Letters

Andrew Nathan’s general criticisms of our book, Mao: The Unknown Story, rest largely on misrepresentations and distortion, especially of our use of sources (LRB, 17 November). The following are some key examples.

1. Nathan asserts that the sources we cite do not say the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1920, but ‘merely confirm that early Communist cells’ were formed in that year. In fact, describing how the Party was set up by the Russians (‘born’) in 1920, both the (authoritative) sources we cite use the term Chinese Communist Party for the organisation as it was in that year. Nathan claims we ‘think [the date] important because Mao wasn’t in Shanghai in 1920’. On the contrary, we explicitly say that Mao was in Shanghai in 1920, a fact which is well known.

2. Nathan accuses us of ‘distorting’ our sources regarding the battle of Tucheng on the Long March, a battle initiated by Mao. According to him, the sources we cite say Tucheng was ‘a victory’. But none of our seven sources calls it a victory. Among the sources we cite is Mao himself, who twice described it as a ‘defeat’.

3. Nathan claims that we base our interpretation of how the Red Army was allowed by Chiang Kai-shek to escape at the beginning of the Long March on ‘one fugitive piece of evidence’. In fact, a glance at our notes would show 26 written sources, including Chiang’s orders for troop deployments when he knew the Reds were escaping.

4. Nathan distorts our use of the evidence showing that what has been touted as the most famous battle on the Long March, at the Dadu Bridge, never took place. He asserts that our ‘key piece of evidence is an interview’ with a 93-year-old. He ignores our seven written sources, including a contemporary Red Army publication, and Nationalist cables unequivocally showing that there were no troops at the bridge. He also chooses to ignore our statement that ‘the strongest evidence … is that there were no battle casualties.’

5. Nathan charges us with making ‘false claims’ about Mao having planned the border war with India in late 1962 ‘for some time’. The official Chinese history of the war shows Mao doing exactly this (from May 1962). He also writes that ‘according to their own source’ – singular, implying we have only one source – Khrushchev did not horse-trade with Mao in the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. We cite five written sources, the key one being Zhang Dequn (not Liu Xiao), who details the horse-trading.

6. According to Nathan, we have only one, uncheckable (‘unpublished’) source for a speech about coups by Lin Biao at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In fact, we cite three written sources, including the standard English-language source. The one classified source we cite is given a full reference.

7. Nathan says we make a ‘string of assertions’ about Mao’s treatment of Liu Shaoqi in detention in 1967-69, alleging that what we say is based solely on two interviews. In fact, our main source is an authoritative written one, by Huang Zheng. We ascribe to each interviewee only one very specific piece of information.

8. Nathan claims that we ‘misreport’ our source on the issue of whether a meeting between Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, and the disgraced ex-defence minister Peng Dehuai in 1966 was held ‘in secret’. Nathan asserts that this was not the case, yet himself acknowledges that the source we cite states that the man who arranged the meeting (Sichuan boss Li Jingquan) agreed not to report it to Beijing. By Chinese Communist standards, this was an act of the utmost secrecy, as it involved visiting Mao’s top detainee (Peng Dehuai) without Mao’s knowledge. Nothing could be more secret. Nathan’s rendering of this episode shows a failure to understand how the Chinese Communist system worked.

9. Nathan faults us for ‘tak[ing] what Mao says literally, even his well-known outrageous statements that famine and nuclear warfare were no big deal’. He suggests we are missing ‘humour or irony’ in Mao’s remarks. It is dismaying that Nathan believes it right to brush off such vital evidence from the horse’s mouth. These statements represented Mao’s policies, which led to the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese.

10. Nathan claims that many of our discoveries ‘come from sources that cannot be checked’. This simply is not true. A survey of our notes should show that the vast majority of our major discoveries are based on documentary sources, and can be checked – provided one does a little work. To prove his ‘uncheckable’ point, Nathan cites two unpublished documents: the findings about the poisoning of Mao’s rival Wang Ming, and a conversation Mao had with Japanese Communists about Indonesia. In the first case, perhaps Nathan could look at Wang Ming’s papers in Russia, where we pursued the leads which got us to the document. And in the second case, as we state in our text, the source was the Japanese Communist Party, whose contact details are in the public domain.

‘When I lived and worked in Moscow in the mid-1970s,’ Tony Neville writes, ‘everyone was expected to inform: failure to do so was a crime’ (Letters, 17 November). I was born in Leningrad in 1939, and lived and worked in the USSR until my emigration in 1979. Throughout that time, neither I nor others, to my knowledge, expected to inform or be informed on. Certainly, we were aware of the KGB and so on, but within the frame of that awareness we led a pretty full life. Drafted as a physician into the Soviet navy, I was dishonourably discharged in 1970 for ‘reading and spreading anti-Soviet propaganda’. Not because I was brave, but, precisely, because I was oblivious. True, during my ‘trial of honour’ by my fellow officers I became aware of a network of informers in the military. But quite a few ‘seditious’ things that I had, quite frivolously, done or said during my five-year service hadn’t been reported. Of about twenty officers on the ship only two did inform, and those who didn’t were not charged. I was surprised that some of those who took to the podium condemned the trial itself, not me.

Neil Forster (Letters, 1 December) remarks that Parveen Sharif’s communication to her brother, which it seems is what was relied on by the prosecution as encouraging him in his terrorist project, ‘was a purely private communication’, as if somehow that makes it all right. Leaving aside exactly what a ‘purely private’ email might be (for example, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Communications Act), is it right or even possible to distinguish between private encouragement and encouragement in public? Can Forster be saying that private communications should always be off limits where possible criminal offences are concerned?

It was John A. Costello, not de Valera, who declared Ireland a republic in 1948: an editorial slip-up in Matthew Kelly’s review of Charles Townshend’s Easter 1916 (LRB, 1 December).