Ralph R. Reiland
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Monday, October 31, 2005
Question: How many innocent people does a communist tyrant have to kill before The New York Times gets really mad? Answer: More than 70 million.
Seventy million is a good estimate of the number of Chinese who perished under Mao's reign of terror and ineptitude, the victims of their own government's decades of torture, famine, forced labor, purges, assassinations, ethnic massacres and class genocide.
Out of the tens of millions of alleged "counterrevolutionaries" and dissidents who spent long periods of their lives in Mao's system of prison-factories and corrective labor gulags, it's estimated that 20 million died during their "re-education" into collectivism, obedience and communal selflessness.
Additionally, the human cost of Mao's ill-planned and ill-named Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961 might well have reached 40 million deaths from starvation, the result of the largest and most deadly famine in world history.
In 1968, Wei Jingsheng, 18, a Red Guard member, provided a firsthand account of how the Great Leap Forward had driven parents mad with hunger:
"Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which 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."
Countless other millions boiled weeds and bark to make soup and stripped the trees free of leaves. Others, writes Jean-Louis Margolin, a lecturer in history at the University of Provence in France and a researcher at the Research Institute of Southeast Asia, were "reduced to searching through horse manure for undigested grains of wheat and eating worms they found in cowpats."
In response to this widespread starvation that was the direct outcome of his forced collectivization of farming, Mao instructed: "Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel. The State should try its hardest to prevent peasants from eating too much."
Added to the above are the direct murders of those who were too successful or too free to fit into Mao's vision of collectivized zombies.
Margolin describes the fate under Mao of landlords, intellectuals, small bosses, richer peasants and those suspected of political incorrectness or independent thinking, i.e., non-communist thinking:
"The whole people were invited to the public trials of 'counterrevolutionaries,' who almost invariably were condemned to death. Everyone participated in the executions, shouting 'kill, kill' to the Red Guards whose task it was to cut victims into pieces.
"Sometimes the pieces were cooked and eaten, or force-fed to members of the victim's family who were still alive and looking on."
For those fortunate enough not be killed, eaten or shipped to the gulags, there were mandatory "submission and rebirth" meetings for wayward intellectuals, as well as organized shunning, social exclusion and public acts of confession and self-criticism for alleged "right-wingers" and those suspected of "Westernism."
I bring up all this history because I was halfway through reading "Mao: The Unknown Story," the new book by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, when The New York Times published Nicholas Kristof's review of the book.
Now it's true that Kristof, an op-ed writer at The Times, judges the book to be a "magnificent biography," and he does at least whistle past the graveyard, pointing out that Mao had slaughtered a quarter of the entire Red Army, "often after they were tortured in such ways as having red-hot rods forced into their rectums."
Still, Mr. Kristof worries that Chang and Halliday might have painted too dark a picture. He wonders if the 70 million number is "accurate," and if the book unfairly excludes "exculpatory evidence" about the upside of Mao's rule.
Arguing that "Mao's legacy is not all bad," Kristof pays tribute to Mao's successes with land reform and women's rights. "Land reform in China," he writes, "like land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today."
What he doesn't say is that land reform in Japan and Taiwan was accomplished without the slaughter of millions of people.
Regarding women's rights, Kristof asserts that Mao "moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea."
The perfect example of this enhanced equality, perhaps, is that the Chinese government has just banned this new book on Mao, for both men and women.
Ralph R. Reiland, the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University, is a local restaurateur. E-mail him at rrreiland@aol.com.
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