In the ranking of the bloodiest tyrants in history, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party would certainly be on the podium. His successive major campaigns have cost the lives of tens of millions of people. Why has no one been able to stop him?
Mao Zedong, who led the People's Republic of China from its proclamation in October 1949 until his death in 1976, enjoyed a better press for a long time than his great "rival" in the USSR, Joseph Stalin. After the disclosure of the latter's crimes, many supporters of Marxism turned to the leader of the Middle Kingdom. They hoped that the leader of the Chinese Communist Party would show a better, less bloody road to the dream socialism.
They couldn't have been more wrong. In absolute numbers, the new homeland of the world revolution turned out to be, as Benjamin A. Valentino, a researcher of the twentieth-century genocide crimes, the most deadly regime in history. This is largely due to Mao himself, who exercised almost absolute power in the country through the communist apparatus.
Prelude:The Long March
Although the first truly criminal experiments of Chairman Mao date back to the 1950s, it is worth mentioning that long before he became known as a ruthless leader. He was one of the leaders of the Long March, that is, about 12,000 km long crossing of the Chinese Workers and Peasants of the Red Army. Soldiers and civilians, about 120,000 in total, traveled from October 1934 to October 1935 from Jiangxi Province in Southeast China to the northwest of the country.
The long march took the lives of tens of thousands of people.
The march, which was essentially an escape from the overwhelming forces of the rival Kuomintang in the region, turned out to be extremely bloody. Various estimates indicate that between 50 and even 90% of the army may have lost their lives during it! "There is no turning back from this road" - Mao repeated to the participants of the murderous expedition, as Przemysław Słowiński mentions in the book "Women of despots" - "The weak will die, but it will be a heroic death."
A tough, relentless attitude guaranteed the apparatchik, who was then just over forty, a quick promotion. It was then, so far unofficially, that he became the head of the Communist Party. No wonder - set a different example, abandoning two of his own children on the road. As Słowiński writes, they remained in Hunan under the care of a pair of peasants. "It has never been possible to establish what their fate was," sums up the Polish author.
First campaigns
It wasn't time for Mao and other Communist Party leaders to really spread their wings until after 1949. Already in the first years of their rule, the process of collectivization of the land began. Initially moderate, he became more and more brutal in the face of the growing resistance of the conservative peasants.
A million to four million people died during it, and a further four to six million were sent to labor camps. The landowners in particular fell victim to agricultural transformations. The party also called not to be afraid of their execution just because an innocent person could be killed by mistake ...
Mao was well aware of what the forced reform was leading to. Many researchers claim that they hoped it would be milder. He was prepared to push her even if he did not. He also agreed to the fact that a group of people had been wrongly murdered. “Generally no mistake has been made; this group of people should have died (...). If they had not been killed, the people would not have been able to raise their heads, "he concluded years later.
The chairman spearheaded yet another literally deadly campaign. In the 1950s, he turned against the so-called "counter-revolutionaries". At the turn of 1950 and 1951, tens of thousands of people suspected of being hostile to the new system were arrested and liquidated. The matter was additionally publicized by the press and radio, so soon an atmosphere of fear and never-ending suspicion prevailed in the country.
The traditional Chinese peasants did not want to come to terms with collectivization. Millions of them paid for it with their lives.
“In just one year, several million people were declared counter-revolutionaries and doomed. The punishment could be death, imprisonment or control, ”describes China's researcher Yang Kuisong. And he adds, explaining the motives behind the spiral of violence unleashed by the communists:"Power gained by force must be maintained by force."
A great leap forward
All the "revolutionary" moves of the Chinese communists were endorsed, if not initiated by the president himself. But none of them show his hand as clearly as in the Great Leap Forward. Interestingly, the personal contribution of the chairman has until recently been marginalized or even overlooked by researchers who believe in the collective model of party decision-making. Meanwhile, as Alfred L. Chan, who deals with this catastrophic episode for China, argues:
In 1957 and 1958, Mao Zedong was carried away by the vision that China's economic development could be rapid, leaps and bounds, based on improvisation and mass spontaneity rather than on the moderate, planned and gradual way set by the first Five Years Plan (1953-1957). Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward on his own, tirelessly forcing his views and his changing ideas and preferences were shaped by the events of 1958-1960.
