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a remarkably forthright and brutal portrayal of Mao, including his relationship with Zhou Enlai and the visit of Richard Nixon to China ... nobody is truthful ... everyone cares only for their own status and power ... (so what else is new?) ... a few excerpts give the flavor

... the real Zhou was not the suave diplomat foreigners saw, but a ruthless apparatchik, in thrall to his Communist faith. Throughout his life he served his Party with a dauntless lack of personal integrity.

... A secret agreement was reached for the CCP to send Russia one million tons of food every year. The result was famine and deaths from starvation in some areas of China occupied by the Communists. ... Few knew that the famine in Red areas in those years was largely due to the fact that Mao was exporting food; the shortage was put down to “war.�� Here was a foretaste of the future Great Famine, which was likewise Mao’s creation: again the result of his decision to export food to Russia.

... Kissinger returned to China in November (now as secretary of state), bringing a terminal blow to Mao’s ambitions. Nine months before, Kissinger had promised that Washington would move towards full diplomatic relations “after the 1974 [mid-term] elections.�� Now he said that the US “domestic situation�� precluded severing relations with Taiwan “immediately”—which Peking had insisted on as a prerequisite for diplomatic relations.

... Mao intended to let the tumor eat Zhou to death unimpeded.

... Mao did not care one iota what happened after his death

... primal myth about the Long March—the crossing of the bridge over the Dadu River ... This bridge is the center of the Long March myth,* fed to the journalist Edgar Snow in 1936. Crossing the bridge, Snow wrote, “was the most critical single incident of the Long March" ... This is complete invention. There was no battle at the Dadu Bridge