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毛沢東 最後の革命 上巻

毛沢東 最後の革命 下巻

　アメリカにおける文革研究の第一人者における最新（といっても原著が出たのは2006年）の研究成果。文革についての基本的な知識（フィリップ・ショートの本で触れられている程度の）がないととっつきにくいと思うし、出版社もマイナーなところで値段もかなり高いのでどのぐらい売れるかなあ。学術的な水準は間違いなく高いと思うんだが。本書の評価については、アンドリュー･ネイサンの書評が参考になる。

Certainly Mao was extraordinarily cruel. But neither MacFarquhar and Schoenhals nor any other scholar has yet presented a plausible diagnosis that would help us to understand how Mao's pathology directed his actions. Confronting such riddles, one misses a certainty, a fullness of reconstruction, that simply cannot be had when it comes to Mao and his court, because so much remains off-limits even in the recent document collections, biographies, and memoirs. Li Zhisui, who was perhaps the only person really close to Mao who was able to write uncensored, was too limited in his access to the leader -- and, indeed, too frightened of him -- to provide an answer to the inner mysteries of this supremely mysterious man. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday solved this problem in their best-seller Mao: The Unknown Story with their own imaginations -- by making up motives and states of mind that they ascribed to Mao and other actors without authority from their sources. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals have respected the limits of their data, and have more scrupulously left Mao an enigma.