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The academics who argue Mao wasn't all bad

There was a time when universities and their teachers were treated with respect bordering on awe. Few would have dared to investigate their actions or question their authority, and, for centuries, what went on behind study doors or in committee rooms and lecture halls was accorded near-holy reverence. Like a towerblock packed with dynamite, that blissful age of ivory-tower isolation crumpled with the rise of redbrick campus life...

One doesn't even need to work in a university to be put through the academic meat grinder.

Though it helps. As Henry Kissinger once said, "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

In the past week, Jung Chang, former university lecturer and author of the renowned memoir Wild Swans, has been given an unpleasant taste of academic knuckle-rapping, the intellectual equivalent of being summoned to the headteacher's office. This summer saw a fanfare of excitement when Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, a research fellow at King's College in London, published their mammoth biography, Mao: The Unknown Story. Ten years in writing, it was billed as an astonishing work of revisionism, one that, the publisher promised, "will astonish historians and the general reader alike"...

This picture of Mao as irredeemably evil, his cruelty exceeding even that of Hitler and Stalin, is a gruelling read... I have tried to read it, but the sheer misery of the story it tells, the darkness and malevolence it reveals, is a little off-putting. Others have also found it hard to digest, more because of style than content, but as The Herald's books of the year round-up showed last weekend, Mao has been one of the most popular reads of 2005.

There were, however, a few bad reviews, one of which, by this paper's regular reviewer Frank McLynn, damningly concluded "this is neither serious history nor serious biography". Since then, the groundswell of criticism from experts rather than celebrity reviewers has grown, coming to a head in an article in the London Review of Books last month in which Andrew Nathan of Columbia University denounced the book for its "distorted, misleading or far-fetched use of evidence". More attacks are reputedly in the pipeline, their main complaint being that the authors' sources are suspect and their reinterpretaion of events such as the Battle of Luding Bridge, during the Long March (which they say did not happen), are unreliable.

Later this month Chang and Halliday will rebutt these accusations in a reply in the London Review of Books. Meanwhile, ordinary readers are left uncertain as to whether this new, even grislier version of Mao is accurate, or merely a projection of Chang's hatred for the man whose policies inflicted such trauma on her family. How can we possibly tell? What is clear, however, is that ... Chang and Halliday have put themselves in the path of the academic meat slicer, the scourge of the half-baked or sensationalist historian.

The rigorous standards by which academics work are rarely met by books aimed at the popular market, just as few academics write bestsellers. No-one can predict whether Chang and Halliday will persuade their intellectual jury of their factual credibility. What is certain is that, whatever the outcome, their work has been tarnished. Until the verdict is pronounced, however, their greatest error has been to treat academia as if it were a safari park when, as any campus novel would tell them, it is a jungle.
Posted by: Fred 2005-12-14

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