[Mao. The Unknown Story] is written with the same deft hand that enlivened Ms Chang's 1991 memoir, Wild Swans. But how much of it is true? Until China abandons its (now very low-key) cult of Mao, and allows unfettered access to archives and to individuals who knew him, our understanding of his highly secretive world will inevitably be distorted. The authors may be right that Mao built his political machine "not through inspiration or magnetism, but fundamentally through terror". And they may be right that Chiang Kai-shek was not as ruthless. But by filtering 20th-century China through the life of a single despot without due attention being paid to the iniquities of his opponents, the book feels too much like the story of a lone ogre, and not enough like a complex and dispassionate history.

  This study, by Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, is a triumph. It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research. This is the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all - the Red Emperor of China. Using witnesses in China, and new, secret Chinese archives, the authors of this magisterial and damning book estimate that Mao was responsible for 70m deaths.

  This magnificent book is not without its blemishes. [...] Nevertheless it is a stupendous work and one hopes that it will be brought before the Chinese people, who still claim to venerate the man and who have yet to come to terms with their own history, even as they require others to do so.

  Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have not, in the whole of their narrative, a good word to say about Mao. In a normal biography, such an unequivocal denunciation would be both suspect and tedious. But the clear scholarship, and careful notes, of The Unknown Story provoke another reaction. Mao Tse-tung's evil, undoubted and well documented, is unequalled throughout modern history. […] An 800-page philippic is not an easy read, especially when it is written with such an undiscriminating devotion to detail. But anyone who wants to understand the world should struggle through The Unknown Story. Do not expect to enjoy the experience. It is terrible proof that absolute evil can sometimes triumph.

  The secrecy that still surrounds top-level Chinese leaders means we have few accessible accounts of their lives and work beyond sometimes stultifying academic chronicles. Chang and Halliday have used diverse sources, from the invaluable Russian archives to a myriad of individual interviews, to bring the monster alive. More than anything, the book's strength is their understanding of the importance of bringing alive the human, or the inhuman, factor in Mao's story. This, they do brilliantly.
  In some respects, the book's weakness is the flip side of this. [...] We don't just need more about the times and less about the man. We know that countless Chinese suffered under Mao. But we also need to understand why so many enthusiastically joined in the violence that Mao unleashed and the imperial traditions he exploited to manipulate the masses. Sheer terror is not a sufficient answer.

  
  Few historians outside China in recent decades have clung to the older romantic image of Mao as a sage, visionary and humanist, but Chang and Halliday's Mao is a revelation even for today's demystified historiography.
  There are problems, however : many of their discoveries come from sources that cannot be checked, others are openly speculative or are based on circumstantial evidence, and some are untrue. […] This book can thus be read as a report on the crumbling of the Mao myth, as well as a bombshell aimed at destroying that myth. That the Chinese are getting rid of their Mao myth is welcome. But more needs to take its place than a simple personalisation of blame.