Scholar’s Mao Bio A Hit in Far East

Call it the “Little Crimson Book.”

Mao’s famous “Little Red Book” now has a popular companion sitting on many bookshelves across China.

A biography of Mao Zedong, penned by Harvard scholar Ross Terrill, a senior research associate at the Fairbank Center for Asian Studies, has experienced a sudden surge in Chinese sales this year, the 30th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s death.

The book, “Mao: A Biography,” has sold more than 50,000 copies since January in a reprinted Chinese translation of the original, which was first published in 1980.

The book was first released in China around the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising and sold well from the beginning, according to Terrill.

The author’s interest in Mao began years ago. He said that he first went to China while “an Australian student wandering around the world, banging on doors.”

“I started working on Mao when I realized that the ideas of the party didn’t mean as much as the power structure and the personality on top,” he said, adding that he thinks Mao acts as a “magnifying glass for China...the whims of the dictator get translated into policy.”

Terrill said that his book aims to present a balanced account of Mao as an individual.

“There is a hunger in China for Mao as a human being,” Terrill said, adding that many Chinese are fascinated by the personal details of Mao’s life that have not typically been part of the nation’s public discourse.

“[The Chinese] are interested in things like, that he had a farmer’s taste in food, slept by day and worked by night, [and] liked Peking opera,” he said.

Terrill added that he happened across a department store window in Shanghai featuring a mannequin advertising green silk pajamas. That model was none other than Chairman Mao.

“There is great pride [in China] that Mao is world famous and that he is Chinese, but they don’t deny that he did a lot of damage,” he said.

Ronald Suleski, assistant director of the Fairbank Center, said he believed that much of the nostalgia for Mao comes from the younger generation. It is this group, Terrill said, who might be buying those green silk pajamas.

On the difference between Western and Chinese approaches to scholarship of Mao, Suleski said that “Western scholars are free to discuss [Mao’s] contradictions, while the Chinese cannot treat him as a completely neutral character.”

Terrill said that Harvard has forged a closer relationship with China over the past 25 years, citing the success of the Fairbank Center and Harvard’s many cultural exchanges and visiting scholars as examples of increasingly strong ties.

Terrill was educated at the University of Melbourne, and came to Harvard in 1965 to earn his Ph.D. He joined the faculty in 1970, and since the 1980s has been an independent writer and associate at the Fairbank Center. He is the author of seven books on China, including a biography of Mao’s wife Madame Mao.

That book has been more controversial in China. A Chinese bookstore clerk once refused to sell Terrill a copy.

“She asked me, ‘do you have permission from your work unit?,’ Terrill recalled. “When I told her I was the author, she checked with the boss. He said I couldn’t buy it.”