1960. Tannin, Luo ding, China. One in twenty villagers has
died of starvation. A report states that “several children” have been eaten.
February 25. 1960. Hangtag commune. Yaohejia village. Yang
Zhongsheng, a poor farmer, is arrested for a recent crime. The victim is Yang Erhu.
The report states: “Relationship with culprit: Younger Brother. Manner of
crime: Killed and eaten. Reason: livelihood issues.” That same report includes
other victims of cannibalism in the same city. 12 were killed and eaten. 16
died of other causes and were eaten after. 48 bodies were exhumed and eaten.
These numbers were, of course, very small in the great scheme of things
relating to the so-called “Great Famine”. But there is arguably nothing sadder
and more shocking than people resorting to eating members of their own family.
The desperation felt all over China in those dark days was something most
people will never understand, but today we’ll try and help you to get there.
The man who was responsible for this wickedness, or at least
the person we find guiltier than any other man, was Mao Zedong. Let’s first
have a look at how he rose up to become what some people have said is the worst
mass murderer in the history of tyrants.
Mao came into this world on December 26, 1893, in the small
rural community of Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, China. His family was
farmers, just as many people were in this area, with Mao himself leaving school
to work in the fields at the age of 13.
It seems he didn’t take to farming as his father had wanted.
Instead, he enjoyed books and poetry. He was especially fond of science and
philosophy, and even at a young age, had his head in the sometimes-difficult
works of the philosopher and economist Karl Marx.
Mao got his wish when at the age of 17 he went off to study,
which led to him joining the Revolutionary Army and the Nationalist Party
(Kuomintang). In 1911, Mao supported the Xinhua Revolution, the event that put
an end to Imperial China and its Qing dynasty.
At this point, Mao was still a nobody, and although he
qualified to work as a teacher the jobs never came and he ended up working in a
library in Beijing. This was an exciting time for Mao, who was intently
watching Russia from a distance when it had its revolution in 1917. Communism
was the way forward, Mao thought, inspired by the likes of Marx and the first
head of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin.
No sooner than the Chinese Communist Party was formed, Mao
became a member. China was a country whose peasants had known much suffering
and experienced many terrible famines, and Mao believed that had to change.
Communism, he reckoned, was the way forward. Power tithe people, the simple
farming folks, was what the young Mao said in his head each night as he drifted
off to sleep. The short version of this story is that the Chinese Nationalist
Party fell out with the Communist Party, and with the latter being persecuted
by the former, there was an uprising and Mao was at the forefront of it. We apologize
for our brevity here, but there’s so much we have to explain later.
Basically, Mao led a Red Army against the Nationalists, and
in 1934 he formed the Soviet Republic of China putting ten Chinese provinces
under Communist control. His bands of peasant guerillas were hunted down. “The
Long March” happened, which was actually a series of marches of Communist
armies in retreat from the Kuomintang army.
The distance covered was some 8,000 miles and on the way,
many people died, perhaps as many as 30,000, but many more endured that
perilous journey to the end, and if any name was mentioned in the capacity of
heroism, it was Mao’s. It was this period in history that would cement his
popularity. There were facts, and there was mythology, something that many
years later helped Mao secure a so-called “cult of personality. “There was
still a split in the country in 1937 when the Japanese invaded, and what happened
next further helped Mao to construct a mythology about him. His Red Army fought
with the Allied Forces against the Japanese invaders, and when the war was
over, he was in a strong position to rule over all of China. The Nationalist
politician, revolutionary, and military leader, Chiang Kai-shek, made a peace
agreement with Mao.
But in the end, there wasn’t much peace. The Communist
forces grew in size, aided by weapons sent to them by Joseph Stalin, the most
powerful person in the Soviet Union.
The fight raged on. The peasants rallied for the Communists,
millions upon millions of them. Hundreds of thousands died on both sides, but
it was the Communists that won in the end, helped a lot by the Nationalists
having had their hands full with Japan in the war. When it was done, Mao
promised change. He promised to redistribute the land, to make life fairer, and
the peasants bought intuit. He may have had good intentions, but little did
anyone know right then that things would take a turn for the worse - the
understatement of the century.
