Jon Halliday

He was also exceptional at reading political situations and shifting positions enough to survive at the very least.

And John Chang and John Halliday's biography of Mao, The Unknown Story, which drew on this newly opened Soviet and Chinese archive, portrays him as someone who was almost entirely driven by the desire for personal power, who used ideology as a tool rather than actually believing in it.

And this is very interesting because that reading is contested by other scholars who think his ideological commitment was genuine, at least early on.

What is not contested is that he was extraordinarily skilled at political survival.