Monster of misrule

Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in 1976. Even today his giant portrait gazes down over Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 his successors massacred hundreds of students and workers. After so many years and books and articles, can anything new be said about him? Although Andrew Walder, a Stanford sociologist and leading China scholar, writes that his comprehensive and deadly analysis is primarily for non-specialists, he has made me think.

President Xi Jinping, who will make a state visit to London in October, speaks highly of Mao. Such praise, concludes Walder, requires ‘highly selective historical memory and a great deal of forgetting’. What has been erased in many memories is that Mao was a monster (not a word used by Walder), responsible for countless Chinese deaths, not least the 30 million, between 1958 and 1961, who starved during a famine that owed everything to his manias (and the co-operation of cronies like Zhou Enlai). Millions more were executed during various drives starting in the decades before the Communist victory in 1949, in some of which Mao was encouraged to kill even more by Deng Xiaoping.

Most popular

Alexander Larman

Prince Andrew’s Easter appearance was a royal blunder

Harvard’s Roderick MacFarquhar, one of the most productive scholars of the Mao period, has observed that ‘the mark of Cain’ lay on Mao’s most spectacular disaster, the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. But it is clear from Walder’s book (as from MacFarquhar’s several volumes) that this mark disfigured Mao’s entire career. Indeed, a Harvard conference on Mao received a short message from Li Rui, one of his former secretaries, stating that ‘Mao liked to kill.’

Walder does not explore Mao’s early life, especially his angry relationship with his father, but he is right to emphasise that, of all Mao’s ‘core ideas’, the oldest was that ‘only violent conflict could bring about genuine social change’.