Still, Mao did battle against warlords who’d ruled over the
countryside with an iron fist.
He did manage to reduce the number of opium addicts in the
country, and he did create policies that made it more possible for the poor to
get a formal education. His policies even improved life expectancy for the
poor, but that was about to change drastically.
Times were better, though, at this point, for many people
whose lives had been a living hell. Chairman Mao was indeed a champion of the
people, even if that meant the summary executions of landowners, at times
burying those folks while they were still breathing.
As Mao often alluded, you need to break a lot of eggs to
make an omelet, or his own words, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a
gun. “All over China things were changing fast. Mao spoke about the enemies of
the rural classes, those wicked landowners that had oppressed them for years.
In villages throughout the country they were executed one by one, with a
scholar later saying there was “at least one landlord, and usually several, in
virtually every village for public execution. “Sometimes their wives were
spared but were forced into being concubines for the once-persecuted.
Mao’s omelet was bloody, there’s no doubt about that, with
some sources saying there were 200,000 to 800,000 executions, and other sources
stating it was more like two to five million. Those are some big differences,
but as you’ll see today, scholars often vehemently disagree over numbers when
it comes to Mao’s China.
You might be thinking, surely a lot of people complained and
protested about these violent land reforms. You’d be right to think that. Mao
even created something called the “Hundred Flowers Campaign”, which was
supposed to let people air their grievances about the party and its policies.
Some did just that, and many of them were the folks who Mao distrusted the
most: the intellectuals and those Mao believed were rightists. After speaking
their minds, these people were often sent straight to prison, or sent to work
in the labor camps, which was often a ticket to a slow death. Mao did seem to
embrace a critique at the start, but that changed later.
Hundreds of thousands were persecuted this way. These were
sometimes members of his own party, but also regular folks he suspected of
holding rightist views. As an example, in Gansu province, two men named Sun Danica
and Liang Daunt had expressed that Mao’s idea for a project to conserve water
wouldn’t work. They were subsequently called “anti-party “by Mao and punished.
That project went ahead and entailed the hard graft of about 160,000 million
people. They were basically asked to move mountains and were worked half to
death, having to survive by living in caves and foraging for food.
This was just one of many of Mao’s ideas that failed, and
failed badly.
It’s estimated that 2,400 of the workers died from the toil
itself. And guess how much clean water came out of it in the end? None. It was
a complete failure, although not something many people wanted to talk about.
That was the thing about such hare-brained projects, if anyone criticized them;
they were denounced as being anti-party.
But many in the party really believed they were changing the
world for the better and making China a country that would be more powerful
than the UK and close even to these. One of those officials once said, “We are
supernatural. Maybe on another planet, there are people who are brighter than
we are, in which case we are of the second order, but if we are brighter than
they are, we are the supernatural of the first order. “To be as powerful as
Britain, Mao said that China’s steel output had to be significantly increased.
In 1958, all over China, the people of the villages had their own little steel
refineries in their backyards. A nation was hell-bent on massive production. As
was always the case with the Communist Party, this was watched over by every
commune’s boss, acanthi cadres. Daily targets had to be met, and those targets
were often utterly unrealistic.
This was all part of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, summed up by
one scholar like this: “Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its
competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s
communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivized.
People had their work, homes, land, belongings, and livelihoods taken from
them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to
merit, became weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate.
“Mao wasn’t going around China to every village. Instead, there were lower
ranking party members responsible for making those targets, and they often
ruled over the communes with exceptional brutality. These local cadres would
often inflate the production figures, just to make the party officials happy.
But when that happened, and it happened a lot, the leaders started seeing
success where there wasn’t any. Many of those villagers were worked to death,
and there was often the punishment of going without food if they didn’t meet
their targets, so some slowly starved to death. Others simply had the life
beaten out of them.
By April 1958, hunger was widespread all over China. In
Guangxi, one in every six people had no food. In Shandong, 670,000 people were
on the verge of starving to death. In Anhui, it was 1.3 million. Mai had hoped
to Make China Great Again with that Great Leap Forward, but if China was
leaping anywhere, it was into the furnace, metaphorically speaking.
