Mao Zedong was a murder?

[El brody]

Is it true that Mao kill more people then the emperor who once rule china?

[Nanatsu Yoru]

True according to who? Not only are accounts of the imperial death tolls often extremely iffy, a lot of Maoists point to other causes behind deaths in pre-Deng China. I'm probably not the best person to talk about this, but exactly what do you qualify as deaths, then? Do deaths at the hands of his citizens count? At the hands of his soldiers? There are no simple answers, history is never black and white. Sure, people died, that's obvious. Exactly how many depends on who you ask.

[Black_Rose]

Is this a troll thread?

http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=444312

(Although my viewpoints then were less revolutionary than they are today. )

[Nanatsu Yoru]

Lighten up.

So his theory is that Mao was not a bad guy, and that the millions who died under his regime were killed by the combination of a famine and an embargo?

Wow, I guess I'm weird, but if I was the leader of a country, and my people were starving as the result of an embargo placed against my country by people who wanted me to step aside, then maybe... the best thing to do would be to step aside? To save the lives of the people whose ruler I am supposed to be? Mao let all those people starve in order to maintain his power, and yet... he's not really a bad guy?
:laugh:

[Zealot]

This is what Black Rose posted:


In late 1959, several natural disasters and bad weather conditions were reported in the press. Floods and drought brought about the "three bitter years" of 1959-62. After 1962, the economy recovered, but the politic was shifting toward a struggle against revisionism, which brought on the Cultural Revolution four years later.

There would have been no deaths in the 1961-62 famines if not for the US embargo.

Reports of severe natural disasters in isolated places and of bad weather conditions in larger areas appeared in the Chinese press in the spring of 1959, after the Wuhan Plenum in December 1958 had already made policy adjustments based on the technical criticism of Peng Dehuai on the People's Communes initiative. In March 1959, the entire Hunan region was under flood, and soon after that the spring harvest in southwestern China was lost through drought. The 1958 grain production yielded 250 million tons instead the projected 375 million tons, and 1.2 million tons of peanuts instead of the projected 4 million tons. In 1959, the harvest came to 175 million tons. In 1960, the situation deteriorated further. Drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of the cultivated area. Some 60 percent of the agricultural land in the north received no rain at all. The yield for 1960 was 142 million tons. In 1961, the weather situation improved only slightly.

US embargo caused millions to starve

In 1963, the Chinese press called the famine of 1961-62 the most severe since 1879. In 1961, a food-storage program obliged China to import 6.2 million tons of grain from Canada and Australia. In 1962, import decreased to 5.32 million tons. Between 1961 and 1965, China imported a total of 30 million tons of grain at a cost of US$2 billion (Robert Price, International Trade of Communist China Vol II, pp 600-601). More would have been imported except that US pressure on Canada and Australia to limit sales to China and US interference with shipping prevented China from importing more. Canada and Australia were both anxious to provide unlimited credit to China for grain purchase, but alas, US policy prevailed and millions starved in China.

Another thing to remember was the extreme loyalty rampant in Confucian philosophy. People often lied a little on how much food was collected in order to impress the officials, then they would lie to the people above them and so on. This was obviously detrimental to a centrally planned economy and was one of the things that inspired the Cultural Revolution

[Black_Rose]

That's Henry CK Liu's work. not mine!

[Zealot]

My bad, I should've said rather what Black Rose quoted but thanks for the info.

[Apoi_Viitor]

A quote from Noam Chomsky (http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm):

He (Amartya Sen) estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame," 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).

