Mao Tse-tung: Supreme Monster of All History

I've been reading Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's towering biography, Mao: The Unknown Story (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), and it's been a sobering experience. I knew certain details about Mao's career before this. I've studied some modern Chinese history, and I've argued since the 1970s that Mao was a disaster for the Chinese people, but the full story of his brutality and barbarism is overwhelming. Among the highlights of this important book:

• Mao's frightening, sociopathic personality. Mao thought that the world was here essentially for his benefit, and that other people were useful only insofar as they advanced his interests. He was completely indifferent to the suffering of others, and in fact wielded power with homicidal carelessness. He could not have cared less about killing other people.
• The utter ruthlessness by which Mao destroyed his opposition in the Chinese Communist Party.
• Stalin and Mao's true role in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. Mao didn't so much fight the Japanese as he did Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists.
• Mao's role in starting--and trying to prolong--the Korean War and the horrible losses China suffered in that war, losses to which Mao was completely indifferent.
• The "land reform" program in 1950-51 that caused the slaughter of 3,000,000 people.
• The establishment and spread of the forced labor camp system, which may have devoured the lives of 27,000,000 people.
• The brutal requisitioning of food from China's peasant population in the mid 1950s, which kept these hundreds of millions close to starvation while Mao exported their produce to finance his ludicrously overblown development schemes.
• The unbelievable savagery of China's crushing of Tibet and the hideous persecution of Muslims in China.
• Mao's obsession with acquiring nuclear weapons, and his casual willingness to sacrifice anywhere from 50% to 75% of China's population in a nuclear war if the war would destroy the United States.
• The horrible Great Leap Forward, an absurd, Stalin-like squeezing of China's poor peasants that was so severe that 38,000,000 of them died of starvation between 1958 and 1962--the most terrible famine in human history, one which was entirely man-made.
• The horrors of the "Cultural Revolution" in the 1960s, the terrible attack on China's traditional culture, and the violence which tore through China between 1966 and 1969.
• His enthusiastic support for the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia.
• Mao's personal degeneracy, his cruelty to those around him, and his tyrannical private behavior.
• The fact that Mao's misrule killed 70,000,000 Chinese between 1949 and 1976, when death finally took Mao away.

This is a major work of scholarship. Chang and Halliday interviewed hundreds of primary source participants in and observers of Mao's rule. The authors combed through every available archive, eyewitness account, primary source, and secondary source they could get their hands on. (The single-spaced bibliography alone is 52 pages long, and includes a multitude of sources in Chinese.) The book took ten years of research and writing, and is already taking its place among the major histories of Mao's China.

I've studied Stalin and Hitler at great length, and I do not in any way seek to minimize their enormous and unspeakable crimes. But Mao must occupy the bottom position in the list of the worst leaders in all human history. (It makes the veneration of Mao that some expressed in this country in the 1960s look even more despicable.) It also makes the display of Mao's portrait and Mao's body in Tiananmen Square by China's current rulers an obscenity, one as egregious as if Hitler's portrait were on display in the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.

If I believed in hell (which I don't), Mao would deserve it above all others. Those in the grasp of his terrible and merciless power certainly knew what it was like.