This was the result of forced labor for steel production but
also various other projects.
It meant those people weren’t doing what they usually did
which was growing food. Butte cadres also lied about food production. In just
one place called Luxe, the local head wrote back to Beijing to say every farmer
was producing 300 kilos of grain a year when the real figure was half of that.
This was going on everywhere. In another province, the grain production was
82,000 tons in 1957. In 1960, it was 18,000 tons, but the boss told the party
officials it was 130,000 tons.
The outcome of this so-called “target fever” was starvation,
on a massive scale. The party, never thinking too deeply, once had the people
going on a huge sparrow killing campaign since sparrows ate the crops. What
happened? There was an insect explosion and the insects ate the crops. At the
time some cadres were in fact writing to Mao and talking about such widespread
devastation, the brave ones anyway, and while Mao did sometimes slow down production,
people kept on dying in huge numbers.
Then to build all this marvelous industry, Mao needed tools
and technology in China.
The best place to buy these things of course was in Russia,
and buy he did, as well ascending massive amounts of grain over to the Soviet
Union. That was the grain the people needed to survive on, but no problem,
because when cadres did the books, it often looked as though the villages still
had enough grain for themselves.
In time, some party members did talk about the millions of
people that were starving and sometimes stated that the steel projects and
water projects just weren’t working.
They did say that too much grain was being taken from the
countryside to the cities and abroad, but often they ended up either losing
their jobs or worse, being sent to prisoner killed. Everyone was supposed to
think as the Vice Chairman of Communist Party, Lin Biao, did, when he denounced
those naysayers as anti-party folks and the enemy of the one and true great
leader. He said on stage in 1959, “Only Mao is a great hero, a role to which no
one else should dare to aspire. We all lag very far behind him, so don’t even
think about it.”This is why when we talk about the many millions that died in
China back then; we can’t just blame Mao but much of the machinery of the men
behind him. Still, he was the boss. Hews the one that could have reversed
things. In Fu yang, 2.4 million people died in total from 1959 to 1961 out of a
population of 8 million. In Jiangshan, in 1959 alone, one in every four of the
600,000 people had died from starvation. In Xinyang, one million died. Mass graves
were everywhere. 67,000 of them had died from being beaten with sticks. There,
local militias stole the little food there was and didn’t take kindly to anyone
complaining that they had none.
Some officials did see this happening, with one report
stating, “Bad people have seized power, causing beatings, deaths, grain
shortages, and hunger. “But get this, the report said it was not the fault of
Communist party policies but because of rightists that had “stirred up trouble”
and caused havoc in these towns and villages.
All these deaths, the report said, were down to the enemies
of the party.
Sure, there were counter-revolutionaries around, but most of
them were just desperate as hell.
They were watching their families grow thin and die. They
were being worked to death and their grain was being sent elsewhere. What were
they supposed to do? In short, this was an agricultural nightmare, and you can
blame the Great Leap Forward for that. There were some other matters, such as
failed harvests that resulted in mass deaths but the party could take most of
the blame – especially as so many officials were afraid to report anything
negative lest they be seen as counter-revolutionaries.
In the villages, the houses of people were torn down to
become fuel for the never-ending quotas of supplies. That left people not just
without food, but without a roof over their heads. If they complained, they
were usually beaten vigorously, sometimes to death.
In Hunan alone, 40 percent of houses were torn down and the
occupants were told they had to make do with whatever they could find to
protect them from the elements. Mao knew about this. He’d been told in a letter
written by another party official named Liu Shao qi.
It didn’t matter. Mao just saw this as another small setback.
The journalist Yang Joshing wrote a book based on interviews
of the people that had lived through this horrible experience. In one story,
someone told him that 13 children went ton official and pleaded for some food.
The kids were subsequently taken far away to mountainous area, and all of them
died from exposure.