This section below is taken from here this (http://www.historum.com/asian-history/20376-peoples-opinion-mao-zeodong-5.html):

In fact the GLF excess deaths are calculated relative to the low levels of mortality that the communists had achieved in the first decade of the PRC. The actual mortality rates during the GLF were not much different from the mortality rates prevailing over the first half of the 20th Century. And not too much different from the mortality rates of India at the same time. In fact anti-communists unwittingly give huge credit to the communists for reducing mortality up to the GLF, in order to max out the excess deaths calculations. So they use this to label Mao a mass murderer. It’s ridiculous.
Look at the mortality rate trend here:

http://www.bikealpine.com/p_10.gif

Great Leap Forward
The maximum death rate is abotu 25/1000 in 1960. This compares to 21/1000 in 1949, not that much of a difference.
But here is the kicker. Look at the death rates in India over the same time (1951 to 1960). They averaged at 22.8/1000 over the entire decade.
So India was more or less at GLF conditions for the entire 1950s. Whereas China for one year only had death rates slightly exceeding the Indian average for the decade.
It can be said that the century leading up to 1949, the Chinese people suffered more or less GLF conditions continually. I repeat the GLF tragic as it was, was more or less the norm for China before the revolution. And the Indians underwent continual GLF conditions over the entire 1950s.
Look at these horrific pictures of a typical Chinese scenes in Nationalist China 1946 (and this period was never even described as a famine period).
LIFE - Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=81QEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=1946,+china,+famine,+child&source=bl&ots=PipWY2aPx-&sig=EaQQV01IVdN85DLlZ2yLdbGYQc0&hl=en&ei=HiyhTPq-BcvFswaM6p3wAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&sqi=2&ved=0CCgQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=1946%2C%20china%2C%20famine%2C%20child&f=false)
Note the children dying of hunger in the streets while people walk around them, the dying child in front of a fat well fed smiling rice merchant. This was the norm in pre-revolutionary China!
(by the way you will also note there is a picture of a starving boy with a begging bowl at the same link. Dated 1946. Yet Dikotter incredibly dishonestly misrepresents this image as from ‘Mao’s’ Great famine on his book cover).
The huge tragedy of the GLF is it bucked the trend in post 1949 China, and the millions of ‘excess’ deaths arise from calculating against the low mortality that the communists had achieved in the decade leading up to the GLF, and brought New China back, for a while, to pre-revolutionary conditions.

And for reference, here's India
http://envfor.nic.in/divisions/ic/wssd/doc2/Image12.gif

[Zostrianos]

I read more than once that Mao only executed about 2 million people (which is relatively low, when compared to other dictators like Stalin and Hitler who killed 15-20 million each); however, a total of 50-60 million are said to have died as a result of his policies (chiefly famines brought about by the Great Leap Forward).

And to the op, Mao wasn't a "murder", he was an actual person.:p

[Ocean Seal]

I read more than once that Mao only executed about 2 million people (which is relatively low, when compared to other dictators like Stalin and Hitler who killed 15-20 million each); however, a total of 50-60 million are said to have died as a result of his policies (chiefly famines brought about by the Great Leap Forward).

And to the op, Mao wasn't a "murder", he was an actual person.:p
Stalin is actually generally accused of executing ~1million people. The other causalities generally come from the war and Holodomor.
The highest estimate for GLF famine casualties is about 25 million if I recall correctly.

[Black_Rose]

Stalin is actually generally accused of executing ~1million people. The other causalities generally come from the war and Holodomor.
The highest estimate for GLF famine casualties is about 25 million if I recall correctly.


I heard estimates of up to 40 million. But I personally accept a figure in the upper teen millions (and possibly lower 20s).

[MarxSchmarx]

Ultimately, the so-called numbers debate misses the point. Whether 10 million people or 1 million people or 100,000 people died as a result of Mao's policies is in some respects irrelevant. What matters is that the bureaucratic rule he helped set up and more or less accepted from the comfort of his villa in the Forbidden City systematically resulted in imposing tremendous suffering on the working class and the rural poor. One can argue, perhaps with some justification, that of the hundreds of millions in China at the time the death toll under Mao was relatively mild. Because the same could be said of, for example, American imperialism in Cuba as being a great leap forward compared to British imperialism in Ireland, or that Japan's colonization of Asia didn't result in as traumatic a destruction as Spain and Portugal's colonization of Africa and the New World. Frankly with such a cold, misanthropic outlook, it is no wonder that the workers of the OECD or even the desperate peasants of the third world hesitate considerably when asked to uphold Maoist China as any sort of victory for regular people.

