Titans of History

MAO ZEDONG

1893–1976

I look at Mao, I see Stalin, a perfect copy.

Nikita Khrushchev

Chairman Mao, revolutionary, poet and guerrilla commander, was the communist dictator of China whose brutality, egotism, utopian radicalism, total disdain for human life and suffering, and insanely grandiose schemes led to the murder of 70 million of his own citizens. A born manipulator and ruthless pursuer of power, this monster was happy to torment and murder his own comrades, to execute millions, permit millions more to starve and even risk nuclear war, in order to promote his Marxist-Stalinist-Maoist vision of a superpower China under his own semi-divine cult of personality.

Mao was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province on December 26, 1893. Forced to work on the family farm in his early teens, he rebelled against his father—a successful grain dealer—and left home to seek an education at the provincial capital, Changsa, where he participated in the revolt against the Manchu dynasty in 1911. He flirted with various careers, but never committed to anything until he subsequently joined the recently formed Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He married Yang Kaihui in 1920, by whom he had two sons (later marrying He Zizhen in 1928 and well-known actress Lan Ping—real name Jiang Qing—in 1939). At twenty-four, he recorded his amoral philosophy: “People like me only have a duty to ourselves …” He worshipped “power like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, like a sex-maniac on the heat … We adore times of war … We love sailing the sea of upheavals … The country must be destroyed then reformed … People like me long for its destruction.” In 1923, the communists entered an alliance with the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). Sent back to Hunan to promote the Kuomintang, he continued to foment revolutionary activity, predicting that Chinese peasants would “rise like a tornado or tempest—a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.”

In 1926, the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek—the toothless military strongman whose vicious, corrupt and utterly inept gangster-backed regime would enable Mao and the communists ultimately to triumph and conquer China—ordered the so-called Northern Expedition to consolidate fragmented government power. In April 1927, having defeated over thirty warlords, he slaughtered the communists in Shanghai, being named generalissimo the following year, with all China under his rule. Mao, meanwhile, had retired to a base in the Jinggang Mountains, from where, emerging as a red leader, he embarked on a guerrilla campaign. “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” he said.

In 1931, Mao became chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi. Happy to murder, blackmail and poison his rivals—killing 700,000 in a terror 1931–5—he displayed the same political gifts as Stalin: a will for power, ruthlessness, an addiction to turmoil and an astonishing ability to manipulate. Like Stalin also, he destroyed his wives and mistresses, ignored his children and poisoned everyone whose lives he touched: many went insane.

In 1933, after several defeats, Chiang launched a new war of attrition resulting in a dramatic turnaround that prompted the communists to sideline Mao and, on the advice of Soviet agent Otto Braun, launch a disastrous counter-attack, leading in 1936 to a full-scale retreat that became known as the Long March. By the late 1930s, using gullible Western writers like Edgar Snow and Han Suyin, Mao had created his myth as a peasant leader, poet and guerrilla-maestro, the march portrayed as an epic journey in which he heroically saved the Red Army from Nationalist attack. In fact, much was invented to conceal military ineptitude and his deliberate wastage of armies to discredit communist rivals.

In 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. Chiang was forced by Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal who kidnapped the generalissimo, to combine forces with Mao. Secretly Mao strove to undermine Chiang’s war effort, even briefly cooperating with Japanese intelligence. By 1943, he had achieved supremacy in the Communist Party, poisoning and purging rivals and critics with brutal efficiency. He continued to court Soviet support for the communists, whose future was assured when Stalin helped defeat Japan in 1945.

Chiang’s militarily incompetent kleptocracy, heavily backed by America, collapsed as Mao, backed by massive Soviet aid and advice from Stalin, gradually drove the Kuomintang off the mainland. In 1949, Mao declared the People’s Republic of China, embarking on an imperial reign of willful caprice, ideological radicalism, messianic egotism, massive incompetence and mass-murder: “We must kill. We say it’s good to kill,” ordered this “man without limits.” Three million people were murdered that year.

