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› Find signed collectible books: 'China: Karl Lang'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mao: The Unknown Story'
In the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, "Today, Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." For Chang, author of Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to history, but to decency. Mao: The Unknown Story does not contain a formal dedication, but it is clear that Chang is writing to honor the millions of Chinese who fell victim to Mao's drive for absolute power in his 50-plus-year struggle to dominate China and the 20th-century political landscape. From the outset, Chang and Halliday are determined to shatter the "myth" of Mao, and they succeed with the force, not just of moral outrage, but of facts. The result is a book, more indictment than portrait, that paints Mao as a brutal totalitarian, a thug, who unleashed Stalin-like purges of millions with relish and without compunction, all for his personal gain. Through the authors' unrelenting lens even his would-be heroism as the leader of the Long March and father of modern China is exposed as reckless opportunism, subjecting his charges to months of unnecessary hardship in order to maintain the upper hand over his rival, Chang Kuo-tao, an experienced military commander.
Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao's ascent to power and subsequent grip on China in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon's visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao's unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao's ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors' consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. --Silvana Tropea
Q: From idea to finished book, how long did Mao: The Unknown Story take to research and write? 1. Mao became a Communist at the age of 27 for purely pragmatic reasons: a job and income from the Russians.
2. Far from organizing the Long March in 1934, Mao was nearly left behind by his colleagues who could not stand him and had tried to oust him several times. The aim of the March was to link up with Russia to get arms. The Reds survived the March because Chiang Kai-shek let them, in a secret horse-trade for his son and heir, whom Stalin was holding hostage in Russia.
3. Mao grew opium on a large scale.
4. After he conquered China, Mao's over-riding goal was to become a superpower and dominate the world: "Control the Earth," as he put it.
5. Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "half of China may well have to die."
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mao Zedong'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Wild Swans'
Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China. At times scarcely credible in the details it reveals of the suffering of millions of ordinary Chinese people, it is an unforgettable record of tyranny, hope and ultimate survival under conditions of extreme harshness. In 1924, at the age of 15, the author's grandmother became the concubine of a powerful warlord, whom she was seldom to see during the 10 years of their "marriage". Her daughter, born in 1931, experienced the horrors of Japanese occupation in Manchuria as a schoolgirl, and after their surrender joined the Communist-led underground fighting Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang. She rose to be a senior Communist official, but was imprisoned three times. Her husband, also a high official and one of the very first to join the Communists, was relentlessly persecuted, imprisoned and finally sent to a labour camp where, physically broken and disillusioned, he lost his sanity. The author herself grew up during the Cultural Revolution, at the time of the personality cult of Mao and the worst excesses of the Gang of Four. She joined the Red Guard but after Mao's death she was to become one of the first Chinese students to study abroad. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China'
In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Im Nordseewind 2008. Kalender'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mao'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mao. Pantheon Paperbacks'
Wer gedacht haben sollte, über Mao Tse-tung sei im Wesentlichen alles gesagt, hat sich gründlich getäuscht! Im Gegenteil nämlich dürfte vieles, nein: das meiste, was in der Vergangenheit über Mao publiziert wurde, aufgrund dieses grandiosen Buches von Jung Chang und Jon Halliday als überholt gelten. Man wird sich nicht zu weit aus dem Fenster lehnen, wenn man voraussagt, dass diese Arbeit auf Jahrzehnte hinaus als die Mao-Biografie Bestand haben wird.
Mit Maos Lebensgeschichte resümieren die Autoren des klug gegliederten Bandes zugleich die Geschichte Chinas im 20. Jahrhundert. Schritt für Schritt folgen wir Maos Weg vom schwer erziehbaren Schüler in das Zentrum der Macht. Die Lektüre entlarvt den chinesischen Revolutionsführer außer als einen Mann, den der Anblick sich gegenseitig erschlagender Bauern körperlich erregte, als einen ökonomischen Analphabeten sonder gleichen: Während die eigene Bevölkerung Not litt, unterstützte Mao befreundete Länder, deren wirtschaftliche Situation zum Teil deutlich besser war als die eigene, chinesische Waffenlieferungen erfolgten in aller Regel ohnehin zum Nulltarif, die Rückzahlung von gewährten "Krediten", die zu gewähren man sich eigentlich überhaupt nicht leisten konnte, wurde von befreundeten Staaten nicht erwartet. Und selbst die nach der bisher einhelligen Lesart ihm zuzurechnenden militärisch-strategischen Leistungen, wie namentlich der "Lange Marsch" 1934/35, werden von den Autoren als ihm in den Schoß gefallene (Fehl-)Leistungen anderer entzaubert.
Mehr als ein Jahrzehnt haben Chang und Halliday recherchiert, zahllose Zeitzeugen, zum Teil aus der nächsten Nähe des Diktators befragt. Sie haben eine Unzahl von Archiven in aller Welt durchforstet, unbekannte Quellen gehoben, ausgewertet und schließlich aus einer unschätzbaren Zahl an Puzzlesteinen ein Bild vom "Großen Vorsitzenden" zusammengefügt, das endlich mit den Legenden aufräumt, die sich bis heute um ihn rankten. Unvorstellbar nach der Lektüre der knapp tausend Seiten, dass das Abbild dieses an nichts, aber auch gar nichts anderem als der Macht um ihrer selbst willen interessierten Massenmörders (ohne Berücksichtigung der Kriegstoten sollen seiner Herrschaft über 70 Millionen Menschen zum Opfer gefallen sein!) in China bis heute den Status eines Heiligenbildes besitzt. -- Andreas Vierecke [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wilde Schwäne.'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mao Zedong: Xian Wei Ren Zhi De Gu Shi'
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