[Zealot]

Except we aren't discussing his "bureaucratic rule" we're addressing the blatant lies about the GLF and the Cultural Revolution. Make a new thread if you want people to debate that.

[MarxSchmarx]

Except we aren't discussing his "bureaucratic rule" we're addressing the blatant lies about the GLF and the Cultural Revolution. Make a new thread if you want people to debate that.

Two issues. First, this thread is about Mao's legacy as the defacto ruler of China, which spanned far more than the GLF and the Cultural Revolution. So maybe YOU might be focusing on these two specific moments in time, but this is hardly exclusively what the thread is about.

Second, even if one were to grant that this thread has become something about specific moments in Chinese history (despite the OP's querry), the problem is that the supposed "victories" of the GLF and Cultural Revolution were promulgated by the same bureaucratic clique that advanced the interests of the nascent Chinese bourgeoisie. Any attempt to separate the two deliberately ignores the fact that the excesses (at best) of both movements were facilitated by the very system that Mao and his closest advisors acceeded to. You want to see real "revisionism", see what people who ignore the systematic failures of this era are saying. Whether you or other apologists for these atrocities like it or not, only a small fraction of the contemporary left, at least outside of highly dogmatic Stalinist circles, considers these to be separate issues. The rest of the left, from leftcoms to Titoists to anarchists to Trots to even the social democrats (basically everyone except a few hardline maoists) see the failures of the GLF and the cultural revolution as rooted in the excessively bureaucratic approach to social change.

[Black_Rose]

You want to see real "revisionism", see what people who ignore the systematic failures of this era are saying.

http://henryckliu.com/page115.html
http://henryckliu.com/page116.html

Do you consider these articles to be an exercise in "revisionism", taking a "highly dogmatic Stalinist" perspective.

----

My perspective on Mao: I consider him to be a murderer due to his campaigns in the 1950s, although I think some of them are somewhat justified. I do not hold him morally culpable for the Great Leap Forward fiasco, and while I have romantic fantasies about being a young girl in the Red Guard, I do not think the Cultural Revolution was a net positive.

What I want for Mao is partial rehabilitation and absolution in the minds of the non-Marxist-Leninist leftist, social democrats, and left-liberals.


Mao did express respect for human life and he does not fit the stereotype of an egomaniacal dictator but maybe an unpragmatic utopian. As I remember parts of Quotations from Chairman Mao, he had great respect for the Chinese peasant as they were the proletariat in Maoism much like factory workers in European Marxism. No one doubts the Great Leap Forward was disaster and millions perished, but the focus is on Mao's responsibility for those deaths and his intentions. Liu attempts to exculpate Mao from incompetence and malice by attributing the suffering from the Great Leap Forward to exogenous factors such as the inclement weather and economic sanctions. (Another hypothesis is that Mao had benevolent intentions stemming his desire to improve the peasants welfare, promote capital formation, and free China from imperialistic influences on a path towards national self-determination; but he was merely incompetent or his plans were not implemented properly.)


I do not see Mao as imperfect, but it is a reasonable thesis that Mao's legacy has been unjustly tainted, distorted, and misunderstood in the ideological battleground of the Cold War. At least, Liu shattered my previous perception of Mao being the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler and the embodiment of evil which is the prevalent consensus of the West. Unlike Liu, I am willing to accept that Mao was incompetent, but I find the unidimensional caricature of a cold-blooded power-hungry tyrannical dictator too simplistic.

[MarxSchmarx]

http://henryckliu.com/page115.html
http://henryckliu.com/page116.html

Do you consider these articles to be an exercise in "revisionism", taking a "highly dogmatic Stalinist" perspective.

As I said, I am sure there is a small fraction of the left outside of the "highly dogmatic Stalinists" who do question the statistics on the suffering under Mao's rule; I don't know anything about Henry Liu but I would imagine one could find a smattering of others who go to great pains to defend Mao but are not committed Stalinists.

[Zealot]

The rest of the left, from leftcoms to Titoists to anarchists to Trots to even the social democrats (basically everyone except a few hardline maoists) see the failures of the GLF and the cultural revolution as rooted in the excessively bureaucratic approach to social change.

