Several people have asked me whether I shall be reviewing this new book on Mao Tse-tung by Wild Swans author Jung Chang. Well, nobody’s asked me to; and as everyone knows, I am much too self-effacing to put myself forward in such a matter…
Apparently Ms. Chang is very, very hard on Mao, whom she draws as a monster.
Well, he was a monster. The only really interesting question about his monstrousness is where it ranks in the 20th-century scale, among Hitler, Stalin, and the rest.
Personally I’d rank him rather low. China being such a populous nation, he had a lot more material to work with than most dictators. Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea murdered around a quarter of his country’s population (and likely ate several of them); but it didn’t notice, since that’s a small country. Similarly with Pol Pot. Mao was trying out crackpot social experiments on 800 million people, so when the eggs turned into a mess instead of an omelet, the mess was tremendous. Just the famines following the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s saw off 25-30 million souls… but that was only around 3 percent of China’s population. You need to decide on some scaling considerations when making these comparisons.
That aside, I have never though Mao was as malicious as, say, Stalin. I am sure he didn’t care about the people his policies killed; but I doubt he took actual pleasure in reflecting on their deaths, as I feel sure Stalin did, and probably Hitler, too. Mao’s inward reflection on the famine mega-deaths was probably something like: “Darn it, the cadres didn’t carry out my instructions properly!” I doubt there was much of an element of:
“Well, those people who died were only useless mouths, anyway,” which, with Stalin, I feel sure there was. Stalin really seemed to hate peasants.
Mao’s affection for them was abstract and cold, but I don’t think he hated them.
Similarly with colleagues. Mao was easier on his colleagues than Stalin or Hitler — he killed very few of them: Gao Gang, Peng De-huai, Liu Shao-qi, and a handful of others. And again, he doesn’t seem to have relished doing so, as Stalin obviously did with Kamenev, Zinoviev, etc.
In any case, the great villain of the age that has gone by was surely Lenin.
Perfectly cold-blooded, urging the use of terror as a peacetime political instrument, gleefully contemplating the suffering of “class enemies,”
teaching Hitler and Mao all their techniques. The whole thing comes back to Lenin. Leszek Kolakowski, in _Main Currents of Marxism_, scoffs at Mao’s intellectual attainments as (I am working from memory) “a few regurgitated Leninist cliches.”
Ed Capano of National Review tells the story of a visit to Moscow with some of the previous generation of NR editors. He went with Keith Mano down into the pit where Lenin’s embalmed corpse was on display. Coming out, Mano was dead white and shaking. Ed asked him what was wrong. Keith: “I have seen the face of the antichrist!”
He wasn’t far wrong.