Thread: The horrors of communist China under Mao Zedong that most Westerners don't know about

The horrors of communist China under Mao Zedong that most Westerners don't know about

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Mises Institute
May 1, 2017, 11:17 PM



Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) attends the rally celebrating the first anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1950 in Peking, China.AP Photo

It's a scandal that few Westerners are even aware, or, if they are aware, they are not conscious, of the bloody reality that prevailed in China between the years 1949 and 1976, the years of communist rule by Mao Zedong.How many died as a result of persecutions and the policies of Mao? Perhaps you care to guess? Many people over the years have attempted to guess. But they have always underestimated.
As more data rolled in during the 1980s and 1990s, and specialists have devoted themselves to investigations and estimates, the figures have become ever more reliable.

And yet they remain imprecise. What kind of error term are we talking about? It could be as low as 40 million. It could be as high as 100 million or more. In the Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1961 alone, figures range between 20 million to 75 million. In the period before, 20 million. In the period after, tens of millions more.

As scholars in the area of mass death point out, most of us can't imagine 100 dead or 1000. Above that, we are just talking about statistics: they have no conceptual meaning for us, and it becomes a numbers game that distracts us from the horror itself.

And there is only so much ghastly information that our brains can absorb, only so much blood we can imagine. And yet there is more to why China's communist experiment remains a hidden fact: it makes a decisive case against government power, one even more compelling than the cases of Russia or Germany in the 20th century.

The horror was foreshadowed in a bloody civil war following the Second World War. After some nine million people died, the communists emerged victorious in 1949, with Mao as the ruler.

The land of Lao-Tzu (rhyme, rhythm, peace), Taoism (compassion, moderation, humility), and Confucianism (piety, social harmony, individual development) was seized by the strangest import to China ever: Marxism from Germany via Russia.

It was an ideology that denied all logic, experience, economic law, property rights, and limits on the power of the state on grounds that these notions were merely bourgeois prejudices, and what we needed to transformed society was a cadre with all power to transform all things.



1966: Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong) (1893 - 1976) at a Red Guard rally in Peking. His followers wave their 'Little Red Books' at him as he passes.Photo by Keystone/Getty ImagesIt's bizarre to think about it, really: posters of Marx and Lenin in China, of all places, and rule by an ideology of robbery, dictatorship, and death that did not come to an end until 1976. So spectacular has the transformation been in the last 25 years that one would hardly know that any of this ever happened, except that the Communist Party is still running the place while having tossed out the communist part.

The experiment began in the most bloody way possible following the second world war, when all Western eyes were focused on matters at home and, to the extent there was any foreign focus, it was on Russia. The "good guys" had won the war in China, or so we were led to believe in times when communism was the fashion.

The communization of China took place in the usual three stages: purge, plan, and scapegoat. First there was the purge to bring about communism. There were guerillas to kill and land to nationalize. The churches had to be destroyed.

The counterrevolutionaries had to be put down. The violence began in the country and spread later to the cities. All peasants were first divided into four classes that were considered politically acceptable: poor, semi poor, average, and rich.

Everyone else was considered a landowner and targeted for elimination. If no landowners could be found, the "rich" were often included in this group. The demonized class was ferreted out in a country-wide series of "bitterness meetings" in which people turned in their neighbors for owning property and being politically disloyal. Those who were so deemed were immediately executed along with those who sympathized with them.

The rule was that there had to be at least one person killed per village. The numbers killed is estimated to be between one and five million. In addition, another four to six million landowners were slaughtered for the crime of being capital owners.

If anyone was suspected of hiding wealth, he or she was tortured with hot irons to confess. The families of the killed were then tortured and the graves of their ancestors looted and pillaged. What happened to the land? It was divided into tiny plots and distributed among the remaining peasants.


Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung (1893 - 1976), accompanied by his second-in-command Lin Biao (1907 - 1971), passes along the ranks of revolutionaries during a rally in Tiananmen Square, Peking (Beijing), 1966.Photo by Keystone/Getty Images

Then the campaign moved to the cities. The political motivations here were at the forefront, but there were also behavioral controls.Anyone who was suspected of involvement in prostitution, gambling, tax evasion, lying, fraud, opium dealing, or telling state secrets was executed as a "bandit." Official estimates put the number of dead at two million with another two million going to prison to die.

Resident committees of political loyalists watched every move. A nighttime visit to another person was immediately reported and the parties involved jailed or killed.

