Biography: I got my first taste of Chinese censorship a few weeks into my posting as Irish Times Asia correspondent in Beijing in January 2001.
Our shipment of books, clothes, children's toys, and so on, had arrived from Ireland and I had put the hardbacks on the bookshelf in the living room of our apartment in Qi Jia Yuan. Among them was the publishing phenomenon of the 1990s (and for me the China bible), Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. The book told the story of Chang's family's suffering in 20th-century China and of oppression under the harsh regime of the former Chinese leader, Mao Zedong. It sold 10 million copies, was translated into three dozen languages, and made Chang a literary superstar.
A few days after I had unpacked the books, a fellow westerner called by to welcome me to China. When he saw Chang's blockbuster prominently displayed, he shook his head and said: "Not a good idea. This book is strictly banned. The authorities mightn't be pleased." Wild Swans was immediately placed out of sight, and as I eased into life in Beijing, I learned that information control stretched way beyond book censorship. Correspondents' apartments were apparently bugged, and e-mail and internet use were monitored too.
Chang's keenly awaited follow-up to Wild Swans, which took 10 years to research and write with her husband, Jon Halliday, is even more devastating. Mao: The Unknown Story is a shocking biography of "Chairman Mao", communist leader and a man who, Chang states, was as evil as Hitler or Stalin. In chasing his superpower dream, Chang and Halliday estimate that Mao caused more than 70 million deaths.
This book charts Mao's life from his birth in 1893 in Chungsha through the Long March, his coming to power, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the final years until his death in 1976.
Mao's life started inauspiciously and he was expelled from school but finally qualified as a teacher. Jobless, he joined the Communist Party in 1921, just as it was founded. He was excluded for a period for not being effective at organising labour, but he returned to the fold and became a leading force in the campaign against the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek, in a 20-year civil war that included the Long March. With the backing of Stalin in Russia, Mao built a power base across China, which eventually led to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.
When he arrived victorious in Beijing that year Mao quickly set about developing the former emperors' compound, Zhongnanhai, as his power base. This walled fortress in the centre of Beijing, set in several acres with a huge lake as its centrepiece, is still where Chinese leaders and their families live. It is near the Forbidden City and a stone's throw from Tiananmen Square. Indeed it was from Zhonghanhai that the order was given to shoot protesting students in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Once he was in power, Mao set about taking over the world, backing Kim Il Sung's dictatorship in Korea and cosying up to Russia. At home he launched a nationwide campaign to suppress "counter- revolutionaries". In 1950, he devoted much of his energy to overseeing major land reforms which, Chang and Halliday say, resulted in three million people dying by execution, mob violence or suicide. They write that Mao intended the entire population to witness violence and killing: "His aim was to scare and brutalise the entire population in a way that went much farther than either Stalin or Hitler, who largely kept their foulest crimes out of sight."
The book outlines how Mao caused one of the greatest famines in history during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear arms. An estimated 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death between 1958 and 1961. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "Half of China may well have to die."
The political crisis caused by the famine resulted in Mao's deputy, Liu Shao-chi,taking power from him in 1962. But Mao eventually managed to regain control of the army, after which he launched the Cultural Revolution, with gangs of students and secret policemen used to murder and destroy lives and culture. This nightmare - in which a further three million were killed between 1966 and 1976 - is outlined in vivid detail in Wild Swans.
Mao never trusted even his closest allies and he fell out with his would-be successor, Lin Piao, the creator of The Little Red Book, who died while fleeing the country in 1971. He even denied his most loyal servant, premier Zhou Enlai, medical treatment for cancer. Chou was known and even admired among western leaders for his manners and intelligence, but he ruthlessly carried out Mao's dirty work, and would send anyone to their death at his boss's say-so, according to Chang and Halliday.
Mao eventually granted Zhou permission for surgery for his cancer only because he was feeling highly vulnerable himself as a result of deterioration in his own physical condition:
"He was nearly blind, and of more concern to him, was beginning to lose control over parts of his body. In this state he did not want to drive Zhou into a corner and make him feel he had nothing to lose and might as well take extreme measures."
Mao is painted in the book as a selfish, callous monster with a voracious sexual appetite. He never stinted on any side of life he enjoyed. He was a gourmet and had his favourite foods shipped in from all over the country. With his rice, Mao demanded that the membrane between the husk and the kernel be kept for its taste. He did not like getting into baths or showers and did not have a bath for a quarter of a century. Instead, his servants rubbed him every day with a hot towel.
He had a special troupe created in the praetorian guard, of young women who were bed mates or "imperial concubines". Nurses and maids were hand-picked to work in Mao's various villas, to provide a pool from whom he could choose. He was married four times and he appears to have hated all his wives. He also showed complete disregard for his children from his various unions. One of his daughters still lives in Beijing.
Mao's fourth wife, Jiang Qing, one of the famous Gang of Four who enforced the Cultural Revolution, is often portrayed as the evil woman who manipulated Mao. However, Chang and Halliday say she was Mao's obedient servant from the time of their marriage in 1939. She described the relationship after Mao's death: "I was Chairman Mao's dog. Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I did."
Mao died in 1976 with two of his nurses/girfriends in attendance and there was a national outpouring of grief. His massive portrait still dominates Tiananmen Square and thousands of Chinese queue each day to visit his body in its mausoleum in Beijing. Copies of The Little Red Book are big sellers to tourists. But whenever I tried to talk to ordinary Chinese people about Mao and his legacy during my time there, I was always met with weak smiles or just silence.
This ground-breaking, remarkably detailed biography fills 650 pages. In addition, there is a comprehensive 200-page list of all interviewees and archives consulted during lengthy and meticulous research. People all over the world were interviewed as part of Chang and Halliday's search to give what they believe is the true account of Mao's life.
One of the interviewees credited in the book is a Fr Luke O'Reilly, listed as "an Irish Catholic priest who was based in Jianxi during the communist takeover".
Many of Chang and Halliday's informants include Mao's closest associates, now ageing men and women. But some of the most revealing details come from sources outside China, including the archives of the former Soviet Union, which played an important role in the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. The book is all the more authoritative because of the authors' access to people who, with the passage of time after Mao's death, were prepared to talk.
Wild Swans is still banned in China and this book will suffer the same fate. However, it is currently being translated into Chinese, and undoubtedly black-market copies will make their way into the country. It is doubtful that too many older Chinese, despite their experiences of the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, will view Mao differently on the basis of its contents. He is still regarded as a god in the country.
And what about the younger generation living in the new, booming, increasingly westernised China? I suspect many are too busy getting on the property ladder, buying cars, working with multinational companies and playing golf to worry too much about the past and the old days of communist China under Mao.
Miriam Donohoe is deputy news editor of The Irish Times. She was formerly the newspaper's Asia correspondent, based in Beijing
Mao: The Unknown Story By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Jonathan Cape, 650pp. £25