March 1993

Not long after Mao Zedong died in 1976, one of the editors of the Party’s People’s Daily said. “Lies in newspapers are like rat droppings in clear soup: disgusting and obvious.” That may have been true of the Party’s newspapers, which Chinese are skilled at reading, but the history of the Party itself is a rat’s nest of often deliberate deception, which the editors of the excellent multivolume Cambridge History of China, or solitary specialists like the late Lazlo Ladany, have tried to unravel.