This huge biography of Mao Tse-tung
(Zedong) is very well researched – 12 years in the making, interviewing scores
of people who were on the scene in Mao’s circle as well as people connected
with him from around the world, and consulting numerous archives. Author Jung Chang was a teenage Red Guard
during the Cultural Revolution (aka, the Great Purge), and her parents were
both longtime cadres of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Her husband Jon Halliday is an Irish
historian.
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Mao Tse-tung comes out as an even
more twisted mass murderer of civilians than I had thought. In terms of sheer body count, he was worse
than Stalin and Hitler -- combined -- and is without a doubt
the top killer of all time. Their
evidence in this book caused R.J. Rummel – the renowned authority on “death by
government,” i.e., the murder of civilians by their own government – to upgrade
(to actually double) Mao’s murder count to well over 70 million Chinese
citizens deliberately killed by his policies.
These were not war casualties; they were deaths of civilians by
calculated government actions (such as deliberate famine, labor camps and
torture as well as executions) with Mao in command. It is a horror story, made worse because of
its reality.
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If Machiavelli had lived during the
mid-20th century, he would have presented Mao as his prime example
of power-by-all-devious-means, rather than Cesare Borgia. Mao had an evil genius for power plays combined with
a total lack of humaneness enabling him to follow through.
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I heartily recommend this book,
with one important caveat: It does not
mention the gross atrocities of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist (KMT) enemy of
Mao (and an ally of the USA) who retreated to Taiwan in 1949. According to R.J. Rummel’s research program
into civilian “death by government,” Chiang ranks number four among the
all-time mass murders by government leaders, behind Mao (with over 70 million
deaths), Stalin (with around 40 million), and Hitler (with around 20
million). Rummel estimates Chiang’s
number of killings to be 10 million Chinese civilians. That is hard to ignore or sweep under the rug,
but our authors do it.
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Major myths surrounding Mao are
exploded in this book. E.g.: during the
Long March, Mao didn’t march; he was actually carried on a litter, a sedan
chair, by others for most of the march.
Mao was ignorant of most military strategy, and the way he wasted tens
of thousands of his own Red Army soldiers was appalling. He would frequently waste the lives of
enormous numbers of troops solely to jockey himself into a better position of
power over his rivals in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He routinely instituted terror for population
control. He was a monster who never
thought twice about killing huge numbers of humans.
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Red China (the PRC) and the CCP
were creations of the USSR, and the documentation is here. Soviet military intelligence (GRU)
consistently aided the CCP with organizational guidance, with important intel,
with technology, and arms. Moscow
consistently backed Mao, amongst all the other CCP leaders whom they had
trained, because of Mao’s willingness to use extreme brutality, unspeakable
tortures and killings. Mao always looked
to Moscow, because he knew the source for guns and money.
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Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT allowed
the Reds to go on their Long March when he could have crushed them at the
time. Chiang wanted the Red Army invasion
of the Southwest provinces in order to scare the independent warlords into an
alliance with him. Also, Chiang had to
appease the Soviets, who had his son hostage.
He “herded” the Red Army west.
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From 1942, in Mao’s settled base at
Yenan, Mao’s style of governance was apparent.
Humor was banned. (!) Everyone was required to write endless
“thought examinations.” A cult of
personality was developing, terror as a means of control was increasing, and he
quickly destroyed the local economy with absurd taxation and hyper-inflation
policies. And Mao would never learn from
his mistakes, ever.
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In the later post-WWII civil war
with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (KMT), Chiang’s army completely out-classed
the Red Army and took over the industrial heartland of China in Manchuria. The Red Army could very well have been
finished off except for the good old USA.
General George Marshall brokered a truce, which gave the CCP and Red
Army breathing space and the chance to be re-armed and trained by the USSR
(with captured Japanese arms and pilot instructors). Gen. Marshall had served in China in the
1920s and was “ill-disposed towards Chiang, mainly because of the corruption of
Chiang’s relatives.” (Or perhaps he
witnessed Chiang’s own murderous history.)
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By 1949 Chiang and the Nationalists
folded and retreated to Taiwan, leaving Mao and company in charge of Mainland
China as the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Mao is so dependent on the USSR for arms that he begins what will be a
long-term policy of exporting food to pay for arms, while Chinese people starve
to death.
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Mao’s terror amongst the peasants
was from the same playbook as Lenin and Stalin:
he set quotas. He decreed that
10% of the peasants were “land-owners” (“kulaks” in Russian parlance), and they
were rounded up for expropriation of property, abuse and/or death.
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Once the Reds were in charge,
nationalization of larger private industrial property was postponed a bit at
first, so business and agriculture started to recover from the chaos of
war. But censorship was total. Public execution spectacles were designed to
terrorize and brutalize the people. Around
27 million people were executed or died in prisons or labor camps under Mao’s
rule.
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At the end of the Korean War,
around 21,000 Chinese Red Army troops were POWs of the US and allies, and of
these fully 2/3 of them refused to return to Red China, most of them going to
Taiwan. Mao’s drive to industrialize,
militarize, and especially to get an A-bomb, meant that even more food was
taken from the peasants and exported.
