When Mao Tse-tung died recently, the radio stations in Taiwan interrupted their programs with an announcement that began, “We have good news to report.”
Taiwan’s reaction was truthful. The outpouring of praise for Mao all over the world was a flood of hypocrisy. It is good news for the world that the man who murdered more people than any criminal in all history has finally passed from this earth.
The estimates by scholars of the number of people killed by the Mao regime in Communist China range from 34 million to 63 million -— far more than Stalin or Hitler. Mao and his apologists tried to disguise his actions behind such pretty phrases as “agrarian reform,” the “Great Leap Forward,” and the “Great Proletarian Revolution,” but it was bloody terrorism just the same.
Communism was enforced on the Chinese people by mass public trials at which assembled crowds, whipped up to a frenzy by planted agitators, demanded death without mercy, and then cheered the mass executions. Eyewitnesses reported trucks carrying the doomed, hands tied behind their backs, “like pigs going to slaughter,” with the spectators applauding.
What kind of people were the victims of these public executions? The Communists called them “landlords,” but a “landlord” was anyone who farmed his little plot with two water buffaloes instead of one.
Mao believed in the desirability of struggle and the necessity of violence. Detailed accounts were published and broadcast in order to maximize the disciplinary effect on the people.
From the very beginning, the Mao system included slave labor. In 1955, a United Nations report listed 20 to 25 million in regular slave labor camps and another 12.5 million in corrective labor camps.
This is in addition to the scores of millions of people drafted to work on Mao Tse-tung’s arbitrary and stupid schemes. In 1959 he decided to lead the water of the great rivers in the south of China to the arid north. Tens of millions of people were set to work on this project without any scientific blueprint. The result was a disastrous alkalization of the most useful wheat-growing land of the north, and China had to start importing wheat.
In all history there has never been such thought control as Mao imposed on China. In 1957 under a campaign he called “let a Hundred Flowers bloom,” he encouraged others to speak out with independent ideas. Some were foolish enough to do it. It was just a ruse by Mao to identify those who needed to he disciplined into total conformity.
In Communist China, the men and women dress alike, look alike, cut their hair alike, labor as beasts of burden alike. In many bookstores, every single book for sale was written by Mao Tse-tung. When President Nixon made his famous trip to China, I remember an enterprising television reporter who interviewed a young woman and asked her what she and her boyfriend did for fun on a date. She replied, “We read the writings of Chairman Mao.”
Not only is Mao’s China a land of political terror and economic failure, it is a cultural wasteland. It has not produced a single first-class work of literature or art.
Yet, Mao was the man about whom President Ford said, “It’s tragic that a man of his great, remarkable ability and skill and vision and Foresight has passed away.”
The only good thing the Maoists have ever done is to announce that no foreigners would be invited to attend the funeral. We can be thankful that they spared us the indignity of having President Ford send an American to mourn for Mao.
