Beasts in the East (The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng - Harrison E. Salisbury)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng - Harrison E. Salisbury
Date:	03/08/00 (29 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Even recent Chinese history is little known by most people.

Disadvantages: How trustworthy are some of the stories?

Parallels with Stalin are drawn in the book but would, I hope, be obvious anyway. This is yet another example of how it's the system allowing a personality like Mao's to destroy people's lives that is what should be reformed, destroyed, whatever. Some vignettes that should stay with anyone who reads this book - though you should wonder whether they are all trustworthy - Mao's (carefully cultivated) peasant coarseness: for example, he used to have his body-guards dig lumps of compacted faeces from his constipated bowels and he liked to defecate in the fields, sniffing a lump of fertilizing human dung beforehand (in order to blunt his sense of smell and enable him to think, which he liked to do at stool); his obsession with swimming and sex (he had an extensive private library of erotica gathered and maintained by a Beria-like head of secret police); his dependence from Long March days on sleeping tablets (and the possible opium addiction of Mao and other members of upper Party); a hugely expensive dinner party in the '80s at which the Chinese communist party met Western capitalists (Hammer et al), which brought to mind the closing chapter of Animal Farm very strongly indeed. Deng suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution but finally achieved supreme power himself: the book doesn't convery any strong impression of his personality or personal evil, as it does strongly of Mao's. In the end though, as the book's title suggests, the tens and hundreds of millions murdered by famine and torture under Chinese communism don't occupy any unique place in Chinese history. It's always happened, and if it was worse in the Twentieth Century, that’s mostly because there were more people for it to happen to.

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