Sept. 9, 1976—Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, who cultivated a cult of
personality that led many to overlook the dismal economic record and millions
of deaths under his leadership, died at 82.
The physical decline of Chairman Mao was, in its
way, of a piece with his crimes: the evidence scattered, but lying about in
such profusion that an unbiased, reasonably attentive person could have
surmised that something was amiss. He had not been seen in public since 1971,
and the consensus of China watchers was that he had suffered from a
neuromuscular disease, probably Parkinson’s.
In fact, his deterioration had been even more rapid
than supposed. China’s leader had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease in
1974. His condition, dire enough with that diagnosis alone, was even worse
because of a longtime addiction to cigarettes that left him vulnerable to
bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema and congestive heart failure, his personal physician
Li Zhi-Sui finally revealed in The Private Life of Chairman Mao
(1994).
Similarly, the strong-arm tactics of the Chinese
leader were not impossible to divine, as in one of the principal maxims in Quotations from Chairman Mao (aka The Little
Red Book): “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But many in
the West were so excited at the wholesale transformation of the world’s most
populous country after the 1949 revolution that they paid little attention to
the strong signals of human-rights abuses.
In 1955, to quell any notion of revolt against a
regime still only in existence a half-dozen years, Communist China formed what
were known euphemistically as “re-education through labor” camps meant to house
“counter-revolutionaries.” In time, they would house not only dissidents but
also petty criminals, drug addicts and prostitutes—about 400,000 people in more
than 300 facilities by 2007, according to an NPR report. Only two years ago did the current post-Mao
overlords close what had become symbols of detention without trial and other
legal abuses.
Even that did not begin to describe the extent of
human-rights violations under the Maoist regime. Before he even seized power
from Chiang Kai-shek, Mao had indicated his general indifference to human life
on his so-called “Long March,” the 368-day, 7,000-mile retreat of Chinese
Communist forces away from Chiang in 1935. As I mentioned in a prior post, less than 5% of his original 86,000
men survived the trip. If he remained unmoved at the thought of losing so
many supporters, is it any wonder that he would be less so by opponents?
The estimates may vary concerning those who lost
their lives because of Mao’s rule, but the arithmetic is unswervingly grim. Hong
Kong-based historian Frank Dikotter, when allowed access to government
archives, estimated that at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in the laughably named “Great Leap Forward,” the nation’s
attempt to catch up with Western economies from 1958 to 1962 through collectivization. In the “Cultural
Revolution” of 1966, another two million may have lost their lives at the hands
of students mobilized into Red Guard units who attempted to purge China of institutions
and individuals regarded as insufficiently revolutionary.
The new understanding about Mao may have been best
expressed by Australian man of letters Clive James, who has written:
“In China Mao Zedong went to war against the evil
landlords and the imperialist spies. Neither group actually existed. The death
toll of his countrymen exceeded the totals achieved by Hitler and Stalin
combined. They all died for nothing. Dying innocent, they have their eternal
dignity, but there are no profundities to be plumbed in their collective
extinction except the adamantine fact of human evil.”
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