Joshing wrote, “I was 18 at the time and I only knew what
the Communist party told me. Everyone was fooled.” He said every tree around
his village was stripped of its bark because the bark was the only thing to
eat. In other cases, villagers ripped out weeds and wildflowers and baked them
in mud pies. It stopped the hunger but made them very sick. Joshing’s book was
later banned in China, to which he responded with the words, it is “an offense
to the memories of tens of millions. “People walked away from their destroyed
villages in the hope of finding anything to eat. Many sold their clothes on
these long walks, just for the smallest amount of food. In the winter, this was
deadly. But bodies were also useful. There is a report from the Shandong archives
that says the local cadres used the dead as fertilizer.
In another village of 45 people, 44 died from starvation.
The last remaining woman was found, having gone completely insane. In another
village, a teenage orphan killed her own younger brother and ate him. Sometimes
the dead were dug up and cooked with hot peppers to disguise the taste of
rotten meat. One time a cadre reported to an official what was going on, to
which he received the reply, “That's right-deviationist thinking. You're viewing
the problem in an overly simplistic matter.” All these stories were taken from
the Chinese archives and used in books on Mao, some of which we have in front
of us now. In one book, in the chapter called “Survival”, it talks about how
some of those local cadres lived like pigs and ate to their heart’s content as
the people died around them.
Others turned to crime. In one province alone in a period of
just two months, 500 granaries were robbed. On top of that, the trains carrying
the grains were often held up and their contents taken by desperate thieves.
Sometimes when the cadres announced a new unrealistic grain quota, at a time
when people were starving, there was rebellion, and the leading figures were
cut to pieces by meat cleavers or beaten with sticks.
But what could people do? Some just left the villages in
what became a large exodus and tried to make it to the cities, many of them
dying on the way.
There is a story of one family that was on such a trek when
they stopped in front of man who had food. The father, Wu Jiangxi, gave away
his nine-year-old kid for a bowl of rice and some peanuts. In another case, a
mother named Wang Waiting sold her son fora couple of pennies and four steamed
buns. We must remember here that the mother and father may well have done this
not just for the food, but thinking that the new owners of their children might
help them to survive. Another story from Jincheng tells us that mother and her
young child tried to escape from an irrigation project. Both were bayoneted to
death on the spot. In another case, the folks that tried to run were rounded up
and stuffed in a house that was then blown up with dynamite.
Many people were just turned back when they actually made it
to the city. In 1960, 380,000peasants were turned away from Sichuan, and
really, where did they have to go? They’d already risked life and limb to get
there. The factories of the cities in themselves were horrific places to work,
but they were better than eating boiled leather, tree bark, your mother, or
your brother. In the factories, women had it the worst.
They went months without washing in many cases, and venereal
disease was rife. One pregnant woman one day didn’t turn up to work, presumably
because she was sick. When she next appeared at the factory, she was told to
take all her clothes off and go and break ice outside in the cold. For men and
women, being stripped naked seems to have been a common kind of humiliating
punishment. And this was supposed to be progress…You’d think in Asian culture
the elderly would have been respected and cared for, but they were often left
to die. They died much quicker, too, given their bodies were notes strong as
the young. Just as the young had to lift heavy objects and work from sunrise to
sundown, in the eyes of the party, the elderly had to do their bit, too.
Often, they weren’t strong enough to join an exodus. In one
village in Hubei, everyone had left a once bustling place. When someone found
the village, it was deadly quiet. Four out of the six people left behind were
the old. They were barely surviving by eating grass and leaves. Do you need to
hear more? We could go on, and we must admit, due to the sensibilities of
YouTube, we’ve left out some of the more disturbing details. We’ve also not
included the many disease deaths, or the many industrial accidents, such as
collapsed mines, built too quickly, run by despicable cadres. We didn’t talk
about the deaths at the gulags, or for that matter, the thousands executed
there and the hundreds of thousands that died from malnutrition in the gulags.
And what about regular violence.