The cells in the prisons themselves grew ever smaller, with one person living in a space of about 14 inches. Some prisoners were worked to death, and anyone involved in a revolt was herded with collaborators and they were all burned.

There was industry in the cities, but those who owned and managed them were subjected to ever tighter restrictions: forced transparency, constant scrutiny, crippling taxes, and pressure to offer up their businesses for collectivization. There were many suicides among the small- and medium-sized business owners who saw the writing on the wall. Joining the party provided only temporary respite, since 1955 began the campaign against hidden counterrevolutionaries in the party itself. A principle here was that one in ten party members was a secret traitor.

As the rivers of blood rose ever higher, Mao brought about the Hundred Flowers Campaign in two months of 1957, the legacy of which is the phrase we often hear: "Let a hundred flowers bloom." People were encouraged to speak freely and give their point of view, an opportunity that was very tempting for intellectuals. The liberalization was short lived. In fact, it was a trick.

All those who spoke out against what was happening to China were rounded up and imprisoned, perhaps between 400,000 and 700,000 people, including 10 percent of the well-educated classes. Others were branded as right wingers and subjected to interrogation, reeducation, kicked out of their homes, and shunned.

But this was nothing compared with phase two, which was one of history's great central planning catastrophes. Following collectivization of land, Mao decided to go further to dictate to the peasants what they would grow, how they would grow it, and where they would ship it, or whether they would grow anything at all as versus plunge into industry.

This would become the Great Leap Forward that would generate history's most deadly famine. Peasants were grouped into groups of thousands and forced to share all things. All groups were to be economically self-sufficient. Production goals were raised ever higher.


People were moved by the hundreds of thousands from where production was high to where it was low, as a means of boosting production. They were moved too from agriculture to industry. There was a massive campaign to collect tools and transform them into industrial skill. As a means of showing hope for the future, collectives were encouraged to have huge banquets and eat everything, especially meat. This was a way of showing one's belief that the next year's harvest would be even more bountiful.



Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong (1893 - 1976, second from left) visiting farm workers to congratulate them on production figures at their agricultural institute in Zhejiang, China, 9th February 1958.Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Mao had this idea that he knew how to grow grain.He proclaimed that "seeds are happiest when growing together" and so seeds were sown at five to ten times their usual density. Plants died, the soil dried out, and the salt rose to the surface.

To keep birds from eating grain, sparrows were wiped out, which vastly increased the number of parasites. Erosion and flooding became endemic. Tea plantations were turned to rice fields, on grounds that tea was decadent and capitalistic.

Hydraulic equipment built to service the new collective farms didn't work and lacked any replacement parts.

This led Mao to put new emphasis on industry, which was forced to appear in the same areas as agriculture, leading to ever more chaos.

Workers were drafted from one sector to another, and mandatory cuts in some sectors was balanced by mandatory high quotas in another.

In 1957, the disaster was everywhere. Workers were growing too weak even to harvest their meager crops, so they died watching the rice rot. Industry churned and churned but produced nothing of any use. The government responded by telling people that fat and proteins were unnecessary. But the famine couldn't be denied.

The black-market price of rice rose 20 to 30 times. Because trade had been forbidden between collectives (self-sufficiency, you know), millions were left to starve. By 1960, the death rate soared from 15 percent to 68 percent, and the birth rate plummeted. Anyone caught hoarding grain was shot. Peasants found with the smallest amount were imprisoned. Fires were banned. Funerals were prohibited as wasteful.

Villagers who tried to flee the countryside to the city were shot at the gates. Deaths from hunger reached 50 percent in some villages. Survivors boiled grass and bark to make soup and wandered the roads looking for food. Sometimes they banded together and raided houses looking for ground maize. Women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition. People in work camps were used for food experiments that led to sickness and death.

How bad did it get? In 1968 an 18-year-old member of the Red Guard, Wei Jingsheng, took refuge with a family in a village of Anhui, and here he lived to write about what he saw:

"We walked along beside the village… Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of others — flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares?"

The author of this passage was jailed as a traitor but his status protected him from death and he was finally released in 1997.

How many people died in the famine of 1959-61? The low range is 20 million. The high range is 43 million. Finally in 1961, the government gave in and permitted food imports, but it was too little and too late. Some peasants were again allowed to grow crops on their own land. A few private workshops were opened. Some markets were permitted. Finally, the famine began to abate and production grew.

