University teachers of courses on modern Chinese history will want to put this slim provocative volume in the hands of their students to animate classroom discussion. Written by prominent specialists in Chinese communist history who each bring their own personal mix of disciplinary preferences to the exercise, the 14 different contributions to Monster? touch upon the fundamental question of what is more important in research and the writing and teaching of history: how we go about doing what we do, or what – at the end of the day – we claim to have discovered?

In a hierarchy of matters that matter, the (re-)affirmation of a politically correct conclusion turns out to reign supreme. When it comes to the place in history of a communist leader of one the great social revolutions of the 20th century and co-founder of the People's Republic of China, methodological rigour is ultimately of secondary importance. That is the unsettling conclusion one is forced to draw from many of the contributions to Monster?. It would be infinitely better if biographies like The Unknown Story were written with 100 per cent; respect for the factual record; they seem to be saying, but hey… like Charles Bronson (or was it Tony Curtis?) put it, “You can't win ’em all!” And so contributor A goes on to show why a depiction of a “regime that engaged in fifty years of mass torture, killing and destruction for no good purpose” is ultimately a welcome “revelation” (p. 22), even if and when, as he admits, it amounts to “a possible but not a plausible” (p. 28) account of Mao Zedong's life based on extensive use of “sources that cannot be checked … [or] are openly speculative or are based on circumstantial evidence … [or in some cases] untrue” (p. 22). Contributor B performs an exercise in a similar vein, setting out to explain how a book can be a “vast compendium of information about its subject” even though it is saturated with “pretension … pomposity and … poor scholarship” (pp. 96–97). Contributor C critiques a book that, as he points out immediately, is “not a work of objective scholarship” but a “vacuum-cleaner assemblage of every bit of information conceivably damaging to Mao's revolutionary reputation” (p. 64); yet he comes out concluding that it paints “a cumulative picture [that] is convincing and in my view quite devastating – it could conceivably alter forever our historical picture of the revolutionary origins of the PRC” (p. 71). And contributor D admits to searching in vain for certain “facts” established and “issues” raised in the mainstream Sinological literature, but all the same is full of admiration for a work that “expose[s] Mao Zedong as one of the greatest criminals in human history” (p. 171).

Also represented in Monster? – a compilation carefully balanced – are historians who insist that what matters far, far more than the fickle political correctness of our age is whether or not we abide by the evidential rules of method and follow the facts where they lead. If and when we don't, our conclusions have no enduring value and are of little interest. Most of these contributing historians come from or identify closely in intellectual or digestive terms with China itself, a civilization that has seen educated men and women theorizing about history for millennia. My favourite is one brutally purist contribution, whose author insists that if a work is in “blatant violation of scholarly norms” (p. 119), then there is simply no way its findings (regardless of how “politically correct” they may be) deserve to be called anything other than propaganda. Benton and Lin have done the field of China studies a marvellous service by compiling this book. It is also available in Chinese (ISBN 978-988-17302-9-9) and as such on sale in selected bookstores in Beijing's Haidian district. Even those who, like myself, have never read the biography that serves as its intellectual point of departure, will find much food for thought in its pages.