From A Glimpse of the World Blog:
In their new biography, Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, a best-selling memoir of oppression under Mao, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, show Mao Zedong not as a great philosopher, social idealist, or romantic hero of the downtrodden, but as a tyrant who manipulated anyone and anything he could in pursuit of personal power. The authors count him responsible for well over 70 million deaths in China, and on the whole see him as a greater scourge to the twentieth century than either Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. But while Hitler and Stalin have been repudiated, both in their home countries and around the rest of the world, the myth of Mao survives today: not only as an emblem of the Chinese government, but as a romantic idea in the world’s imagination. Chang and Halliday want to change that.
