The Mao Conference, and a Discussion about Jung Chang.

There were varied reactions to the conference from attendant students. Rana Mitter received generally positive reviews for his two lectures in the morning - both of them clear, informative and well communicated despite the microphone difficulties and a couple of best avoided jokes. The afternoon's speakers were less uniformly appreciated, with the first one - also a lecturer from Oxford - speaking too fast and too unvariedly from a set of notes that seemed remarkably disorganised and unstructured. The final speaker, from Bristol University (a sure sign of quality) gave what I thought was an interesting presentation on the Cultural Revolution accompanied by a rich range of visual material, but he seemed not to have grabbed the attention of most of the student audience. Perhaps a combination of his being the last of four meaty lectures, it being after what was clearly a good lunch for some attendees, and the fact that the play station generation doesn't like to sit and listen for a whole day were the reasons for the impression I got that he was merely providing background noise to the more personal conversations of attendant students.

I did ask Mitter, after his lectures, about the Jung Chang biography of Mao. His initial response was "utter crap". "So you don't like it then?" I perceptively summised. He went on to explain that he had no argument with her intention of showing Mao in a negative light. "Although I hope I'm objective in these sort of lectures I actually think Mao was a monstrous figure". The problem, as he saw it, is that it is such bad history - it gives the impression of using a huge range of sources which subsequently prove well nigh impossible to follow up. Mitter - or Rana as I now felt I could call him - referred me to an article in the London Review of Books by Andrew Nathan that he felt summed up the main problems with Chang's approach to history. It is, in fact, an article I have read and copied for students before, by way of providing a useful balance to reading Chang's book, so I was pleased to see we at SGS are not completely in the academic desert. The online version - together with links to the published correspondence between Nathan and Chang about his review - is here, and well worth reading.

Rana Mitter, whose own books (see posts below) are excellent as a way of getting in to China in the 20th. century - recommended, as a preferable biography of Mao, one by Philip Short, which is harsh on the dictator but more rigorously researched and noted. I was unable to find the book in Blackwells in Oxford, where I happened to be on Saturday, but a quick search on Amazon indicated that there is one copy available of this now out of print paperback, for the reasonable price of £69.34.

And so how to approach Jung Chang? Mitter hates it - as do most academics - but I was struck, as were some of the students at the conference, by the fact that much of what she writes is very tenable. She is not as far out as her writing style sometimes suggests; the story she tells matches the story we hear from others. And it is an accessible, readable, exciting story. She pulls no punches, and allows the need to settle a personal score to jaundice her conclusions too much, but read in the knowledge of where she's coming from, and with due note taken of the comments about her sourcing, it should still provide a good basis for trying to understand Mao. The chapters on the Long March, for example, are detailed and chilling, giving a great account of this extraordinary event. If the main rival to this book is an out of print £64 paperback, I think we can see some life yet in continuing to read Jung Chang!

I will try and publish some short summaries of key points from the lectures on this blog soon.