The cadres had a saying they liked to use, “Kill a chicken
to scare the monkey. “That basically meant show people you will use extreme
violence and other folks will think twice about getting out of line. The stick
was often the weapon of choice. Shockingly, people suffering from
starvation-related edema were hit with sticks, with the expression used,
“Beating the water out of them.” That means the liquid build-up in them was
beaten out. One official said, “If you want to become party member, you must
know how to beat people.” An investigation team from Beijing once arrived at a
village and called what they saw a “torture field.” On one reservoir project in
Huangcai, 4,000 from 16,000 villagers were beaten. A quarter of them died. There
were indeed killing fields everywhere. One boy was beaten to death for stealing
tiny bit of wheat. In Human, 300 people were accused one winter’s day of not working
hard enough and they were all told to strip and work. One in seven of them
died. Sometimes those accused of slacking were branded with hot irons or
pierced with needles. One entire family was forced to sit in a vat of excrement
after the father had tried to steal a sweet potato for them. He died three
weeks later after more punishment, which included being force-fed that poop. In
Hunan, there was a report of a whole family being bricked up in a house and
left to die. A similar thing had happened to other families.
The head of the province, Zhou Xiao Zhou, at least ordered
an investigation after he’d found out. In another report from Dioxin, it showed
many thousands had died. 10 percent of them had been buried alive. In another report,
a man in Hunan village was forced by boss Xing Dec hang to bury his own son
alive just because the son had tried to steal a morsel of grain. The archival
report said the father died from “grief” three weeks later. Not all the cadres
were that brutal. In one province 260 of them lost their jobs for not beating
the people hard enough. 30 of those cadres died from their beatings. The
numbers are debated, but some reports say that during the Great Famine 45
million people died, over the normal number of deaths in China. Around two to
three million were tortured to death or executed. Some scholars put the total
number at 55 million deaths, which alone makes Mao’s run in charge as one of
the most horrific disasters in the history of humankind. People still argue about
the numbers, but no one denies millions died needlessly and often violently.
Mao knew what was happening. In the minutes of a secret
meeting held in Shanghai on March25, 1959, it was revealed that he said, “When
there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of
the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” But he wasn’t done
with death, not by a long way. In January 1962, the man we’ve already mentioned
named Liu Shao qi stood in front of cadres in Beijing at the “Seven Thousand Cadres
Conference”. Shao qi spoke the truth and said what had happened could have been
prevented. The disaster had been man-made. This was some pronouncement given
the pervasive fear that had throttled China for years. Mao took partial responsibility
and stepped down from his leadership, and Shao qi stepped up.
Again, we must cut a long story short, so let’s just say
that Mao would get his own back on Shao qi, but that was after he took control
of something called the “Cultural Revolution.” Starting in 1966, Mao used this revolution
to silence his critics and monopolize control. He would make himself a god, and
he’d drum up the anger of young people all over China to do his often violent
bidding.
So, you won’t be surprised to hear that Shao qi was later
denounced by Mao as an enemy, a traitor, and he was beaten on a few occasions
while being denied his much-needed medicines.
He died soon after, but many years later, he would at least
be judged more fairly and have the “renegade, traitor and scab” accusation
removed from his name.
But how did Mao manage to turn things around after falling
foul of the party and before that ruining a country? Well, he used propaganda
on a large part of the public who for the most part were not that educated.
Remember Mao’s famous words, “To read too many books is harmful.” Mao wanted
people to read the right books. He wanted people to read his own philosophy,
what became known as Maoism.
The working-class folks and the poor farmers were still
living perilously close to abject poverty, so when a seemingly strong leader
told them he was behind them and their struggles; they grabbed hold of those
words out of desperation. Moa was clever. He told the nation that they needed
to learn from a deceased soldier named Lei Feng.
This is called mythology making, a dictator’s ace in the
pack. Feng had died at the age of 21, but he’d left behind a diary. Inside this
war hero’s book were entries that talked about the proletarian struggle and the
rise of a wonderful country. And guess who had inspired him the most? Mao, of
course. One entry went, “Yesterday I had a dream.
I dreamt of seeing Chairman Mao. Like a compassionate
father, he stroked my head. With a smile, he spoke to me. ‘Do a good job in
your studies. Be forever loyal to the party, loyal to the people.” Mao would
tell huge crowds that the nation needed to listen to heroes like this man,
who’d given up his life for the common good.
Yep, you want to throw up right now, but it actually worked.
The only thing is, Lei Feng was a work of propaganda. It’s
almost certain no man with this name wrote that stuff in a diary and its
possible Feng never even existed atoll. That’s why it pays to read books about
propaganda techniques throughout history.
