Book Review: The New Emperors

Pete Salisbury's The New Emperors is one of the best history books I've ever read. In reads like a Bill Bryson take down of one of the most complicated subjects in contemporary history: the rise and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party through the lives of it's two paramount leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. It tracks the Party's rise against the odds - even the Soviets were backing the Kuomintang - to eventually take over and completely remold Chinese society. The remolding might be one of the most brutal yet intriguing social science experiments of all time: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This is where the books shines.

Instead of just telling you that the peasants were melting their farm tools in backyard steel mills during the Great Leap Forward while the crops rotted, it describes through firsthand account and interviews how these things happened, what Mao was thinking, and how his lieutenants fueled it. It shows the beginnings, starting with Peng Dehuai, of the purging that would define the Cultural Revolution. Like a soap opera it sets up the characters just to watch them fall. Perhaps venturing a bit too far into speculation, but supported with Mao's own words, Salisbury claims what was really going through Mao's head were literal pipe dreams. The opiate-laced sleeping medication that the old warhorses were dependent on fueled the imaginative perceptions of what flipping an entire society on its head would bring.

The book changes direction to chronicle the less interesting but more relevant story that brought Deng Xiaoping out of small tractor repair shop where he was sent during the Cultural Revolution and into Beijing to topple the Gang of Four. Like Mao, the book starts soft on the imminently flexible and results-oriented leader and ends with the rigidity and tragedy of his latter days, culminating in the Tiananmen tragedy where the author was an observer.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the roots of today’s China. Though I didn’t think so at the time, it was worth the Beat Reader I traded it for at Friendly’s Guest House in Manila. Get it.