The Cultural Revolution was a grassroots movement and the failures of the Great Leap Forward have been addressed in this thread.

So back to my point, either disprove the evidence given here or start a new thread to discuss the separate issue of how China organized its government, because I can see this thread going off topic any time soon.

[Iron Felix]

The Cultural Revolution was a grassroots movement and the failures of the Great Leap Forward have been addressed in this thread.

So back to my point, either disprove the evidence given here or start a new thread to discuss the separate issue of how China organized its government, because I can see this thread going off topic any time soon.
The Cultural Revolution was no more grassroots than the Pogroms. The Cultural Revolution was initiated directly by Mao because the Great Leap Forward was a disaster and lead to Mao losing his absolute grip on power.

[Black_Rose]

As I said, I am sure there is a small fraction of the left outside of the "highly dogmatic Stalinists" who do question the statistics on the suffering under Mao's rule; I don't know anything about Henry Liu but I would imagine one could find a smattering of others who go to great pains to defend Mao but are not committed Stalinists.

I don't know if I am the type of person who would "go to great pains to defend Mao"

Overall, I consider Mao to be a great revolutionary, a good political philosopher, and an incompetent administrator. My overall assessment of him is positive, and he is not the moral equivalent of Hitler.

My only criticism against him from a moral perspective was his treatment of Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi, two successful generals of the People's Liberation Army, that played invaluable roles in the struggle against the Nationalists and Korean War, but criticized the Great Leap Forward. It is a revolutionary government's prerogative to stifle dissent (even though history would vindicate their criticisms). Peng Dehuai was appropriately treated initially since he was placed in house arrest (which I consider to be the preferred and humane way of silencing critics), but suffered beatings at the hands of the Red Guards. Liu Shaoqi died due to untreated diabetes after being expelled. I just believe they should be granted leniency because of their contribution in fighting imperialism and liberating China - they were not reactionaries feigning a change of conscience who conformed with the expectations of the revolutionary regime in order to evade punishment.

Since I regard him as an incompetent administrator, my image of him concern his role in the Great Leap Forward is that of a bankrupt gambler or a failed Alexander Hamilton. This source (http://books.google.com/books?id=hQsFJlSf26kC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=great+leap+forward+embargo&source=bl&ots=laH34Mh2ih&sig=FY_x3WF3ZEQJzNgXDQUd8HpC_SQ&hl=en&ei=dz_gTdmQCIS6sQOcztCrAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFcQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=great%20leap%20forward%20embargo&f=false) states that Mao was initially ecstatic after the United States issued a trade embargo on the People's Republic of China since this situation compelled China to traverse the path of economic independence through rapid industrialization and increased agricultural production by utilizing China's abundant labor to overcome China's initial dearth of capital. However, some projects, notably steel production, cannot be done without capital intensive equipment. Mao's gamble to industrialize China failed, but if he succeeded he would be revered like Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Hamilton advocated Federal assumption of the debt burden of the states to improve the credit of the United States (at the expense of the working class, nevertheless, since wealthy speculators bought the debentures from impecunious farmers at a fraction of their face values, and he advocated regressive taxes to fund the state such as a tax on whiskey). Also, Hamilton advocate the industrialization of the United States to extricate it from the influence of British imperialism by protecting incipient Northern industries with protective tariffs and subsidies (at the expense of Southern agrarian interests). This is one reason why the Union was able to win the United States Civil War, since the South was vulnerable to an economic blockade as it lacked any endogenous means of economic production beyond its highly feudal agricultural economy.

Remember the main reason for the accusations, often levied with histrionics, against Mao: to contrast righteous capitalism with destructive communism. Leftists, even anarchists and Trotskyists, should not yield so easily to these reactionary accusations, even if they have some empirical substance, but the essence of their arguments is a moral indictment of radical leftism, not to analyze policy errors of the People's Republic of China. The United States had an embargo on China in order to cause economic breakdown, which prevented the importation of food. This does not exonerate Mao, since a nation should not be expected to rely on the charity of its enemies, but to point out that the some deaths were indeed preventable if the US lifted the embargo for humanitarian reasons. However, one should acknowledge Washington was more concerned with combating communism than preventing deaths from the egregious policy errors of communist regimes. The US cannot legitimately stake a claim to moral righteousness because it did not gave a shit if millions died from an economy or meteorological cataclysm.




