The cover story of the latest New York Times Book Review is a review of Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday. Regular Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, an acknowledged expert on China, authored the review. In 1990 he and his wife Sheryl Wu Dunn, received the Pulitzer Prize of International Reporting for “knowledgeable reporting from China on the mass movement for democracy and its subsequent suppression.”
One would think that having observed Chinese oppression close up, Kristof would have been enthusiastic about this expose of Mao, but his review reveals the double mindedness of the American Left as regards murderous Marxist regimes.
Kristof starts out by acknowledging that “Based on a decade of meticulous interviews and archival research this magnificent biography methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao's claim to sympathy or legitimacy.”
Now I have to admit that as a conservative, I had never accorded Mao either sympathy or legitimacy, but apparently for those on the Left, no Marxist, no matter how much blood is on his hands is without redeeming qualities.
Kristof admits that according to the evidence presented “Mao emerges from these pages as another Hitler or Stalin,” but Kristof has “reservations.” He quibbles over whether “close to 38 million” Chinese died in the great famine of 1958-61, as Chang and Holliday claim, or only 23 million as other have suggested. It would seem almost fatuous to point out that Hitler has been universally condemned as monster for killing 13 million in concentration camps and therefore 23 million dead would certainly make Mao a monster, even if this were his only crime. Still Kristof wonders if the authors “exclude exculpatory evidence.” It is hard to think of what kind of evidence could excuse the mass murder of millions.
According to Kristof, “Mao's legacy is not all that bad.” Kristof appears to believe that without Mao's iron hand China would never have moved into the 20th century. One might point out that Taiwan and Hong Kong abolished the oppression of feudalism without engaging in mass exterminations.
Kristof credits Mao with the emancipation of Chinese women, an accomplishment which “moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say Japan or Korea.” Personally, as the mother of four and grandmother of 12, I would regard a country where any woman who attempts to have a second child is faced with forced abortion and sterilization as one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, but maybe I am biased. I also fail to see how the fact that in China today 119 males survived to adulthood for every 100 females makes China a great place for women. By my calculations this means that somewhere between conception and maturity 19 out of every 100 females are killed. Kristof is certainly well aware of these aspects of China's one child program. In a column in the same edition of the Times he castigates the Bush administration for not funding the United Nations Population Fund just because of its involvement in China's population control program.
Why would Kristof feel obliged to say something good about Mao? Does he really believe that the ends justify Mao's means or has he calculated the price he would have to pay for a review which unequivocally recognized Mao for the monster he was? Perhaps, since according to Kristof, Mao is now considered by some in China as a god, Kristof is afraid that if he does not say something nice about Mao, his Chinese hosts will roll up the welcome mat, after all in China today, as in the past, one has to learn how to kowtow.
Or perhaps Kristof is a captive of the great illusion of the Left that Marxists are really nice Liberals who were forced by circumstances to temporarily repress various liberties or eliminate pesky problems — like millions of their fellow citizens — and if we are nice to them and ignore their excesses they will turn into happy democrats.
Given the history of the last 100 years, such illusions are not the product of innocent optimism, but willful self-delusion.
