Three new books — Patrick Wright’s “Passport to Peking” (Oxford; $34.95), Frank Dikötter’s “Mao’s Great Famine” (Walker & Co.; $30), and Timothy Cheek’s anthology “A Critical Introduction to Mao” (Cambridge; $27.99) — attest to the difficulty of definitively fixing Mao’s image, a project that amounts to writing a history of China’s present.
