In the Steven Pinker book, “The better Angels of Our Nature” – a history of violence
and an attempt to understand the darker side of humanity- the man who is the focus of today’s
show plays almost a starring role among many of the other tyrants, criminals and government-sanctioned
sadists.
He is sometimes called the worst mass murderer in the history of tyrants, but knowing the
exact number of how many died due to his policies and those just murdered under the regime,
is not easy.
That number is sometimes said to be about 40 million, sometimes we are told 45 million,
and sometimes we are told even as many as 65 million.
It’s hard to even imagine such a thing and we might be reminded of the phrase sometimes
attributed (there are doubters), to the tyrant Joseph Stalin “A single death is a tragedy,
a million deaths is a statistic.”
The reason the number of deaths changes of course is because getting access to records-
if there even is a record of death- is not easy, and it is also difficult to know who
died as a direct result of Mao’s policies and zero-tolerance attitude to critics.
But historians haven’t pulled the number out of hats, and there are ample well-researched
accounts of the devastation of Mao’s policies and also how his regime was sometimes incredibly
cruel towards the Chinese people, especially dissidents.
The historian Frank Dikötter, who spent a lot of time researching in archives for what
went down during the Great Leap Forward, said Mao Zedong was responsible for “one of the
worst catastrophes the world has ever known”.
He said around 45 million people either starved, were worked to death, or were beaten to death.
“It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the
20th century...
It was Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over,” he said.
We can tell you first hand how this writer told a captivated audience at a literary festival
that people were seen only as “digits”, things to move the Great Leap ahead.
This historian, while researching his book, “Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's
Most Devastating Catastrophe”, explained to people that while looking through China’s
Public Security Bureau reports he found some things that turned his blood cold.
Dikötter said that in these records of the provinces he found that there were instances
of children, hungry children, stealing potatoes.
The rulers were strict about crime, and in one instance the child had his hands tied
and was thrown into a river.
Others were forced to work naked in winter as punishment, some were branded, others set
on fire, while others merely had their nose or ears cut off.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing was a record of parents being forced by officials to bury
their children alive.
But starvation killed the most people.
To give you an example, Dikötter writes that in one town containing around 250,000 people,
80 percent of the folks were deliberately kept away from the official canteens where
food was served.
They were old or weak and so it was decided they were a waste of space in the greater
scheme of things and should be starved to death.
That’s how bad it was, and this information was taken from archives, not word of mouth.
But before we talk about more misery, let’s look at who this leader was.
This will be a very abridged history, as people have written long books on this man’s life.
Little Mao was born on December 26, 1893, in a small rural community called Shaoshan,
in the province of Hunan, China.
His parents were farmers and were said to have worked hard in the fields of that town
for generations.
It’s said his family weren’t that bad off for their area, which was mostly made
up of very poor peasants.
He did a bit of schooling, but by the time he was 13 he was working in the fields, too.
It’s said he had been a good student, and enjoyed reading and writing poetry.
It’s said he was asked to leave school for being unruly, according to an excerpt from
a book featured in the New York Times.
His mother, whom he worshipped, was ok with him leaving but his father was displeased,
according to this book.
Mao himself once said he had bitter fights with his father.
At 14, his dad said he had found a wife for Mao, but we are told he turned the offer down.
Other sources tell us he did in fact marry her, but that Mao never later recognized her
as his proper wife.
In his own words, Mao once said, “When I was 14, my parents married me to a girl of
20.
But I never lived with her ... I do not consider her my wife ... and have given little thought
to her.”
She died a year after their marriage anyway, and it’s said even though his father wanted
him to work in a rice store, Mao had his sights set on studying in a modern school where he
could learn things like foreign languages, science and world history.
He would soon be inspired by western economists, philosophers, military leaders and scientists,
as well as the writings of philosopher and economist Karl Marx.
It’s said at around this time, still a young man, he developed a reasoning that the end
justifies the means, or perhaps you might say that to make an omelet you have to break
some eggs.
His father at this time thought Mao’s intellectual pursuits were totally pointless.
Their break-up was imminent.
At age 17 he left home and went to study in another city.
