How Do Biographers Depict Mao Zedong?

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The Mao Zedong in “MAO: The Real Story” is a complicated and fascinating figure, a revolutionary and tyrant, poet and despot. This major new biography draws on Russian documents unavailable to previous biographers and reveals surprising details about Mao’s rise to power and his leadership in China. Cover Courtesy Simon & Schuster

Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century and arguably the most important figure in the history of modern China. MAO: The Real Story (Simon & Schuster, 2012) by Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine creates a detailed and revelatory portrait of a complex world leader. Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death. Learn how biographers depicted Mao as a romantic revolutionary in this excerpt taken from the introduction, “Myths and Realities.” 

Historical figures merit objective biographies. Yet the challenge of writing such biographies is daunting even under the best of circumstances. The biographer must pursue a seemingly endless trail of published and unpublished sources, often in a variety of languages, exhaust the contents of numerous archives, winnow truth and fact from rumor and falsehood, strike the right balance between the public persona and the private person, and judge the wisdom and folly of the subject over the span of a lifetime. Such difficulties are multiplied when the subject of the biography is the leader of a closed society that jealously guards its secrets. This is certainly the case with Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China. But now, more than thirty-five years after his death in 1976, with the release of important new documents from China and exclusive access to major archives in the former Soviet Union, a clearer, more nuanced, more complete portrait of the most important Chinese leader in modern times can be drawn. That is the aim of this biography.

To be sure, Mao has been the subject of numerous biographies in Western languages since the American journalist Edgar Snow first wrote down Mao’s life story just past its midpoint, in July 1936. A year later Snow published that story as the centerpiece of Red Star Over China, an influential book that helped shape history and remains in print to this day. For what it tells about the lineage of Western-language Mao biographies—a lineage from which our own biography significantly departs—it is worth relating why that encounter between the guerrilla commander cum leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the young American reporter took place.