In 1951–2, Mao subjected China to his so-called Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns to eliminate China’s bourgeoisie. Spies infiltrated everywhere, informing on supposed transgressors, who were heavily fined, sent to labor camps or executed. Mao ruled like a red emperor, paranoid about his security, always on the move, shrewdly manipulating his henchmen and pitilessly sacrificing old comrades to maintain power at all costs. He constantly declared: “Too lenient, not killing enough.” While he lived like an emperor on fifty private estates using military dancing girls as “imperial concubines,” he drove China to become a superpower, deploying Chinese troops against America in the Korean War as a way of persuading Stalin to give him military, especially nuclear, technology. It would not matter, he mused, “if half the Chinese were to die” in a nuclear holocaust.

Mao continued to wage war on his people throughout the 1950s. The 1958–9 Anti-Rightist Campaign—through which over half a million people were labeled rightists—saw hundreds of thousands consigned to years of hard labor or execution. The Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, a massive drive to increase steel production, encouraged villagers to create useless little forges, coupled with a move to collectivize China’s peasantry into rural communes. Emulating Stalin with his manmade 1932–3 famine, Mao sold food to buy arms even though China starved in the the greatest famine in history: 38 million died. When defense minister Marshal Peng Dehuai criticized his policies, Mao purged him but his anointed successor, President Liu Shaoqi, managed to claw back some power from Mao in 1962.

Denouncing Liu, who was destroyed and allowed to die in poverty, Mao avenged himself by getting control of the army and state through his chosen successor, the talented, neurotic Marshal Lin Biao and supple chief factotum Premier Zhou Enlai. He masterminded another terror, the Cultural Revolution, in which he asserted his total domination of China by attacking the party and state, ordering gangs of students, secret policemen and thugs to humiliate, murder and destroy lives and culture. Three million were killed between 1966 and 1976; millions more were deported or tortured.

From 1966, Mao used his wife Jiang Qing to promote his purges. An only child and the daughter of a concubine, Jiang had become an actress after leaving university, acquiring an enduring belief in the importance of the arts. She had married Mao in 1939. Her call for radical forms of expression, instilled with “ideologically correct” subject matter, escalated into an all-out assault on the existing artistic and intellectual elites. Renowned for her inflammatory rhetoric, she manipulated mass-communication techniques to whip young Red Guards into a frenzy before sending them out to attack—verbally and physically—anything “bourgeois” or “reactionary.” In an orgy of denunciation, terror and murder, the Communist Party, including moderates like President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, was purged. Mao personally directed both the individual persecutions of his closest comrades, using Jiang Qing, whom he hated, and the vast chaotic violence aimed at restoring his absolute tyranny.

The aging Mao fell out with Lin Biao, creator of the Little Red Book, who died in a plane crash while fleeing in 1971. This left Mao in the hands of the grotesque Jiang Qing and the Maoist radicals known as the Gang of Four.

Having fallen out with Moscow, Mao pulled off one last coup: US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Dying, Mao restored, then again purged, the formidable pragmatist Deng Xiaoping. Mao disdained Jiang Qing but she and the Gang of Four remained powerful. Mao died in 1976.

Deng arrested Madame Mao in a palace coup. In 1981 Jiang was found guilty of “counter-revolutionary” crimes. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but she committed suicide in 1991. A hated figure, she was described by one biographer as a “vicious woman who helped dispose of many people”; the “white-boned demon” who, in her own words (when on trial), was “Chairman Mao’s dog. Whomever he asked me to bite, I bit.”

In the 21st century, Mao’s China has been tempered by capitalism but he remains its Great Helmsman, his mummy still worshipped in its tomb, his Communist Party still in absolute control, his secret police still brutally repressing political, cultural and personal freedom. Mao remains the most formative and powerful Chinese statesman of the last few centuries.