They open the book saying "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.

[1] In conducting their research for the book over the course of a decade, the authors interviewed hundreds of people who were close to Mao at some point in his life, used recently-published memoirs from Chinese political figures, and explored newly-opened archives in China and Russia.

[10] Areas under Communist control during the Second United Front and Chinese Civil War, such as the Jiangxi and Yan'an soviets, were ruled through terror and financed by opium.

They say that Mao sacrificed thousands of troops for the purpose of getting rid of party rivals, such as Zhang Guotao, and he did not take the initiative in fighting the Japanese invaders.

[citation needed] Chang and Halliday said that the Long March was not the courageous effort portrayed by the Chinese Communist Party and that Mao's role in leading it was exaggerated.

[citation needed] Mao is also portrayed, along with the Communist elite, as a privileged person who was usually carried around in litters and protected from the suffering of his subordinates, rather than sharing their hardship.

She interviewed a local blacksmith who had witnessed the event and said that "when [the troops opposing the Red Army] saw the soldiers coming, they panicked and fled — their officers had long abandoned them.

[12] In addition, The Sydney Morning Herald found an 85-year-old eyewitness, Li Guixiu, aged 15 at the time of the crossing, whose account disputed Chang's claims.

"[14] The book claims that Mao did not just tolerate the production of opium in regions that the Communists controlled during the Chinese Civil War but participated in the trade of it as well to provide funding for his soldiers.

Hu's son objected to this description and his threat of legal action led Chang's publishers in Taiwan to abandon the release of the book there.

Also, the book details Mao's desperation in needing economic and military aid promised by the Soviets, as the prime motivating factor in backing Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea.

[16] The book opens with the sentence: "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader."

"[17] China scholars agree that the famine during the Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions of deaths but disagree on the exact number, which may be significant lower or higher but within that same range.

Popular history author Simon Sebag Montefiore lauded the book in The Times, calling Chang and Halliday's work "a triumph" which "exposes its subject as probably the most disgusting of the bloody troika of 20th-century tyrant-messiahs, in terms of character, deeds — and number of victims.

"[32] Journalist Gwynne Dyer praised the book for documenting "Mao's crimes and failures in unrelenting, unprecedented detail", and stated he believed it would eventually have a similar impact in China as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago did in the Soviet Union.

[33] Historian Max Hastings said the book is a "savage indictment, drawing on a host of sources including important Soviet ones, to blow away the miasma of deceit and ignorance which still shrouds Mao's life from many Western eyes."

"[35] Professor Richard Baum of the University of California, Los Angeles, said that "it has to be taken very seriously as the most thoroughly researched and richly documented piece of synthetic scholarship yet to appear on the rise of Mao and the CCP."

If the book sells even half as many copies as the 12 million of Wild Swans, it could deliver the coup de grace to an embarrassing and dangerous pattern of Western thinking.

"[37] Schram offered nuances to translation, ulterior passages within selected texts, and criticisms that suggested the authors were not without significant bias in their structuring of the work and representation of Mao’s views.

While praising aspects of the book, stating that it "shows special insight into the suffering of Mao's wives and children", and acknowledged that it might make real contributions to the field, Nathan's review was largely negative.

"[38] Professor Jonathan Spence of Yale University said in the New York Review of Books that the authors' single focus on Mao's vileness had undermined "much of the power their story might have had.

[3] David S. G. Goodman, Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney, wrote in The Pacific Review that the book, like other examples of historical revisionism, implied that there had been "a conspiracy of academics and scholars who have chosen not to reveal the truth."

Goodman stated that as popular history the book's style was "extremely polemic" and he was highly critical of Chang and Halliday's methodology and use of sources as well as specific conclusions.

[40] Professor Thomas Bernstein of Columbia University referred to the book as "a major disaster for the contemporary China field" because the "scholarship is put at the service of thoroughly destroying Mao's reputation.

The result is an equally stupendous number of quotations out of context, distortion of facts and omission of much of what makes Mao a complex, contradictory, and multi-sided leader.

Professors Gregor Benton and Steve Tsang wrote that Chang and Halliday "misread sources, use them selectively, use them out of context, or otherwise trim or bend them to cast Mao in an unrelentingly bad light.

"[41] Timothy Cheek (University of British Columbia) said that the book is "not a history in the accepted sense of a reasoned historical analysis", and rather it "reads like an entertaining Chinese version of a TV soap opera.

... Chang and Halliday's method of citation makes it necessary for the reader to check multiple sources in order to track down the basis for any single assertion.

... Can they balance the loss of millions of lives as a result of profoundly wrongheaded policies (such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution), regardless of their supposed objectives?