But then the third phase came: scapegoating. What had caused the calamity? The official reason was anything but communism, anything but Mao. And so the politically motivated roundup began again, and here we get the very heart of the Culture Revolution. Thousands of camps and detention centers were opened. People sent there died there.

In prison, the slightest excuse was used to dispense with people — all to the good, since the prisoners were a drain on the system, so far as those in charge were concerned. The largest penal system ever built was organized in a military fashion, with some camps holding as many as 50,000 people.


A group study Mao's little red book in a education centre, somwhere in the People's Republic of China, in 1971.AP Photo

There was some sense in which everyone was in prison.Arrests were sweeping and indiscriminate. Everyone had to carry around a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. To question the reason for arrest was itself evidence of disloyalty, since the state was infallible.

Once arrested, the safest path was instant and frequent confession. Guards were forbidden from using overt violence, so interrogations would go on for hundreds of hours, and often the prisoner would die during this process.

Those named in the confession were then hunted down and rounded up. Once you got through this process, you were sent to a labor camp, where you were graded according to how many hours you could work with little food. You were fed no meat nor given any sugar or oil. Labor prisoners were further controlled by the rationing of the little food they had.

The final phase of this incredible litany of criminality lasted from 1966 to 1976, during which the number killed fell dramatically to "only" one to three million. The government, now tired and in the first stages of demoralization, began to lose control, first within the labor camps and then in the countryside. And it was this weakening that led to the final, and in some ways the most vicious, of the communist periods in China's history.

The first stages of rebellion occurred in the only way permissible: people began to criticize the government for being too soft and too uncommitted to the communist goal. Ironically, this began to appear precisely as moderation became more overt in Russia. Neo-revolutionaries in the Red Guard began to criticize the Chinese communists as "Khrushchev-like reformers." As one writer put it, the guard "rose up against its own government in order to defend it."

During this period, the personality cult of Mao reached it height, with the Little Red Book achieving a mythic status. The Red Guards roamed the country in an attempt to purge the Four Old-Fashioned Things: ideas, culture, customs, and habits.

The remaining temples were barricaded. Traditional opera was banned, with all costumes and sets in the Beijing Opera burned. Monks were expelled. The calendar was changed. All Christianity was banned. There were to be no pets such as cats and birds. Humiliation was the order of the day.


circa 1970: Chinese Red Guards reading from the little red book of Thoughts of Chairman Mao before starting their day.Photo by Keystone/Getty Images

Thus was the Red Terror: in the capital city, there were 1,700 deaths and 84,000 people were run out. In other cities such as Shanghai, the figures were worse. A massive party purge began, with hundreds of thousands arrested and many murdered.

Artists, writers, teachers, scientists, technicians: all were targets. Pogroms were visited on community after community, with Mao approving at every step as a means of eliminating every possible political rival. But underneath, the government was splintering and cracking, even as it became ever more brutal and totalitarian in its outlook.

Finally in 1976, Mao died. Within a few months, his closest advisers were all imprisoned. And the reform began slowly at first and then at breakneck speed. Civil liberties were restored (comparatively) and the rehabilitations began. Torturers were prosecuted. Economic controls were gradually relaxed. The economy, by virtue of human and private economic initiative, was transformed.

Having read the above, you are now in a tiny elite of people who know anything about the greatest death camp in the history of the world that China became between 1949 and 1976, an experiment in total control unlike anything else in history.

Don't tell me that we've learned anything from history. We don't even know enough about history to learn from it.

Excerpted from The Death Camps of Communist China
https://www.businessinsider.com/horr...errer=facebook

October 22, 2009
All the President's Mao

By Mac Fuller


President Obama and "the other side of Barack's brain," Valerie Jarrett -- whose stepfather coincidentally maintained close ties with the President's adolescent mentor and Communist, Frank Marshall Davis -- handpicked the following bureaucrats and placed them in positions of great authority, power, and visibility:

Van Jones, "Green Jobs Czar," self-defined Communist.

Ron Bloom, "Manufacturing Czar" cites Chairman Mao as a political guide.

Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, who stated in an address to high school students this past June that Chairman Mao Tse-tung was one of the two "philosophers" she most often turns to.

President Obama handpicked and placed the Socialists and socialist sympathizers in positions of great authority and visibility:

Carol Browner, Director, White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, an ardent Socialist activist and one of 14 leaders of Socialist International's, "Commission for a Sustainable World Society," which calls for "global governance."

Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Administration and Regulatory Affairs , "who openly argues for bringing socialism to the United States, and even lends support for communism...."

How many others, handpicked by Mr. Obama and Ms. Jarrett, are there?



Here is China's Communist Chairman, Mao Tse-tung (whose name, oddly enough means, "to shine on the East") in his own words, at the age of 24, before he became supreme ruler of all China as well as the mass murderer responsible for the death of 70,000,000 people -- in peacetime:

Mao expressed the central elements in his own character, which stayed consistent for the remaining six decades of his life and defined his rule.

Mao's attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, "I," above everything else:

"I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others... People like mewant to ... satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me."*

Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty.

"People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people." "I am responsible only for the reality that I know," he wrote, "and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don't know about the past. I don't know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self."

He explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations.

"Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don't believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself... I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.....

He argued that conscience could go to hell if it was in conflict with his impulses:

"These two should be one and the same. All our actions...are driven by impulse, and the conscience that is wise goes along with this in every instance."....

When he came to the question, "How do we change [China]?" Mao laid the utmost emphasis on destruction:

"...the country must be...destroyed and then re-formed."

He extended this line not just to China but to the whole world -- and event the universe:

"This applies to the country, the nation, and to mankind... The destruction of the universe is the same... People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn't that better!" **

President Obama's White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn, on Chairman Mao: he is one of my two "favorite political philosophers," and "one of the two who I turned to the most...."

President Obama's "Manufacturing Czar," Ron Bloom on the free market system and Chairman Mao: "We get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense.... We know this is largely about power....We kind of agree with Mao, that power comes from the barrel of a gun."

William Ayers, President Obama's unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber, friend, fellow board member, "respected" national educator, virulently anti-American, and likely ghost writer of the

President's autobiography, Dreams of My Father:

"I am a radical, Leftist, small "c" Communist.... Maybe I am the last Communist willing to admit it.... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me."

https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...dents_mao.html
_____

These same people are still involved in the political fabric of the country.

WHY OBAMA'S LIEUTENANTS LOVE MAO

Exclusive: Jamie Glazov details horror of mass murderer celebrated by the left

Published: 10/22/2009 at 12:00 AM Print


The left’s long romance with tyranny and terror is manifesting itself in the Obama administration once again. Having experienced the high of putting $900 million of American taxpayers’ money into Hamas’ blood-soaked hands, some Obama advisers are now getting a new fix by offering thanks and praise to the late communist mass murderer Mao Zedong.

President Obama’s White House communications director, Anita Dunn, recently praised Mao Zedong in a videotaped speech to high schoolers by calling him “one of the two people that I turn to most.” When confronted on it, she said she was just joking. It remains a mystery what is laughable about extolling the greatest mass murderer in human history who slaughtered 70 million of his own people. In any case, Dunn was clearly not joking, as is evident in the detailed and earnest explanation she gave the high schoolers in her references to both Mao and Mother Teresa while emphasizing the importance of perseverance and choosing one’s own path.


Dunn’s veneration of Mao is shared by another Obama insider, “manufacturing czar” Ron Bloom, who, it appears, has been quoting the communist mass murderer with great approval. At a 2008 Union League Club meeting in New York, for instance, Bloom explained to his audience that:

“We know that the free market is nonsense. (…) We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.”

Understand leftists’ dedication to tyranny and tolerance of terror in Jamie Glazov’s “United in Hate”

And from the barrel of a gun Mao’s political power did come indeed. Let’s for a moment reflect on the crimes that Mao perpetrated:

After capturing power on Oct. 1, 1949, in the immediate postrevolutionary period alone, Mao murdered as many as 15 million Chinese citizens. In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, an industrial and agricultural program intended to make China the world’s largest steel and grain exporter. Involving demented economic schemes and brutal forced collectivization, the Great Leap was an unparalleled human disaster, exterminating approximately 38 million people through government-engineered famine.

Mao’s starving victims were reduced to eating grass, dirt, leaves and tree bark in the attempt to survive. They picked through horse manure for undigested grains of wheat, or cow manure for worms. They also resorted to cannibalism, digging up freshly buried corpses. Mad from hunger, parents ate their own children – or swapped children with other parents in an attempt to ease the horror of the act. Children were also killed, boiled and used as fertilizer. Desperate villagers who abandoned their homes and traveled to other towns in search of food were mowed down by machine-gun fire.

