Eventually, Trudeau explains, he is taken to meet “this venerable gentleman . . . [who was] looking like a sort of Buddha” and, he notes, “we sat down and had a long talk. He did most of the talking.” Whipped up into a frenzy of Marxist orientalism, Trudeau writes of his last encounter with Mao with the enthusiasm of an overgrown teenager meeting an aged rock star.

Mao: The Unknown Story goes a long way toward undermining the cult of personality that officially hovers around Mao, but unfortunately it merely replaces one cult with another, exchanging the deific for the satanic. In Chang and Halliday’s handling, Mao was a leviathan figure without precedent, responsible for basically all of China’s terror-filled modern experience. The authors neglect to consider how centuries of imperial rule in China prepared the ground for Mao, and they write out of open, righteous hostility to their subject. Moreover, they tend to downplay the fact that many Chinese participated in Maoist programs at various levels — willing enthusiasts, unfazed supporters, cons, and quietists — which the book’s photographic sections make distressingly clear. They argue that citizens committed inhuman acts against each other out of fear, and because their sole opportunities for improving their horrid lives required them to betray, ruin, or destroy others. These are persuasive explanations, but only to the degree that they are in keeping with Chang and Halliday’s victim’s justice approach to chronicling Mao’s life and times.

In fact, the unstinting vehemence of their biography makes an older book on Maoist China, Chinese Shadows, a welcome tonic. Written by Pierre Ryckmans in 1973 under the pseudonym Simon Leys, it provides a withering, dispassionate account of “how heavily Mao has weighed on China’s destiny, and how much his presence has become a paralyzing factor in the life of the country.” But rather than focusing exclusively on Mao, Ryckmans considers the stifled, despondent experiences of the ordinary citizens living under his regime. His findings, based on chilling evidence taken from his travels throughout China shortly after the Cultural Revolution, led the Belgian sinologist to note that “the Chinese tend to look at human behavior in terms of role-playing and to consider themselves somewhat as actors playing their own existence.”

With critical sympathy, Ryckmans offers a disconcerting explanation for why Mao’s rule was able to persist for so long, cause so much suffering, and elicit such widespread zeal. More so than Chang and Halliday, he recognizes at least some self-awareness and agency in ordinary citizens, even if these were put to dark ends out of fear, resentment, or detachment. While brooking no illusions about Mao and his regime, Chinese Shadows comes across as a wiser book than Chang and Halliday’s comprehensive but one-note biography, perhaps because its task is more demanding: to account for human tragedy under totalitarianism on an individual basis rather than to simply ascribe it to a monster and proceed to compile an inventory of his many evils.

Indeed, concentrating entirely on Mao’s wickedness, Chang and Halliday limit their work’s most vexing point to a bitter afterthought: “The current Communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao.” Coming to terms with this regime, its dreadful genealogy, and its future movements, is a burdensome undertaking that Mao: The Unknown Story makes more demanding and necessary — for more than just a handful of American policy experts and their Washington audience. Risen China represents a difficult but unavoidable challenge for the wider international community and, perhaps most importantly, for the 1.3 billion people who remain part of its Maoist machinery.

Which brings us back to you, dear Censor. Do you remember the patriotic poems of the Cultural Revolution? One went “O Chairman Mao, you are the red, supremely red Red sun which shines in our hearts, We wish you a long life, a long life, a life without end!” Still feeling that enthusiastic? Perhaps all you can bring to mind from Mao’s time is his beatific face. After all, it hung in every home. One of the most popular of the Great Helmsman’s portraits was called “Chairman Mao Walks All Over China.” How’s that title strike you now? But I’ve kept you too long. You should probably get back to work. Tear away.