Art-whore Supernaut fumes at Mao-inspired fashion and welcomes a new biography as a welcome bit of reality:

No one argues any more that even though Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot did terrible things, they were, somehow, "great". The unchanged view of Mao is partly the fault of the Chinese Communist Party’s leaders, who claim to be his heirs and hang his portrait in the emotional centre of the capital. But even elsewhere in the world Mao is often praised, after his brutality has been acknowledged, as a visionary, poet, calligrapher, guerrilla chieftain, military genius, unifier, and even - as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger claimed - charmer.
Not any more. In their decisive biography, Mao: the Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday leave Mao for dead. By that I mean that Mao’s reputation as a "great man," unless one includes Hitler and Stalin too, is finished.

She reproduces a review of the book by Jonathan Mirsky, approvingly.

Meanwhile, Red Star News, disapprovingly, reproduces sections of a review by the Guardian’s Will Hutton that is much kinder on the Chairman.

Anyway, what I really don’t like about the articles are pieces like this:

While
the Great Leap Forward and the disaster of the Cultural Revolution are
famed exercises in futility, personal delusion and inhumanity,
brilliantly documented by Chang and Halliday, don’t forget that between
one and the other Chinese growth averaged 15 per cent per annum, never
achieved before in a single year in China’s long history.

Right,
but Hutton forgot to mention that the years in between the country was
governed not by Mao but by Liu Shaoqi and that this economical success
was one cause for Mao to launch the CR.