Mao: The Unknown Story

The first great political biography of the twenty-first century – Frank Johnson * Spectator *
This is a bombshell of a book… Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have done this extraordinary country a huge service with this book, which will one day be read as widely within China as it will deservedly be in the outside world – Chris Patten * The Times *
Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao’s tumultuous life… Magnificent… It is a stupendous work – Michael Yahuda * Guardian *
Devastating… Awesome… Mesmerising… The most powerful, compelling and revealing political biography of modern times. Few books are destined to change history, but this one will – George Walden * Daily Mail *
A triumph. It is a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research. This is the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all – Simon Sebag Montefiore * Sunday Times *
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s meticulously researched biography explodes every unquestioned truth… An extraordinary exercise in iconoclasm that is likely to play its own part in changing history – Isabel Hilton * New Statesman *
Awesome yet immensely readable – Ruth Rendell * Guardian *
What Chang and Halliday have done is immense and surpasses, as a biography, all that has gone before – Jonathan Mirsky * Independent *
This book’s strength is [Chang and Halliday’s] understanding of the importance of bringing the human, or inhuman, alive in Mao’s story. This, they do brilliantly – Richard McGregor * Financial Times *
The authors shred the myths in which Mao’s national and international reputation rested… Jung Chang and John Halliday have done this extraordinary country a huge service with this book, which will one day be read as widely inside China as it will deservedly be in the outside world – Chris Patten * The Times *

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a ‘barefoot doctor’, a steelworker and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 - the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Her award-winning book, Wild Swans, was published in 1991.

Jon Halliday is a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, University of London. He has written or edited eight previous books.

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