Maintaining the Mao myth

International Herald Tribune ^ | JULY 6, 2005 | Jonathan Mirsky

[baystaterebel]

Not long ago I wrote an enthusiastic review of "Mao: The Untold Story," the new biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. The June issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, in which my review appeared, was promptly barred from China.

The same fate has befallen other publications containing similar reviews, and a BBC interview with Jung Chang herself (she is the author of the global best seller "Wild Swans") was blocked.

Mao Zedong died in 1976. Why is it that almost 30 years later, in a China where freedom of speech is said to be on the rise, attacking the Chairman remains taboo?

Chang's and Halliday's biography is a nothing-is-sacred act of demolition. Chang says of Mao, "He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did." The authors assert that Mao was responsible for upwards of 70 million peacetime deaths, including at least 37 million in the 1959-1961 famine that arose from Mao's harebrained economic policies.

These are scarcely new facts within China. If 70 million people died before their time and many more millions suffered during the Cultural Revolution, there must be hundreds of millions of Chinese who know about Mao's depredations.

Indeed, in 1981 the Party published an official judgment in which it said the Chairman bore the main responsibility for the epochal tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, and admitted, too, that from the late 1950s the Chairman had made mistakes and misjudgements.

But the Party concluded that Mao remained a great Marxist revolutionary. The Cultural Revolution, therefore, remains out-of-bounds for serious research in China.

[baystaterebel]

Another socialist icon, another mass murdering psychopath.

[kezekiel]

Chang says of Mao, "He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did." The authors assert that Mao was responsible for upwards of 70 million peacetime deaths, including at least 37 million in the 1959-1961 famine that arose from Mao's harebrained economic policies.

And yet who is villified on the American left? Reagan and Bush. Freaking idiots.

[sharktrager]

If Freedom of Speech is on the rise in China, I'm Brad Pitt.

Scared Bunny

[ncountylee]

Mao second love, after mass murder, was pedophilia!

Scott Ritter is hoping for China posting?

[Billthedrill]

Mao combined a communist disregard for individual human life with a similar, and much older, Chinese cultural sentiment. The result was a callous relegation of unprecedented millions to a death from his government's perceived need and their victims' perceived irrelevancy in its pursuit.

There were more Chinese killed during the Great Leap Forward than in the succeeding Cultural Revolution, but more of Chinese culture died during the latter. So, at its end, did Mao. He, like Lenin, demonstrated that the most successful revolutionaries are the very last people one wants to govern the country afterward.

[Armigerous]

Q. What comes out of a rodent's ass?

A. Mousy Dung