HOW MAO DIED A Chinese love-story by David George and Yin Wei Synopsis In 1976, the year Mao died, there were only 37 Westerners living and working in Peking (as it was known then). Foreign experts, working for press agencies, universities, institutes, they all lived in the 'Friendship Guesthouse' along with Venezuelan Marxists and Palestinian terrorists, rode around on bicycles in blue cotton suits with a special badge on the collar saying "Friend of China" - in Mao's own handwriting. David George was one of them. A Cambridge Ph.D., he gave up a professorship to go with his young family to learn the truth about China and write about it. His hero and model was Ed Snow, author of Red Star Over China (the "greatest journalistic scoop of the century") who had created the original legend of Mao, interviewing him up in the cave dwellings of Yenan - and falling in love with a young Red guerrilla fighter. A delicate, fragile but in the end hopeless infatuation - like his affair with China as a whole. David wanted to follow in his footsteps but not, he hoped, repeat the intense disillusionment Snow went through as Mao the charismatic revolutionary morphed into the unpredictable ruler and the revolution bogged down in infighting and incompetence - like every other revolution before it. David hoped that the Cultural Revolution - the next phase of which was supposed to break out in 1976 - was everything it was meant to be: a brand new kind of revolution, one which would change human nature itself. It was a mistake: by the end he had gone on strike, was accused of being an anarchist, threatened with six years imprisonment. One of his students in Peking - Yen Wei - had been through the first Cultural Revolution, as had her daughter. More: she knew "where the bodies are buried" including - astoundingly - the truth about how, when and why Mao was to be assassinated. She gave this story to David and he got it out when he found a way, at last, to leave. Fascinating characters, historical characters, remarkable people, adventures worth re-telling... This is dramatic history: all these things happened, though dreams always look strange when they put on street clothes.
About the Author: After completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University at the age of 23, David took off and has lived in many countries and through many dynamic times - Berkeley, California in the Sixties, China during the Cultural Revolution, Malaysia, France, Australia... Twenty years at Murdoch University (Western Australia) culminated in a Professorship and Chair at the City University of New York. He took early retirement in 2000. He speaks French, German, and (rusty) Russian and Chinese. A well-published and respected academic, David has published six books - on Asian theatre and Buddhist thought, and is also a prize-winning playwright who has received grants and commissions from the French and Italian governments, and whose plays have been performed throughout Australia and as far afield as Moscow. Together these two quite different forms of writing now enrich his novels, infusing them with the meticulous detail learnt from the rigours of research, as well as an expertise in realising fictional worlds and their characters, the legacy of many years writing for and directing theatre. His previous attempts at writing novels all showed great promise: Thomas Nelson called Innocence (a novel about the Children's Crusade) "wonderfully written," Harper Collins "intriguing and emotive." Houghton Mifflin called Red Snow (a Chinese love-story) "a creative and imaginative novel," Hodder and Stoughton "he writes brilliantly," Random House "an ambitious, original project." Houghton Mifflin called Eyebabies "a wonderful story... simultaneously disturbing and alluring, original and familiar... every so often a project comes along that I just can't stop in the middle and yours was one of those." Katherine Greenwood of Bloomsbury Publishing called Eyebabies: "an absorbing story, with strong and beguiling characters." Retitled How Mao Died, Red Snow was published in 2003 by Red Swallow Press and Amazon., as was The Crusade of Innocents. How Mao Died was translated and republished in Indonesia by Kompas Gramedia in 2008. It has now been completely rewritten and is being reissued to mark the upcoming 40th anniversary of Mao's death.