User:Arilang1234/Draft/The White-Boned Demon: A Biography of Madame Mao Zedong

LUST, REVENGE AND REVOLUTION By Fox Butterfield of the New York Times.

In The White-Boned Demon, Ross Terrill has written a wild history of Jiang Qing, the fourth wife of Mao Zedong and arguably the most important woman in China in the 20th century. Mr. Terrill's account, an anecdotal biography, draws on an impressive array of sources, including recollections by members of Mao's family, confidential Communist documents and unpublished memoirs of Chinese and foreigners who knew Miss Jiang. The result is a startling and disturbing look at the personal side of politics in China. The Communists have long insisted that under their rule personalities don't count and political quarrels are about serious ideological questions. But Mr. Terrill concludes, The personal relations of the leaders are more important in China than in any other major country. Family feuds and personal grudges, he writes, made playthings of policy issues.

Indeed, if Mr. Terrill's rendering of Jiang Qing is correct, much of the Cultural Revolution - one of the great disasters of modern Chinese history - can be explained by her willful, vindictive personality and tempestuous relationship with Mao. For her, the Cultural Revolution, during which millions of Chinese were persecuted, had no deep meaning but was only a chance for revenge on the people she felt had wronged her, dating back to the 1930's.

This is a sweeping, sensational conclusion, all the more remarkable because of the author's background. An Australian who lives in Boston and the author of 800,000,000: The Real China and Flowers on an Iron Tree, Mr. Terrill helped shape a favorable image of the People's Republic at a time when not much was known about it. The White- Boned Demon (a Chinese epithet for Miss Jiang after her downfall in 1976), reflects a disenchantment with the Communists that has recently spread to many Sinologists.

In Mr. Terrill's new book, she emerges as an extraordinary character. The product of a broken family (her mother was a servant and prostitute), she learned early to be self-assertive and resentful of those around her. Having chosen acting as a career, she loved to play to crowds. By turns she could be petty, charming, cruel and seductive. In a country where women were supposed to stay at home, she literally parlayed sex into power. Mr. Terrill shows that she too had been married three times when, at the age of 24, she met and captivated Mao.

Remarkably, Mr. Terrill discovered a former soccer star who recalled how Miss Jiang, a young actress in Shanghai Fox Butterfield, Boston bureau chief for The New York Times, opened its Peking bureau in 1979. He is the author of China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. in 1934, fondled his leg while they were watching a movie and then promised, I am going to give you unsurpassable pleasure. In another person, such promiscuity might be dismissed as incidental to the great events of the time. But with Miss Jiang, it becomes critical to China. When the Japanese invaded Shanghai in 1937, Miss Jiang made her way to the Communists' cave headquarters at Yanan in the northwest. There she began to think of hooking someone, as her third husband, a bohemian theater critic, recalled. After several affairs, she set her sights on Mao, clapping ostentatiously at his lectures and inviting herself into his cave. One evening Zhou Enlai, according to a source Mr. Terrill calls close to the Mao family, was searching for Mao to answer an urgent cable and stumbled on the Chairman in the bushes with Miss Jiang. Ever the diplomat, Zhou blew out his lantern and sent Mao's bodyguards away.

BUT other Communist leaders were scandalized by the relationship. Mao was 45, almost twice Miss Jiang's age, and she was a pretty actress infected with the bourgeois style of Shanghai. Moreover, he was married to a Communist with whom he had had five children and who had just made the Long March with him. Eventually, a fateful compromise was arranged. Mao was granted a divorce and permitted by the party's leaders to marry Jiang Qing (who was pregnant), but she was required to stay out of politics for 30 years.

It was like a time bomb, Mr. Terrill writes. The deal fired Miss Jiang's resentment of the party leaders who confined her to a political doll's house. And when the 30 years expired in the mid- 1960's at the start of the Cultural Revolution, she sought revenge.

From the 1940's on, she and Mao quarreled frequently. But as Mao prepared the Cultural Revolution, he was in a minority in the party and turned to her, among others, for help. She began by reforming the Chinese theater and then tracked down her old enemies. At a mass rally in a stadium in Peking, for example, she directed a struggle session aimed at Fan Jin, a woman editor who had married Miss Jiang's second husband after they had separated in 1931. Fan Jin had supposedly published some satirical essays portraying Mao as a megalomaniac and sponsored a poem hinting that Miss Jiang was a semiprostitute. Her real crime, Mr. Terrill argues, was her marriage. She was imprisoned and died not long afterward. Quoting from personal interviews and Chinese press reports, Mr. Terrill shows that Miss Jiang also wreaked vengence on Mao's family. His third wife, her immediate predecessor, was confined to a mental hospital for several decades. When Mao's eldest son was killed in the Korean War, his widow accused Miss Jiang of feeling immense ecstasy. Several other children or their spouses were arrested, and Miss Jiang forced her own daughter to divorce her husband because he was just a farmer, causing her to go insane. The White-Boned Demon raises some difficult questions. The most obvious is how careful Mr. Terrill has been about his sources. Many of the anecdotes come from people who were clearly Miss Jiang's enemies and who spoke after she fell from power. I am inclined to believe Mr. Terrill is correct about the general pattern of her character, but the reader may wonder about the veracity of some quotations.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E0D71639F937A35750C0A962948260

Gungwu, Melbourne Age.
 * Harrison Salisbury in Newsday.
 * Publisher's Weekly.
 * Professor Eric Widmer, Brown University.
 * Fox Butterfield in New York Times.
 * Elisabeth Croll in Times Literary Supplement, London.
 * Professor Richard Solomon, Rand
 * Los Angeles Times.
 * Professor Michel Oksenberg, University Of Michigan.
 * Prof. Wang
 * Library Journal.
 * History Book Club review.
 * Boston Globe
 * Philadelphia Inquirer.
 * New York Tribune.
 * Boston Herald.
 * Susan Brownmiller in Chicago Tribune.
 * Merle Goldman in The New Republic.
 * Prof. Richard Smith in Houston Chronicle.
 * Melbourne Sun
 * News-Press.


 * Sunday Press, Melbourne.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
 * Cleveland Plain Dealer.
 * Asian Wall Street Journal.
 * The Wichitan.
 * Manchester Evening News.
 * Rachel Faggetter on "First Edition,"
 * Adelaide Advertiser.
 * The Financial Times (London).
 * Prof. Emily Honig in Political Science Quarterly.

http://www.rossterrill.com/madame_mao_100418.htm