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WAS MAO REALLY A MONSTER?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story. Edited by Gregor Benton and Lin Chun. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. viii, 199 pp. US$42.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-415-49330-7.
The academic response to popular histories is much like a master chef going to McDonald's with a favourite young niece or nephew: disgusted by the crass marketing of salt, grease, and high fructose corn syrup but not wanting to come off as a snob (and, to be sure, the french fries are tasty). When academics fume against Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (Bantam, 2002), Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Basic Books, 1997), or, the subject here, Mao: The Unknown Story, they feel the same futile avuncular exasperation: How can I explain this to a civilian? To be sure, Ming armadas did make prodigious explorations, the Japanese Army did in fact commit war crimes, and Mao was indeed a megalomaniac under whose rule tens of millions died from political causes. But if Mao's story is not "unknown" (any more than the Rape of Nanking was "forgotten"), was he the monster Chang and Halliday portray?
Fourteen academic reviews are reprinted here, with...