I would appreciate feedback at Dochoch29@aol.com.

Some of the allegations are facially unbelievable. I have no access to the Chinese cites nor most of the non-Chinese, other than MacFarquhar which I will consult.

1) The notion that everyone was fooled by Mao, from leftists …more like Edgar Snow and Felix Greene to US military envoys, UN dignitaries and Richard Nixon, is unlikely. What a brilliant man he must have been!

2) In discussing the "Great Leap Forward," no mention is made of back-yard furnaces, small-scale development and the impetus being to quickly gain self-sufficiency. To the authors, a purpose was to starve millions of Chinese. That the Leap failed is another matter. The road to hell is NOT paved with good intentions. Good intentions are better than bad intentions. The authors quote Mao as saying to someone (that I cannot verify) that he wanted quick superpower strength "to conquer Japan and San Francisco." Does anyone believe he thought or said that? That he would conquer the United States? If he believed he could (and why would he want to?) that belies his "brilliance" in being able to fool the world until these two savants came along.

3) Not a word is said about Mao's stated reasons, and valid ones, to bring about the Cultural Revolution. Mao claimed that he wanted to avoid the class divisions, the stifling bureaucratic domination that characterized the Soviet Union. Foolish or not, he wanted to give cityfolks a stint on the farms and farmfolk an experience in the city. Whether feasible or crackpot, any serious writers must at least address the concept. It is not sufficient to simply call him a monster, a falsifier of his participation in the Long March, to allege that he never fought the Japanese, that he only won the Civil War because of Soviet help (Stalin supported Chiang and, if you go back to 1927, Stalin, overriding Trotsky, sent Borodin to china to urge Mao's disastrous amalgamation with the Kuomintang). (less)