After educating himself more he went on to join the Revolutionary Army and the Nationalist
Party (Kuomintang), whose intention was to overthrow the monarchy.
That happened in 1912, and the Republic of China was born.
These were exciting times for Mao no doubt, but he didn’t exactly rocket into politics.
In 1918 he became qualified as a teacher, but after looking for jobs in Beijing he was
still unemployed.
Instead he managed to land a job as a librarian’s assistant at Beijing University.
Around this time we are told that Mao had taken an interest in Russia and what was going
on there with the revolution (1917), an uprising that would lead to the formation of the Soviet
Union based on the tenets of communism.
Just a couple of years later and Mao would become one of the first members of the Chinese
Communist Party.
There was still a ruling nationalist party in China that Mao had supported from the beginning,
but having watched Vladimir Lenin’s ideas come to fruition not too far away, Mao believed
it was time for China to give some power back to the people, the agrarian masses that made
up most of the country.
What happened next, in short, is the Chinese Nationalist Party broke all alliances with
the upstarts, the Communist Party.
And here’s where Mao stepped in.
He led an army (The Red Army) of peasants against the nationalists.
This violent reprisal wasn’t without its reasons of course, the Nationalists had killed
and locked up many people affiliated with the Communist Party before the fighting.
Mao then formed the Soviet Republic of China and by 1934 ten provinces in the country were
under his Communist control.
Government forces then buckled down and tried to defeat all those mostly peasant guerillas,
but the Communists retreated and began was has been called “The Long March”, basically
a hard trek through the mountains.
It’s said from about 100,000 people that started the march, around 10-30,000 died on
the way (the exact number is disputed).
Walking 8,000 miles over treacherous territory gave Mao some stories to tell; he was in some
ways a great action and intellectual hero, and this would later fuel the “cult of personality.”
If you don’t know what that is, it’s when a leader becomes somewhat like a demigod,
and he and his cronies (often paranoid themselves of being accused of not being devout) use
propaganda, the media, posters, unrealistic stories, to promote this veritable savior.
Look no further than North Korea for a present example.
Matters became worse in China in 1937 when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the country.
The government couldn’t have internal discord and also fight Japan.
The Red Army of Mao grew in size in part because of the atrocities of the Japanese.
Mao’s communists were asked to get on one side and they did, and together along with
help from the Allied forces the Japanese were defeated.
Where did this leave Mao?
Well, in a pretty strong position.
He wanted all of China, and that he got in the end.
A second civil war ensued and that ended with Mao’s enemies skipping off to Taiwan.
So, now we have Mao the leader, and he did a lot of good things.
If people got in his way, blood was often spilled, but he took land from warlords and
gave it back to the people.
He tried to stop opium production and cut down on addiction.
He doubled the number of Chinese people getting an education; he greatly improved healthcare
and women’s rights.
It’s said because of Mao’s policies life expectancy improved quite quickly in the country.
He was a champion of the rural classes, but things would take a turn for the worse.
Although he thought he had done so much good, and he had in many respects, he was still
heavily criticized by those he said were on the right – these were mostly urban folk
with urban educations.
We might remember many of these people were bullied, hurt, had their lives turned upside
down.
After some amount of condemnation he embarked on a campaign of fear.
His doubters had to be silenced, and they were.
Mao had even allowed people to voice their concerns about how the country should be run,
which came under the banner “Hundred Flowers Campaign.”
But many of those on the right, expressing concern of the leadership, were just sent
to prison.
If you think being doxxed is bad, imagine hundreds of thousands being sent to dank jail
cells just for sharing an opinion.
Some writers say the campaign was only there in the first place to weed out so-called threats.
In many other cases people were executed, and it’s said in every village there were
executions.
People also perished in labor camps, where Mao had hoped to see a “reform through labor”
campaign change people’s views.
It’s also written that during this time many people took their own lives before they
could be forced to work or be executed.
But without criticism there can be no progress, without a dialectic it’s hard to move forward,
and when you glue the mouths of your detractors something bad is likely going to happen.
It did, and worse than anything previously seen.
In 1958, Mao launched his “Great Leap Forward”, which were a series of reforms to push the
country forward.
