Evil's Friendly Face ; ***** Book of the Week Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Jonathan Cape Pounds 25 .Pounds 20 (0870 165 0870)

Summary

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When Jung Chang was 13 years old, in 1965, she watched a big fireworks display to celebrate the 16th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Tears of joy sprang to her eyes. 'How lucky, how incredibly lucky I am to be living in the great era of Mao Zedong!' she kept saying to herself.

'How can children in the capitalist world go on living without being near Chairman Mao, and without the hope of ever seeing him in person?' In her memoir Wild Swans, she recalled at that moment making a pledge to herself 'to work hard to build a stronger China, in order to support a world revolution.

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Evil's Friendly Face ; ***** Book of the Week Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Jonathan Cape Pounds 25 .Pounds 20 (0870 165 0870)

I needed to work hard to be entitled to see Chairman Mao, too. That was the purpose of my life'.

Forty years on, she and her husband have written a biography of the man who was her childhood idol, but her view of him is very different. He was, she now believes, a pitiless sadist with utter contempt for his own people, a bloodthirsty thug whose only interests lay in ...

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