This horrifying tragedy – the greatest famine in all human history – was created intentionally by Mao. While millions starved, plenty of food existed in state granaries. The army, however, guarded these granaries under strict order: “Absolutely no opening the granary door even if people are dying of starvation.” In their biography, “Mao: The Unknown Story,” authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday conclude that if food had not been exported and instead had been distributed among the Chinese people, “very probably not a single person in China would have had to die of hunger.”

In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, designed to purge the country of all dissent and bring it completely under the dictator’s vicious rule. Millions of schoolchildren became the infamous Red Guards, whose task was to destroy anything connected to traditional culture and philosophy. As Paul Johnson put it, the Cultural Revolution became “a revolution of illiterates and semiliterates against intellectuals, the ‘spectacle-wearers’ as they were called. … It was the greatest witch-hunt in history, which made the Zhdanov purges in postwar Russia seem almost trivial.”

In the Cultural Revolution, almost every expression of human emotion – and every cultural ritual whose purpose was to honor the sanctity of human life and relationships – became illegal, including weddings, funerals and even the simple act of holding hands. The Red Guards humiliated, beat and murdered teachers, school administrators, bureaucrats, foreign diplomats, technicians, artists, intellectuals and, eventually, anyone and everyone. “Class enemies” experienced every humiliation the Red Guards could think up; the Guards smeared their faces with ink, forced them to get down on all fours and bark like dogs, and made them eat grass. The Red Guards also literally feasted on those they had murdered. In Guangxi, where at least 137 “animals” (“class enemies”), mostly teachers and college principals, were killed, the Red Guards cooked and ate them.

An immense concentration-camp system, the laogai, spread through China like a cancerous growth. It operated under the pretense of “reform” or “re-education” through labor and self-denunciation. The horrors of the laogai almost defy description. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in the “laogai,” has given an account of its vicious dynamics in “Laogai: The Chinese Gulag.” Bao Ruo-Wang has done the same regarding his seven years in the laogai in “Prisoner of Mao.” Wu and Bao did for China what Armando Valladares did for Cuba in “Against All Hope,” and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did for the Soviet Union in “Gulag Archipelago”.

Between 1949 and 1980, some 50 million Chinese people passed through this system of terror. Like Stalin’s Gulag, Mao’s laogai took on a life of its own, continuing its bloody work unabated until Mao’s death from Parkinson’s disease in 1976. In all, Chinese Communism would extinguish the lives of over 70 million people in the 20th century.

Mao biographers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday also document how this horror represented the natural order of things for Mao. Indeed, while millions of his people were starving to death, the dictator habitually informed his inner circle that it did not matter if people died and that, in fact, death was to be deemed a cause for celebration and rejoicing. This was because, naturally, destruction was necessary in order for the earthly heaven to be built. Mao wished destruction not only for his own country, but for the entire universe. As he explained: “This applies to the country, to the nation and to mankind. … The destruction of the universe is the same. … People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better!” Mao stated that it would be ideal to sacrifice about 300 million Chinese lives for the world revolution, since “it’s best if half the population is left, next best one-third. …”
Thus, as in Castro’s Cuba, mourning for the dead was forbidden. Mourning implied that there was something wrong with death – a notion that a death cult obviously couldn’t allow. Moreover, grieving for a dead person singularized the individual and his private reality. Mao therefore outlawed the shedding of tears at funerals and even ordered peasants to plant crops over burial grounds – since he believed that deaths “can fertilize the ground.”

With all of these barbarities in mind, it is completely no surprise that Obama insiders such as Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom would pick a genocidal dictator like Mao to be the object of their affection. These leftists are simply continuing the left’s long tradition of showering adulation upon Mao – as well as other communist mass murderers.

Indeed, as I have documented in my new book, “United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror,” leftists worldwide were, and have continued to be, exhilarated by Mao’s horrifying reign of terror – and the philosophy it was based on. From the likes of American journalist and activist Anna Louise Strong and the French “feminist” intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, from American journalist Edgar Snow to the “Red Dean” of Canterbury Hewlett Johnson, from British filmmaker Felix Greene to Orville Schell, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, there was never a shortage of leftists who genuflected in the direction of Mao’s killing fields.

Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom prostrating themselves before the memory of the greatest mass murderer in human history is to be totally expected. It’s just another chapter of the left’s long history of bowing down in front of adversary regimes and despots who devote themselves to inhumanity, oppression and death.

https://www.wnd.com/2009/10/113670/