Mao hoped that sending tens of millions of people to the countryside would cause China to surpass Britain's production levels. This did not happen, and the Great Leap Forward Policy caused the greatest famine in human history.
What was the effect of the "spontaneous" development forced by the authorities? Predictably, the president's dream of surpassing Britain's production in fifteen years had by no means come true. Contrary. Experimental methods of agricultural production and attempts to smelt iron and steel in rural backyards ended in economic collapse and the greatest famine in history.
The number of victims of the Great Leap Forward is estimated at a minimum of 20 million people. Benjamin A. Valentino calculates that in the four years between 1958 and 1962, up to 30 million Chinese could have died. All because of the imagination of the chairman, who in those times was practically idolatrous. The fact that he could impose even such insane solutions clearly testified to its importance. "His opinion prevailed whenever he wanted to, and his words had to be obeyed," comments Alfred L. Chan bitterly.
One Hundred Flowers and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
It was impossible to ignore such a gigantic catastrophe into which Mao's economic experiment had turned into. As a result, at the beginning of the 1960s, the previously inviolable position of the chairman slightly weakened, and he was sidelined. But not for long.
The disaster which turned out to be the Big Leap policy caused Mao to be temporarily sidelined. But not for long. In the 1960s, he returned with the slogan of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The photo shows a ballet scene from the "revolutionary opera" that was to replace the traditional Chinese opera.
The desire to regain the leading role in the party prompted the Chinese leader to unleash yet another murderous campaign. This time the pretext was the alleged need to carry out a cultural revolution, aimed at the final elimination of, in his opinion, traditions that are outdated.
The size of the revolt exceeded any previous persecution to which opponents of communism had been subjected. Both those undertaken in the early 1950s against the counterrevolutionaries and those which resulted from the society's overly enthusiastic response to criticism expressed in 1956 with the slogan "let a hundred flowers bloom".
The signal to start the action was the so-called May 16 notification, attacking bourgeois party members, governmental and cultural circles. However, the situation soon got out of hand. Aroused by Mao's slogans, the huntiebians (Red Guards), composed of students and young workers, unleashed a real terror in the provinces. In the few years of the campaign, between 400,000 and a million people died. As before, several million more went to jail.
How much for what was happening can you blame the leader of the movement himself? As Benjamin A. Valentino writes:
Mao and his allies never had complete control of the Cultural Revolution. The fight broke out between the Red Guards factions. Ultimately, the conflict escalated beyond the assumed scenario of events. However, as with previous campaigns, Mao likely understood that large-scale violence would be inevitable during a revolution. He did not seek violence or destruction for their own sake, but was prepared for them if they could help him achieve his goals.
A murderer without premeditation
Mao's insane and utopian moves, often forced by him even against a large part of party dignitaries, led to the deaths of tens of millions of people. The scale of the terror unleashed in China by him is indisputable. As well as the fact that the Chinese leader readily accepted the bloody consequences of his actions.
He accepted them with as indifference as subsequent family troubles. After all, not everyone will find a way to divorce their wife when she experiences a mental breakdown as a result of their joint experiences. Meanwhile, for the head of the CCP, as Przemysław Słowiński writes in his book "Women of despots", it was an almost natural move ...
Mao also had no mercy for his loved ones. He had his third wife locked up in a psychiatric institution. Photo from the book "Women of Despots".
The fact that in most cases the human sacrifice was merely a "side effect" of the chief's crazy ideas and not an end in itself is little consolation. It is hard to believe that even today this argument is sometimes used as a mitigating circumstance when assessing the Chinese regime. It is allegedly less damnable than, for example, the Stalinist dictatorship, which the Great Purge appears to be the work of pure hatred.
Following the same lead, Mao was a lesser criminal than Stalin, because he only consented to the mass extinction of his country's citizens, and not - personally ordered executions. But is it really worth wondering who was worse?