This was resisted by the Politburo (and by Chou En-lai, who was
otherwise loyal to Mao), so Mao relaxed it a bit, making 1956 and 1957
relatively better. But not for
long.
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In 1957 Mao laid a trap for
intellectuals and dissidents, called “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.” People who wanted democracy and the rule of
law were encouraged to express themselves in public. Then Mao closed the trap, calling it the
“Anti-Rightist Campaign,” rounding them up.
He again set quotas for arrest, just as Stalin had done.
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In 1958, in his Great Leap Forward,
Mao knowingly caused the worst famine in human history, from 1958 to 1961. Huge amounts of food were taken from the
peasants and exported. He exported food
to Russia in return for massive military assistance, including the means to
produce atomic weapons, while nearly 38 million Chinese died from starvation and/or
overwork. In 1960 alone, 22 million died
in this famine. Mao’s Number 2, President Liu Shao-chi, admitted to the Soviet
ambassador that at least 30 million had died before the famine was over.
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Then the president of the PRC, Liu
Shao-chi, politically ambushed Mao at a huge CCP conference in 1962, damning
the obvious carnage of Mao’s policies.
The Party cadres overwhelmingly agreed with Liu, and Mao had to back
off, thus ending the worst of the famine.
Mao salvaged much of his power by being backed by the defense minister,
Lin Biao, as well as Chou En-lai. Mao
would strike back with revenge later.
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Meanwhile, the “Big Destruction” in
Tibet was Mao’s drive to annihilate the Buddhist culture there after the 1959
invasion. Monasteries were destroyed,
monks and nuns were killed. In 1963 in
China proper, all art forms in all of the PRC were denounced. It was declared that “people read too much.”
(!)
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In 1966 Mao launched his Great
Purge, the Cultural Revolution. His main
allies who helped him pull it off were the defense chief Lin Biao and the loyal
Chou En-lai. Madame Mao (Jiang Qing)
spearheaded the “kill the culture” campaign’s beginning. Students, the Red Guards, were given food and
then encouraged to turn on their teachers.
They invaded homes, burning books and destroying paintings, musical
instruments, etc. To me, this defines
barbarity.
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(The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia adopted
this Maoist philosophy, rhetoric, and policies in the late-1970s, and their
murder rate, as a percentage of the population murdered, out-did Mao.)
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Mao then turned the momentum of terror
against Party members who had opposed him earlier. Off to labor camps (often a death sentence)
went artists, writers, scholars, actors, journalists, etc. Education basically stopped. Leisure time vanished, replaced by mandatory
group study sessions on Mao’s “thoughts,” and group denunciations of members. Sounds like Hell on Earth to me.
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The Red Guards purged CCP president
Liu Shao-chi and his wife as “capitalist roaders,” along with Deng Xiao-ping. Liu died in 1969. However, Deng will be a survivor.
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In 1967 the Red Army commander at
Wuhan opposed the Cultural Revolution.
Mao went there himself to reestablish control, but the up-surge of
popular anger there was so overwhelming it threatened him to the point he had
to flee for his very life via a very close-call airplane escape.
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By the late 1960s, Mao’s worldwide
revolutionary authority had waned. US
president Nixon visited and fed Mao’s superpower dreams, but later with
Watergate and Nixon’s fall, these dreams ended.
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The loyal Chou En-lai had cancer,
and early treatment would have helped him, but Mao delayed Chou’s
treatment. For one, Chou was the
smoothest diplomatic personality he had and was needed for the Nixon
negotiations. And Mao didn’t want Chou
to outlive him. Nice reward for a comrade for a
lifetime of loyalty!
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Mention must be made of Madame Mao,
Jiang Qing, who was ascendant during Mao’s last years. She was nuts.
A completely paranoid evil bitch.
She was active in the early Cultural Revolution, pushing all Chinese to ever
more austerity while she lived an extravagant personal lifestyle. Her special private train would often stop at
her whim, completely clogging all regional railroad traffic; and she justified it thusly: “In order for me to have a good rest, and a
good time, it is worth sacrificing some other people’s interests.” (p.730) (Oh, yeah! We's da rulers, and yous' da low-life scum!)
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Deng Xiao-ping, who had been purged
earlier, had to be rehabilitated by Mao because Chou was so ill, but Mao
countered him with the “Gang of Four” (which included Madame Mao). Mao was failing physically. He had lost control of the Red Army, but he
stubbornly advocated the Cultural Revolution to the very end of his days. Mao faded out to extinction, yet Deng
survived and the Gang of Four were tried and executed. Deng later started the process by which the
economy of China was freed of its most insane restrictions, thus leading to the
phenomenal unleashing of Chinese economic genius.
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How shall I summarize Mao? Since he personally loved scatological language,
how about this: “He was a sadistic, psychopathic,
sack of shit.”
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-Zenwind.
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