Chairman Mao...the world’s biggest killer?
DEADLIEST DICTATORS
CHINA is the world’s new powerhouse, on course to overtake the U.S. as the biggest economy after a great leap forward.
But two generations ago, China was on its knees.
That was after the original Great Leap Forward, under Mao Zedong’s communist control, collapsed into chaos, starvation and mass deaths.
As many as 60 million men, women and kids died in under five years, leaving some people so desperate they resorted to cannibalism.
They started eating their own elderly parents, and then their own children.
Many still refer to this deadly dictator as Chairman Mao.
But away from the iron fist of Chinese media censorship, the name Chairman Mad has a more truthful ring to it…
THE police log, dated March 1960, is chilling.
“Name of culprit: Zhu Shuangxi. Victims: Husband and elder son. Manner of crime: Corpses exhumed and eaten.”
Then comes the lie: “Reason for crime: Livelihood issues.”
Famine
Livelihood issues? For that misleading phrase in the official records of Red China under Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, or Zedong, read “famine”.
New information is constantly emerging from official party records documenting the horrors of that terrible period between 1958 and 1962.
Much of it has been sifted and analysed by Professor Frank Dikotter of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
It reveals how the disastrous famine that overtook China’s millions was the direct result of blind political dogma backed by centralised control and totalitarian power.
“Revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao said.
It was one of those many thoughts that filled the famous Little Red Book beloved by radical students and trendy intellectuals in the West in the Sixties, along with the Labour party’s only very recently top men Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.
Nightmare
It was Mao’s determination to compete not only with the West but also with the Soviet Union, his rival for the leadership of the communist bloc, that plunged his people into this nightmare. The first step was a massive programme to build dams and reservoirs.
Peasants who were just about to bring in the corn and rice harvests were hauled off the land and directed in their millions to this gruelling, slave labour with picks and shovels.
In their absence, crops rotted in the soil. There was the first shortage of food that winter.
A rapid spiral of decline set in.
Desperate peasant farmers fed their hungry families on seed they should have kept to plant in the spring.
The next harvest was smaller still.
Nothing was ever thought through. Beijing ordered a national campaign to eradicate sparrows because they were eating grain.
But once the birds were exterminated, insect populations grew in the granaries and the effect was the same.
Farmers were told to replace wooden wheels on their carts with iron ones, but the carts were then too heavy for the bulls to pull them.
Yet those who went back to wooden wheels to do their job were denounced as counter revolutionaries.
And while the people at home starved, millions of tons of food were being exported to East Germany, Albania and Castro’s Cuba, just so Mao could show off his generosity and the superiority of communism.
Suffering
Yet the suffering of those deprived of food was horrendous. In some villages, a tenth of the population died in a single month.
Some ate the straw roofs of their houses and the cotton padding of their winter clothes.
They soaked and softened the leather of chairs until it was edible. They ate plaster from the walls of their homes.
One report found in the party archives described shrivelled peasants and children with ribs visible through their skin, scrambling to carve out handfuls of porcelain-white mud.
This they mixed with chaff, flowers, weeds and water, kneaded into mud pies and baked.
The pies stopped the hunger pangs for a while but blocked up the intestines and bowels.
Many families fled to the cities, where women sold their bodies for a bowl of rice. A man traded his nine-year-old son for 4lbs of peanuts.
It was only a short step to cannibalism, the meat of the dead smothered with hot peppers.
Corpses were dug up and eaten. Families would eat parents. Neighbours would swap children so they didn’t have to eat their own.
All private property was taken into state control, down to the ploughs and rakes the farmers needed for their work, and the pots and pans to cook.
Sick
As the food shortage escalated, the communists dictated that those too old or too sick to work would not be fed.
They would be left to starve to death, and the sooner the better.
If they even foraged for food, they were punished. Dying was all that was left to them. And even then they’d most likely be eaten.
As many as three million didn’t wait and instead took their own lives.
Discipline was merciless. Villagers caught trying to hide or hoard food were clubbed to death.
Ears were lopped off, hair ripped out, people branded with hot irons.
In some cases they were forced to eat human excrement, doused in petrol and set alight.
Dikotter found some evidence of all these punishments for offences as small as simply digging up a potato.
In all, he estimated 2.5 million people were beaten or tortured to death.
One 12-year-old boy was drowned in a pond for stealing food from the communal canteen.
After another boy took a handful of grains and his father was forced to bury him alive.
Women were raped at will by party officials and the militia who policed the communes.
It was not unusual for them to be paraded naked through their villages, a humiliation that caused many to kill themselves.
A starving mother accused of stealing a few grains of rice for her two children jumped into a river to drown, with them strapped to her back.
In the province of Sichuan, the size of France and once fertile and prosperous, half the population vanished between 1958 and 1961, leaving fields overgrown with weeds.
In the region of Fuyang, 2.4 million people were dead out of a population of eight million.
Mao described the deaths as “valuable lessons”.
Beating
Wherever he went, the roads were lined with quickly- transplanted crops and happy peasants, smiling between gritted teeth to avoid a beating.
Many clung to the belief that the Great Leader knew nothing of their suffering and that the truth was being kept from him. It was wishful thinking.
Mao set the tone with his observation that “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”.
Eventually men in the upper echelons of the party were brave enough to challenge his vision.
The Great Leap Forward into modernity, in reality a Great Leap Backwards into an era that was medieval in its cruelty and suffering, was gradually abandoned.
As for Mao, history will record that, in that circle of hell he shares with the other 20th century monsters Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Mao still manages to outstrip those infamous butchers as a true mass murderer.