Woman of Ill Repute.

Becoming Madame Mao, by Anchee Min (Houghton Mifflin, 338 pp., $25) Anchee Min's Becoming Madame Mao, a biography in the form of a novel, is at least the third English-language attempt to present Mao Tse-tung's third wife as a tragic figure. Ross Terrill, in Madam Mao: The White-Boned Demon, did the most digging; but Maoist sympathies prevented him from seeing the Communist interregnum for the total catastrophe it is. Roxane Witke's Comrade Chiang Ching was written on the basis of long personal interviews, the only ones ever given to a foreigner, at the height of Mme. Mao's power; but the book betrays the twists and turns of a semi-authorized tract as well as a feminist spin which nevertheless still pictures her and Mao as a romantic couple.

Mme. Mao was neither heroic in the old Greek sense, laudable and worthy of emulation, nor representative of an important sociological group. Chiang Ching-one of several names she adopted in various incarnations-is merely another of those mysteries of the human comedy: a rather unremarkable person who through happenstance and insatiable ambition rose from the couch to a position of enormous power.

Because her history has so often been fabricated and refabricated-both for her own purposes and in the interests of the Communist party-much of it will always be in doubt. Still, the outline is clear, and is rehashed in Min's book: Born just after the Chinese Revolution began in 1911, a waif from a broken family in Shantung, Confucius's home province, she joined a students' itinerant opera company dedicated to spreading a message of reform. Eventually, she made her way to Shanghai, center of China's cinema, where she played minor roles, peddling her attractive body if not her art, a mediocre actress seemingly without a future.

In 1937, when the Japanese in Shanghai started their all-out attempt to bring down Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Republic, already besieged by warlords and Communists, Chiang Ching made her way to the Communist guerrilla's isolated redoubt in northwest China. Apparently recruited for the purpose by a fellow Shantung-man, Kang Sheng-Mao's longtime secret-police chief and head pimp-she was in and out of Mao's bed, eventually becoming his wife over the objections of his politburo comrades. Mao was then still only first among equals and there was bitter resentment that he was abandoning his third wife, a veteran who had accompanied the Communists on their Long March. Both Mao and Chiang Ching had to sign a pledge that she would never enter politics.

But her own ambition, and Mao's never-ending game of playing all ends against the middle, made her a useful tool, and she soon took a role in the incessant intrigues around Mao when the Communist regime was installed in Beijing in 1949. By the 1960s, when Mao was fighting to retain his role as supreme leader and keep China from becoming a "normal" society, Chiang Ching became his chief agent provocateur.

And what a demon she was! Leading the juvenile-delinquent Red Guards along with her acolytes in the "cultural" world, she brought China to virtual chaos as Mao lay dying from syphilis. Chiang Ching believed this was her moment to become China's empress, but on Mao's death the forces of "moderation" led by the old mandarin/compromiser/impresario Chou En-lai and his sidekick, Deng Xiao-ping, closed in on her. The new leadership staged a show trial including evidence that she had informed in her Shanghai days when she was a prisoner of the Kuomintang political police. But Chiang Ching gave tit for tat: "I was Mao's dog; I bit whom he told me to bite." Condemned by the new "Maoists," discredited even among her followers (Anchee Min was one), she was said, finally, to have committed suicide.

That Chiang Ching and the rest of the so-called Gang of Four were scapegoats for one of the major man-made catastrophes of all time-at least 50 million people died as a result of the dislocations and famine brought on by Mao's Great Leap Forward and by the Cultural Revolution-is undoubtedly true. This was a woman who used her power to even petty scores with ancient rivals, who was directly responsible for the death of thousands and the ruin of hundreds of thousands, not to mention the destruction of priceless antiquities, and who justified it all with Mao's pseudo-Marxist rationalizations. Not once, as she apparently admitted to sometime intimates like Witke, did she even try to find out what happened to her own self-sacrificing mother. Nor did she take up the cause of China's abused women, as her admirers in the West have sometimes claimed. (Women's welfare was, indeed, the life's work of Teng Ying-chao, Chou's wife, and a Chiang Ching target.)

Perhaps this utter depravity is worthy of historical note, but Anchee Min approaches the story not as a historian but as a decidedly sympathetic novelist. Min, herself, if the stylized photograph on the dust jacket is to be believed, is still a beautiful, young-looking Chinese woman. Born of an upper-middle-class family, she was intoxicated as a student activist by the later stages of the Cultural Revolution and became a devoted follower of Mme. Mao. But like so many others, she apparently got caught in the toils of the changing Party line and spent eight years on a prison farm, "sent down" to be "reeducated by the masses." She is now married to a former American Marine and has made a splash with several novels that include events based on her own miseries. She feels, apparently, that she has a special insight into Chiang Ching's personality and still, apparently, admires Mme. Mao's enormous energy and rebelliousness. Accordingly, she presents a sympathetic though cluttered narrative of the whole history of Chiang Ching's life, from her childhood to her final trial. In a radio interview, Min admitted that her own long-suffering mother still does not understand why Min is giving new publicity to the Chiang Ching story, which her mother, along with most of China, would like to forget.

Instead of an insightful presentation of recent Chinese history, we have in Becoming Madame Mao one more attempt to obscure the Asian scene by an appeal to the cliche of the exotic and unknowable East. But a whore's a whore for a' that!

Stylistically, the book is a mess. We have not only Chiang Ching's stream of consciousness, but also that of other friends and foes-and a third-person narrative as well. The strange staccato sentences are so primitive that at times they seem like baby talk or pidgin. Min might say that she is getting into the morass of Chiang Ching's mind, or delving into the psyche of the other players. But this does not excuse her many factual and translational mistakes. An apparatchik in the National People's Congress is not the equivalent of "a congressman." Her two-paragraph summary of the Chinese civil war of 1945-49 gives no indication that much of it was played out in the banks of Shanghai by warlords, with whole divisions switching sides with hardly a shot fired. Chiang Kai-shek's German military advisers, who dated from the Weimar Republic, were Junker anti-Nazis; Chiang was not a "fascist" who went to Hitler for help, as Min says. She glosses over Mao's ups and downs with rivals, his problems with the Moscow party line, the differences between sophisticated Shanghai party members like Zhou and many of the country bumpkins around Mao. She presents a picture the guerillas as intellectual Marxists, when Chinese translations of Marxist and Communist books were not available until after Mao came to power.

The author does make the puzzling and painful point that while Chiang Ching seems to have been buried in her own cesspool, Mao, a far greater villain, has become an icon for many Chinese. I, too, was shocked when I saw Mao's face on an amulet tied to the rearview mirror of a taxi in Shenzen.

Min, in a recent radio interview, told an admiring caller about to go off to China for the first time that she should not trust anyone or anything she saw there, given the moral vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution. It is not bad advice for her readers.