From the very beginning of his career as a communist revolutionary, Mao Zedong (1893-1976) enjoyed humiliating, torturing, and killing people. He got a kick out of it and it was his way of staying in control and in power and expanding his power.
Killing, killing, more killing, killing to terrorize and induce absolute submission and obedience, killing just to meet arbitrary killing quotas, knowingly starving people to death in order to get the funds to pay for heavy industry and weapons—all of this was how Mao conducted his communist revolution from the outset, as a work like Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday spells out in detail. (A biography that some critics seem to dislike because of its focus on what Mao actually did and why; it’s not dry enough, not evasive enough, hence is “polemical” and “biased.” The authors should probably confess to being in favor of human life, maybe during a struggle session.)
Purges and terror
From the book:
It was just at this time [in 1930] that Mao learned that Moscow had given him the ultimate promotion—making him head of the future state. His aggressive pursuit of power had won him appreciation. Now that he had Moscow’s blessing, Mao decided to embark on a large-scale purge, get rid of all who had opposed him, and in the process generate such terror that no one would dare disobey him from now on…
IN LATE NOVEMBER, Mao started his slaughter. He ordered all the troops to gather in the center of the Red territory, where it was hard to escape. There, he claimed that an AB League [Anti-Bolshevik League] had been uncovered in the branch under Peng De-huai—which in fact contained people who had resisted being taken over by Mao. Arrests and executions began. One interrogator wrote in his unpublished memoirs how an officer who had led an attempt to leave Mao’s fold was tortured: “the wounds on his back were like scales on a fish.”…
Once he had tightened his grip on the army, Mao turned his attention to the Jiangxi Communists. On 3 December he sent Lie [Lie Shau-joe] with a list of his foes to the town of Futian, where the Jiangxi leaders were living. Mao condemned the meeting in August which had expelled his ally Lieu as an “AB meeting” which “opposed Mao Tse-tung.” “Put them all down,” he ordered, and then “slaughter en masse in all counties and all districts.” “Any place that does not arrest and slaughter, members of the Party and government of that area must be AB, and you can simply seize and deal with them [xun-ban, implying torture and/or liquidation].”
Altogether, tens of thousands died in Jiangxi. In the army alone, there were about 10,000 deaths—about a quarter of the entire Red Army under Mao at the time—as revealed by the secret report immediately afterwards. It was the first large-scale purge in the Party, and took place well before Stalin’s Great Purge. This critical episode—in many ways the formative moment of Maoism—is still covered up to this day. Mao’s personal responsibility and motives, and his extreme brutality, remain a taboo….
CHINA’S FIRST RED STATE [1931-1935] was run by terror and guarded like a prison. A pass was needed to leave one’s village, and sentries were ubiquitous round the clock….
The state’s response [to rebellion against the Reds as the Nationalists closed in] was to be merciless and not to take the slightest chance. At its nadir, even everyday social intercourse and hospitality could bring death. “No family was allowed to have visitors to stay overnight,” veterans recalled. “Any family found to have done so was killed together with the visitor.”
Mao would have been the same sort of person without the communist ideology and without the backing of the Soviets, but could not have eagerly ended human lives on the same scale. In another time and place he might have been a serial killer or warlord, gleefully murdering only dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands instead of tens of millions.
Sense and sensibility
So what then are we to make of a passage such as this in Martin Gilbert’s History of the Twentieth Century: Concise Edition, discussing the ravages of Mao’s Cultural Revolution inflicted on the Chinese in the later part of the maniac’s rule?
As well as destroying old buildings, temples, and museum pieces that were the pride of ancient Chinese culture, Red Guards [unleashed by Mao] attacked their school teachers, school administrators, local party officials, and even their parents. Many thousands of individuals died under the blows of these attacks. Hundreds of leading intellectuals were beaten to death, or committed suicide….
Mao Tse-tung was calling on the power and anger of these very ‘common people’ to turn against Chinese sensitivities and sensibilities that were at the centre both of ancient Chinese culture and his own earlier revolutionary structures.
The author of a general work must be alert to the hazards of compression and selection, and every reader must assume that he will probably get a clearer picture after more specific inquiry.
This problem is not that. The first part of what I quoted is fine, except perhaps for the reference to “thousands” killed during the Cultural Revolution. Historians argue about how many hundreds of thousands were killed during it. Possibly, though, Gilbert means to refer here only to the earliest phase of the Cultural Revolution.
But why is he babbling about “Chinese sensitivities and sensibilities that were at the centre both of ancient Chinese culture and his own earlier revolutionary structures”? The lust to enslave and kill is the sensibility and sensitivity that was always “at the center” of Mao’s destructive “revolutionary structures.”
The problem is not summary that is too brief or conveys an inadvertent implication. The problem is with the author’s understanding, perhaps influenced by (unbiased?) discussions of Mao that downplay and rationalize what he was all about. Perhaps some of the “revisionist” (accurate) accounts of Mao came too late for Gilbert. The first volume of Gilbert’s full three-volume history, A History of the Twentieth Century 1900-1933, was published in 1997. Mao: The Unknown Story came out in 2005. The first volume of Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on Mao in power was published in 2010.