Plays and movies were made about this fictional lad who’d
loved his Chairman Mao. Songs about him moved an entire nation. One of them
included the lyrics: “Don’t forget what to love and what to hate…Learn from
Feng's good example…be willing to make a revolution…The collective ideology
shines…Remember Chairman Mao’s guidance in your hearts…The revolution will last
forever. “Meanwhile, Mao lived in luxury as his so-called people ate scraps. He
preached about embracing the struggle and wore expensive robes. He taught
people to embrace stoicism just as fiction-Feng had, and he ate like a king.
Girls were regularly told they had to go visit the Chairman in his bedroom. As
one writer stated, their numbers increased as their age decreased, and several
left his room with an STD. The writer added, “The illness, transmitted by Mao,
was a badge of honor, testimony to their close relations with the Chairman.”
Mao went a step further in 1966, starting campaign that you could compare to
something that happens on social media platforms today.
He started a poster campaign, so everywhere that a person
went they saw a picture showing this great leader, or his devoted people
putting their fists in the air in support of this ideal man.
Yep, this was the same man that had led his country into a
bloodbath. He then attacked the people he said were to blame for the country’s
problems. These were the traitors, and many of them were intellectuals,
teachers, folks who might have been mentally armed against his propaganda. That
meant that there was a problem in the universities for Mao. People learned in
those places about the history and cultures of the world. Mao didn’t much like
that. He partly blamed the Ministry of Culture. One time he decided it was time
to change its name and he came up with, we kid you not, “The Ministry of Gifted
Scholars and Beautiful Ladies.” Then, he thought, hmm, I really hate them
reading about other cultures. So, he came up with the name, “The Ministry of Foreign
Dead People.” About one month later, he was still going on about how these dead
folks from history were dangerous to the cause. We might recall here a great
writer who had watched the horrors of world wars and authoritarianism and saw
in his crystal ball the future of endless conflicts and even the widespread use
of drones. His name was George Orwell.
In his book 1984, he wrote of an authoritarian government
called Big Brother and how it controlled the thoughts of a nation. A famous
phrase went, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the
present controls the past.” Orwell was long dead before Mao’s cultural
revolution, but Mao’s education policies were indeed a kind of Orwellian “thought
police''. Mao wanted to control truth, and to do it, he had to rewrite history
and get rid of anyone who had what he perceived as the wrong kinds of thoughts.
Like Stalin had done, he took control of the arts. His Big
Brother face was everywhere.
He vilified intellectualism. And then he spread around one
of the most read books in history.
That was his Little Red Book, which included 267 aphorisms
that he said ordinary people should live by. It included these lines: “War is a
continuation of politics, and there are at least two types: just (progressive)
and unjust wars, which only serve bourgeois interests. While no one likes war,
we must remain ready to wage just wars against imperialist agitation. ”An army
that is cherished and respected by the people, and vice versa, is a nearly
invincible force. The army and the people must unite on the grounds of basic respect.
“Young people carried it everywhere. They had it in their pockets when they
marched into schools, and dragged out their former teachers, accusing them of
being “rightist” and “imperialist running dogs and spies.” Things were about to
get very ugly.
These students formed their own Red Guard, and they walked
into schools and pulled out teachers by their hair who they accused of being
enemies to the cause. They beat them and humiliated them and tortured them.
Mao’s young followers said they were born with purebred blood, and their
mission in life was to hunt down the bourgeoisie traitors.
They did that at the Third Middle School for Girls in
Beijing, when they dragged out the principal and beat him to death. They left a
message on the wall, “Long Live the Red Terror.” Soon after, at Beijing
Teachers College, they took a female teacher and kicked her down the stairs,
killing her. In other schools, where the kids doing the bullying were no older
than 13, they ganged up on their teachers and forced them to swallow excrement.
All over the place, these educated teachers were deemed dangerous
intellectuals. The students murdered a woman named Lao She, and then they went
to her father’s house. This guy, named Nan Bashan, they also beat to death. They
beat his son, too, and locked him in the house, where he later died of thirst.
