On 26 December 1893 in the valley of Shaoshan, in the
province of Hunan, two peasants brought a monster into this world
whose
brutality, cruelty and mass killings were not even matched by the brutal Hitler
or the equally despotic Stalin. That monster’s name was Mao Tse-tung.
Throughout history, The Chinese communist Party has all but deified Mao and his
portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square, which is an appropriate place for
it since the square itself is a symbol of communism’s brutal response to
opposition against it and also the site of the massacre of its own students.
From the beginning, Mao was an utter liar and the worst
of hypocrites due to the extravagant, leisurely life he led while brutally
suppressing any chance for relaxation in his own people. Despite living in a
country where starvation was rife, especially in the countryside (thanks to Mao
tens of millions would perish from starvation) he had many a villa built
specifically to his tastes although even with the backbreaking work his people
put into building it, sometimes he only visited these places once if at all.
The Chinese communist Party would have us believe that
deep down Mao really did care about the people, that he fought for the
peasants, that he was a military genius who played a major part in China’s
greatest victories and that he was their greatest leader. However, after years
of research and many interviews with survivors of Mao’s reign of terror and
those who were closest to him, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday closely examine the
Mao myth created by the Chinese communist Party, taking a close look at the
formation of it, as well as the defining moments of his rule and in so doing,
utterly destroy that myth once and for all.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, China was a
country that was being torn apart by factional fighting. Chiang Kai-Shek at
this time became the leader of the Nationalist movement and, after many years
of scheming, machinations, betrayals and plotting, Mao became the leader of the
Chinese communist Party. However it was not Mao’s leadership skills that led
him to become the leader of China for some twenty-seven years. Rather this came
about as the result of (still unacknowledged) massive military support from
countries such as soviet Russia, who supplied them with advanced artillery and
enormous supplies of planes, tanks and other weaponry for their fight against
the Nationalists and against the Japanese.
Even in the beginning, Mao’s red army treated each town
it occupied as its own personal fiefdom and milked the inhabitants of all they
were worth. Mao showed his skill (or more accurately lack thereof) by leading
ambushes which led to failure and massive death and which he always inevitably
ended up watching through binoculars from a mountain in the distance. It is in
this context that we must view one of the most deceptive of all Mao myths, that
of the Long March. One of the most covered up parts of Chinese communism’s
history. And for good reason.
On the run from Chiang Kai-Shek’s vastly superior army,
Mao managed to drag out the Long March so as to avoid meeting up with Chang
Kuo-Tao, a man who was a far better military leader and who commanded a far
larger army than Mao did. Thanks to Mao’s blunders, an army of eighty thousand
was reduced to little over ten thousand. This even after Kai-Shek allowed the
Reds to leave so as to curry favour with Russia. As well as this, they invented
a battle, which supposedly took place at the bridge over the Dadu River. In
fact the battle never happened.
Once supreme leader of China, Mao wasted and depleted his
army in such pointless misadventures as the Korean War all for the single
purpose of receiving military aid from Russia and thus turning China into a
modern superpower. How did Mao propose paying for this investment? With a
Stalin-like brutally enforced collectivisedfarming campaign and with the State
collecting most of the proceeds to pay the Russians for military hardware. Mao
knew the results of his policy, knew of the mass starvation and did nothing. In
fact, he purged the few party leaders who dared to stand in his way.
In terms of culture, Mao was also equally as brutal and
all but destroyed the arts in China. Films, theatre, plays, poetry, books,
music, almost nothing survived what was cynically called the Cultural
Revolution. In this he was aided by his doglike number two Chou en-Lai and his
own wife, the infamous Madame Mao, Jiang Qing. At the same time Mao’s ruthless
Red Guards staged denunciations, torture, home invasions and in general,
unleashed the kind of terror on teachers, cultural and authority figures that
would leave Hitler’s feared SS men literally shaking in their boots.
Finally Mao himself was a hypocrite because
though banning culture for everyone else he himself was very well read. He kept
himself surrounded by whores both in the political and literal sense of the
word, those who would like attack dogs do his bidding and bite the hands Mao
fed them. His last days are much like his whole life, spent largely in
seclusion, fearing only for his safety, spiteful to the end, going so far as to
deny his number two, Chou en-Lai cancer treatment. Good riddance, Chairman Mao.