High American government sources have admitted that the objective of the economic warfare was aimed at causing a breakdown of Communist China. The idea was that problems in the Chinese economy would lead to loss of support from the people causing the collapse of the Communist Republic.
However, while people were starving in China and US officials were waiting for Communist China to collapse, Washington D.C. had no idea how much suffering the Chinese people were capable of enduring and that even with the drought and famine, most Chinese were better off than they had been in centuries.

We may never know how much of an impact America’s “economic warfare” against China crippled its ability to import food to feed its starving people in a time of drought and famine. In fact, this may have also influenced Mao’s decisions since he wanted the world to see China as strong and capable of feeding itself.


If anyone pulled a trigger on China’s people, it was not Mao. It was Washington D.C. fueled by fear of everything Communist caused by the Korean War, Vietnam, McCarthyism’s Red Scare and the Cold War with Communist Russia.

http://ilookchina.net/tag/us-embargo-on-china-1949-to-1969/

[The CPSU Chairman]

Apoi Viitor, what's with that graph you posted that shows Chinese mortality rates? I clicked on it and it took me to a website about "Bike Alpine Tours". Which I think is an odd place to get information on mortality rates in Mao's China.

Not that i'm doubting the info you posted. I'm just puzzled by the source. :confused:

[Apoi_Viitor]

Not that i'm doubting the info you posted. I'm just puzzled by the source. :confused:

I'll probably replace it, the link appears to be broken anyways. Not sure about the source, if you click on one of the links I included in the post, you'll see that my post is a modified version of someone else's on a different forum. I thought it was incredibly informative, so I usually post it in every "did Mao kill 30 million people" thread.

Anyways it's really hard to find a graph that doesn't start simply a year or two ahead of the great leap forward (god those capitalists are dishonest bastards), but I finally found one.

http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/china/data/06112801_1.gif

That decline seems pretty damn steep, and look how it starts to increase after Mao's death.

[The CPSU Chairman]

Ah, I see. Thanks. It's pretty amazing that the Capitalists are able to push such incredibly dishonest and hypocritical propaganda and get away with it. They brand Mao as pretty much the most evil leader the planet has ever seen because of the death rates during the GLF, when those charts show that the GLF only brought the death rate briefly back up to what it had been under Capitalism. Which would, in effect, make Chiang Kai-Shek a far worse mass-murderer than Mao. Somehow the GLF's brief Capitalist-era death rate stands as a testament to the evils of Communism, but the Communists' success in improving things so much to begin with is irrelevant, and the fact that things were so miserable before Mao came to power can't possibly have anything to do with Capitalism.

Capitalists. They make my head explode sometimes. Frustrating little bastards.

Anyway, many thanks for posting that info. I look forward to using it in debates. :)

[Black_Rose]

In debates with reactionaries, I often point out how Chang Kai-Shek was just as more brutal than Mao; one notable instance was the Shanghai Massacre of 1927 or the New Fourth Army Incident during WWII. Mao is often blamed in the Western media because he was communist; if you doubt this, ask yourself why no one mentions the mass murders (some estimates are upwards of 500,000) of the communists by Suharto in Indonesia in 1965. Mao was not kind to his enemies, since he knew they would not reciprocate kindness; during his 1950 campaigns, such as the Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries, Mao followed just the dictum - be merciless to the merciless.

BTW, some of the deaths of the Great Leap Forward can be avoided with a humanitarian interdiction of the Cold War embargo by the US, but the Washington clerisy watched ecstatically on the prospect of an economic collapse in China (like John Paulson and Kyle Bass during the mortgage meltdown, watching the value of their CDS contracts on asset back securities soar), instead of sincerely worrying about the death toll in China.