Again, all these stories are taken from the Chinese archives. Hundreds were
clubbed to death, stabbed, kicked down stairs, throughout Beijing, and on its
peripheries. The nightmare of violence was back again. The Old World had to
die, they said, and blood had to be spilled to make new world. Persecution
spread all over the country, with around 400,000 educated people being told
they had to leave the cities where they lived, usually after a beating.
It was a reign of terror. Their social media of the day was
putting up photographs of traitors or writing their names on walls and calling
for their removal. These people waved their Little Red Books in the air and
shouted slogans supporting their brilliant and selfless leader.
More years passed and more people were accused of being
“reactionary capitalists” and “spies”, nothing more than agents of the bad
people in the West. Just to give you an idea of the carnage, in just the
province of Yunnan, the witch hunts took the lives of 17,000 people and
according to one book, crippled another 61,000.
Many towns fell under suspicion of not allying with the
cause, especially if a religious minority lived there. Thousands of Mongols
were beaten to death, many more were made homeless. The Red Guards filled up
trucks where they traveled great distances to do their worst. They barely had
food to eat and even did their toilet in these trucks, all for the great cause.
Hundreds of thousands of people from the cities were forced
into the countryside where they had no idea how they’d survive. Many of them
lived perilously close to starvation.
What did clerks and teachers and accountants know about farming?
More purges followed. In Hubei alone, 173,000 people were under investigation
for what was said to be “counter-revolutionary activities.” Anyone really,
especially educated folks, was investigated. Even party members were under
suspicion, and they could soon find themselves doing hard labor or slowly dying
in a dark prison cell. If you want to keep power as a dictator, just as
paranoid Stalin had done, you need to clean house often.
Who knows how many people were murdered during these very
bleak and black years. Estimates differ widely, with the lowest number being
put at 250,000 deaths but the highest 2 million.
As for those city-dwellers that were beaten and forced to go
live in the countryside, estimates put the number at 10 million. How many
so-called “bad elements” were beaten badly, publicly humiliated, harassed so
much they couldn’t take it anymore (that number is huge alone), or lost every
material item they had in life? We’re talking about significant amount of a
very large population- an incomprehensible figure, and all because of one man.
After the death of Stalin, Mao had feared the people of the Soviet Union would
turn against hardcore communism. Stalin might havedissed Mao when they met, but
Mao still looked up to him. Then when Mao saw the new leader Khrushchev
denounce Stalin and his deathly purges, Mao of course wondered if he too might
be denounced. Mao knew he needed this reign of terror to hold on to power. Just
as the French revolutionary leader Maximillian Robespierre had said, you have
to strike terror into the hearts of the people. And back to Orwell and
something he called doublespeak, both Robespierre and Mao said terror equals
virtue.
Mao saw himself as being the pinnacle of communism all over
the world. He once explained his idea of virtue, saying, “Our objective is to
struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the
capitalist road... so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the
socialist system.” He was a dictator that caused a great famine and whose ideas
led to people in the countryside killing and eating their own families. His
idealism led to 20th-century witch hunts that saw innocent people beaten to
death with sticks by an angry mob of young folks who had no idea they’d been
brainwashed.
And guess who one of his victims was, whose family was
humiliated and beaten and forced to move to the countryside? His name is Xi
Jinping, the current Chinese leader.
His sister died as a result of the disgusting humiliation
she experienced, and his mother was forced to denounce his father. The father
was then sent to prison and Xi, just age 15, was sent to the countryside where
he and the rest of his now distraught family had to live in a cave. So surely,
Mao must have come under an avalanche of criticism in more recent times? He
died, by the way, in 1976, and the Cultural Revolution died with him – even
though it had petered out before that.
It seems some powerful elements in China don’t embrace the
adage, “Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed to Repeat It.” In 2017, there
were reports of Chinese scholars and others losing their jobs for criticizing
Mao, and while Xi has at times talked about more criticism of the past being
needed, too much criticism is not good when authoritarianism reigns. Certain
words in some places can get you in big trouble, just as that man Orwell had
warned with these immortal words: “In a time of deceit telling the truth Isa
revolutionary act.” Arm yourselves with knowledge viewers, so you don’t become
a weapon for someone with dangerous ideas.