This included forcing farmers to work in a collective, everything was for the country,
the move ahead, the bright future, and anyone working for themselves in the vein of an individualist
capitalist was severely punished.
The reforms were many, but a big emphasis was also on quickly industrializing the country,
which often involved taking the peasants out of the fields and into iron and steel production.
China was then hit by devastating floods and some bad harvests, and all the efforts to
have people working in industries did not really work out.
The movement from field to factory also meant lower grain production.
Mao’s propaganda would tell a different story, however.
When you have zero-tolerance to criticism, or even complaining, it’s not always the
police or army that get to you.
It’s your neighbor, because much of the time they are playing a bad part in the Prisoner’s
Dilemma game, which basically means they get you before you can get to them.
One writer for the Guardian interviewing a Chinese author wrote, “Across China teachers,
former landlords and intellectuals were being humiliated, beaten and murdered.
They were hounded by neighbors, colleagues and pupils moved by misguided revolutionary
fervor, personal grudges or little more than whim.
Friends, children and spouses turned on them.”
We might also say that during rules of cults of personality people can become quite drunk
with love, stoned on their belief that they know the true path cut by the great leader.
So, when ruin comes, there just wasn’t anywhere the people could turn.
Many of those that did criticize the policies were called “right opportunists” and imprisoned.
It was a chaotic time, to say the least.
What happened was a famine, a terrible famine.
This was a response from one party official who had been told there is no food for people
to eat, they are dying.
“That's right-deviationist thinking.
You're viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter.”
This famine literally killed off entire villagers, decimated towns, turned some people on each
other.
Farmers declaring that their harvest was terrible were sometimes beaten, set alight, drowned.
The Guardian writes, “Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic
harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply
angering officials.”
One Chinese man called Yang Jisheng who lived through those harsh times many years later
wrote a book called “Tombstone”, which he penned after travelling the length and
breadth of China to find out how people had been affected by the famine.
His own father had died of starvation back then.
He finds case upon case of acts of sheer desperation and depravity.
In one such case 13 kids appeal to officials to give them a scrap of food.
The officials take the young kids to the edge of the mountains where they die of exposure.
In another case a young boy kills and eats his own brother.
He mentions other cases where people didn’t bury their deceased family members (they hid
them) so that they could collect their food rations, and in some cases people just ate
their dead friends and family.
Like the historian we mentioned, the Chinese writer got this information from Chinese provincial
archives.
The authorities at least were good at keeping records.
"To start with, I felt terribly depressed when I was reading these documents," he told
The Guardian “But after a while I became numb – because otherwise I couldn't carry
on.”
His book is banned in China, and some critics wonder if the Chinese authorities have not
learned a lesson already about censorship.
Is history doomed to repeat itself?
We doubt it, but one might ask even as right and left schisms destroy friends’ alliances,
if banning and blocking is a good thing.
Yang called the banning of his book, “an offense to the memories of tens of millions.”
Of course we can’t directly charge Chairman Mao for all the deaths, and it’s said that
some of Communist Party leaders kept a lot of information away from him regarding the
depth of the famine, but we must also make him accountable for his part, his rule by
fear, his intolerance for criticism.
While one man alone we cannot blame, it perhaps is just easier to focus ire on one thing,
one face.
But that man, that face, did say things like, “Political power grows out of the barrel
of a gun.”
He also said, “To read too many books is harmful.”
This was in his famous “Little Red Book”, which consists of 427 quotations from Mao.
It’s said a billion copies of this book have been published, making it more widespread
than the whole of the Harry Potter series of books, but still a little way behind the
bible.
Still in some countries today leaders look upon their population as a herd of sheep designed
for their sometimes unruly demands and absolute theories, mostly indirectly related to them
retaining their power.
As sir Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is Power,” and maybe we should all arm ourselves
with a foundation of knowledge, a willingness to listen and change, to not fall for a despot’s
lies, to not be seduced by GroupThink, to not be enthralled too much by the madness
of a crowd, and live with open hearts and curious minds.
What do you think of Mao Zedong?
Could the famine have been averted?
Also, be sure to check out our other video, greatest naval battle in history - battle
of leytte gulf.
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See you next time.