The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (76 page)

MAO ZEDONG

Death toll:
40 million

Rank:
2

Type:
Communist dictator

Time frame:
1949–76

Location:
China

Broad dividing line:
new vs. old

Major state participant:
People’s Republic of China

Who usually gets the most blame:
Mao personally and Communism generally

Another damn:
insane people’s republic

L
IKE MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY SUCH
a dangerous time to live, the life of Mao Zedong is entwined with several of my top one hundred multicides, but he stands here as Number 2 purely as the ruler of China for a quarter century. Mao is almost certainly the deadliest individual in history to have wreaked havoc inside a single country.

Mao was an authentic ideologue. Rather that sitting back and enjoying being absolute master of all he surveyed, he was constantly fiddling with the way his country worked. Obviously this made him far more dangerous than a dictator who merely siphoned off a percentage of government contracts or bedded the wives of ambitious flunkies. Instead, he disrupted agriculture in a country that was hovering dangerously close to starvation and incited angry mobs to attack anyone who lacked proper enthusiasm for his policies.

Victory of the Revolution

In April 1949, Chiang Kai-shek fled China for exile on Taiwan (see “Chinese Civil War”), and after a bit of mopping up, Mao Zedong proclaimed the new People’s Republic of China on October 1. For the first year of this new era, China was run by a layer of Communist watchdogs placed over top of the old Nationalist bureaucracy, but clearly that couldn’t last forever. The Korean War gave Mao both a reason and an excuse to tighten security.
¹

The 1950s saw a string of political movements that were ostensibly designed to mold the new China along Marxist lines, but mostly they just made everybody jumpy and prevented rival power structures from taking root. The goals of each campaign were reduced to numbered checklists and slapped up on wall posters. Certain classes would be targeted for a few months of accusations, betrayals, arrests, suicides, purges, and beatings, until Mao grew weary of going in that direction. Then he’d start another campaign. New enemies were decried and persecuted. The imprisoned survivors of the earlier campaigns might be turned loose and rehabilitated, while their earlier persecutors would suddenly become the new focus of Mao’s denunciations.
²

The first salvo was the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries campaign (October 1950–October 1951), which wiped out any trace of the old Nationalist regime. “Bandits” and “spies” were hunted down—usually anyone who had actively supported the previous regime. Retired sympathizers of the Nationalists were dragged out to be publicly humiliated, beaten, or exiled. By May 9, 1951, an internal report noted proudly that the population had been cowed: “rumour-mongering [has] died down and social order stabilised.”
³
All of the weapons that had piled up over a quarter century of civil war were collected, and it was forbidden for a person to change residence without a permit. Organized crime was virtually eliminated as
real
gangsters, pirates, and bandits were killed or imprisoned with little formality.

The simultaneous Agrarian Reform campaign saw the destruction of the landlord class. The peasants were encouraged to seize land and attack the owners. Mao preferred public killings for maximum impact. “A young half-Chinese woman from Britain witnessed one rally in the centre of Peking, when some 200 people were paraded and then shot in the head so that their brains splattered out onto bystanders.”
⁴
Millions of prisoners were put to work in the newly established
laogai
(“reform through labor”) camps. Most authorities estimate that these first purges killed between 1 and 3 million people.

The Three-Antis campaign (late 1951–May 1953) aimed to eliminate the misuse of government money by civil servants. The watchwords were anti-corruption, anti-waste, and anti-bureaucratism. Almost 4 million government officials were hauled in and roughly interrogated. Mao set a quota that at least 10,000 embezzlers were to be sentenced to death, but it turned out that he overestimated the degree of corruption in the old regime, and relatively few big embezzlers were uncovered. In any case, the underlying purpose of the campaign was to put government finances firmly under Mao’s control, and it worked.

Next came the Five-Antis campaign (January 1952–May 1953). Businessmen were collectively accused of undermining the fiscal integrity of the state, as the Communists proceeded to stamp out (first anti) tax evasion, (second) bribery, (third) cheating in government contracts, (fourth) thefts of economic intelligence, and (fifth) stealing of state assets. At first businessmen were pulled into group criticism sessions during which they were encouraged to confess their crimes and denounce their rivals. Then workers committees paraded with drums and banners to encourage more action. The businessmen were hauled into public meetings to be yelled at some more. Although few were killed outright, the humiliation, abuse, and harassment drove many to suicide.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign

In February 1956, three years after Stalin died, the new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was secure enough in power to denounce Stalinist repression. Mao decided to do him one better. In February 1957, he openly invited criticism of the party and the direction that society was heading. “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” he announced, calling for an outpouring of new ideas. Mao wanted to let China’s intellectuals discuss policy. He encouraged his people to speak their mind. He wanted suggestions and criticism. Really. It wasn’t a trick. Wall posters criticizing the regime were pasted up—and they stayed up. After a few cautious voices spoke up without punishment, people slowly came to realize that maybe Mao meant it. They began to offer a few suggestions. Soon, all of the gripes that people had been keeping bottled up for eight years erupted.
⁵

Or maybe it
was
a trick. Mao considered Khrushchev weak for opening Soviet society and dragging Stalin’s good name through the mud. In April, Mao described to a select few, “Intellectuals are beginning to . . . change their mood from cautious to more open. . . . One day punishment will come down on their heads. . . . We want them to speak out. You must stiffen your scalps and let them attack! . . . Let all those ox devils and snake demons . . . curse us for a few months.” As he later explained, “How can we catch the snake if we don’t let them out of their lairs? We wanted those sons-of-turtles to wriggle out and sing and fart . . . that way we can catch them.”
⁶
Mao’s critics say this was his diabolical plan all along; Mao’s defenders explain that he started with honest intentions, but was surprised, insulted, and, frankly, a little bit hurt when people started picking on him, so he had them all punished (I don’t know why this is better than “he planned it all along”).
⁷

The hundred flowers were hit by a weed whacker when the Anti-Rightist campaign began in June 1957. Now that the government knew exactly who the malcontents were, the intellectual class could be purged. Scientists, of course—especially nuclear scientists—were exempt. But anyone else who had spoken out was shipped to labor camps to chop timber or mine radioactive ores.

Mao also used the Anti-Rightist campaign to weaken members of his inner circle who were getting dangerously well established. He encouraged fanatics to challenge the loyalty of moderates in the upper echelons of power. Under pressure bubbling up from below, old allies like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi were forced to abase themselves in front of the Party Congress. All their friends denied them, and their allies denounced them. Although they weren’t purged, they were broken, and Mao would be safe from their maneuvering for a while.

Lifestyle

Mao made the most of being the master of a quarter of mankind. He had squads of beautiful women picked and assigned for his pleasure. He had over fifty rural villas built. Entire mountains and lakefronts were fenced off for his personal enjoyment. It became customary for every important city to have an opulent estate set aside specifically for his use.
⁸

Mao was notoriously unhygienic. He preferred old, comfortable clothes, eventually imposing his fashion on the entire country. He never brushed his teeth but instead rinsed his mouth with tea and chewed the leaves. His teeth were covered with a green film, and slightly loose, wobbling in gums that often oozed with infection. It’s been said that he did not have a bath for a quarter century. “A waste of time,” he called it. Instead, he would have a servant rub him down with a hot towel. His failure to bathe wasn’t an aversion to water; Mao loved swimming, even in the floating sewage of dangerously polluted rivers. He especially enjoyed swimming in private pools with his squads of naked pleasure women.
⁹

Foreign Policy

By 1953 almost all non-Soviet foreigners had been cleared out of China. Missionaries were driven away. Doctors and engineers fled. Teachers, reporters, and merchants were expelled. Tourists didn’t dare. For the next twenty years, China would be closed to foreign scrutiny.

Mao was a loose cannon on the world stage. Until the 1970s, the United Nations and the West continued to recognize the fugitive Nationalist government on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China. This wasn’t just stubbornness on the part of the capitalists. A British offer to recognize the People’s Republic was turned down flat because the United Kingdom refused to completely break relations with Taiwan.
¹⁰

In 1950, Mao threw a couple of million troops into the Korean War against the United Nations, United States, and United Kingdom, making this the last open war between great powers in history (so far). Among the hundreds of thousands of Chinese killed was one of Mao’s sons.
¹¹
After Stalin died in 1953, Mao began to drift away from the Communist bloc as well. In 1964, after an immense research effort that gobbled up economic resources, the Chinese exploded an atomic bomb. In 1969, China fought a small border war with the Soviets. Faced with the first open war ever fought between nuclear powers, the world held its breath until the fighting safely ended with no one nuked.

The upshot of all of this was that for many turbulent years, the most populous country on earth was on the boil, removed from the world, a secret, xenophobic, and fanatic nation armed with the most powerful weapons known to man.