why he was never properly challenged by his politbureau, some of whom are still in power today. It also leaves you wondering what will happen when the official translation in Chinese comes out and mainland Chinese start to read it.


I ordered mine via amazon in the UK and there were no problems with it being stopped by Customs.

Very Interesting Celtic, I will look out for it, thanks for the tip. I was amazed to see Wild Swans being freely sold here, with no apparent censure. I think the West still demonises China, or rather it's government.

I enjoyed the book too. It's major job is to revise accepted notions about the early life and career of Mao. It does seem to gloss over the corruption of the Nationalists and the atrocities carried out by the invading Japanese army, whereas Wild Swans talks about these in lots of detail. It has also captured the popular imagination in the West. Wild Swans is one of the great bestsellers and the Mao book will be read by folks who do not usally plough through 700 page history biographies.

Jung Chang has been working on a transalation, but I think it will be a long time before Mainland Chinese are able to buy copies off the shelves in China. I suspect that your copy got through, because its contents were not inspected throughly enough, although I think the Chinese government don't really care what foreigners living here read and think as long as we are discrete and don't cause any trouble.

Glad to hear that the Mao book is in China. We have just been discussing whether we should bring our copy in our personal effects when we come in October. Neither of us have read it yet and thought it would be more relevent to read it while in China.

I think that perhaps they WANT the Mao book to slowly infiltrate here. I think it is not wrong to say that Deng's impact will be much more profound than Mao's impact in the current generation is. AS soon as the scars of this generation disapear Mao will be only remember as somebody that made Deng's vision possible. And to do that it will be necessary to slowly fade Mao into a less glossy part of children's colouring books.

I dont know, it's just a theory, but maybe slowly eroding the big man's reputation is something that people actually want to do. As to say: "that was then, today is now. The future is to be written."

Dump time I guess.