In 1949, Mao Zedong and his communist forces gained full control of China, finally bringing to close a thirty-three year period of political chaos, foreign conquest, and civil war. The story of how the communists eventually rose to take control of China is basically a Rockyesque comeback story with a cast of millions, which I highly suggest you look into, but we’re going to skip over all that in favor of what Mao did once he was in control. Seen as a prudent leader, intellectual, and poet, many hoped that Mao would reform the long suffering country and bring about prosperity. Unfortunately, Mao’s prime mentor on how to run a communist dictatorship was Joseph Stalin, a murderous psychopath who had people executed if his breakfast gave him indigestion. Things did not go well.
Now it should probably be known that despite claims otherwise by that cool kid in college with the Che Guevara poster in his dorm room, most of the communist regimes in the world began with political purges. Which is just a nice way of saying they killed or imprisoned anyone seen as against them; which in practice meant businessmen, intellectuals who didn’t kiss Mao’s ass, and anyone with contact with the outside world. Wanting to prove that he was just the most communist of the communists, Mao’s purges involved the killing of some one million people and another million being sent to re-education/labor camps. This fun little activity was quickly followed by two major reform movements. The first was land reform, wherein land was taken from its owners and given to poor peasants, which for some reason often included beating the former land owners to death, killing some 2.5 million people and sending a further 4 million people to the labor camps. The second was an industrial and government purge targeting anyone with what were called “capitalist leanings”. Families, friends, and coworkers were strongly encouraged to rat on each other, and those taken into custody were tortured until they committed suicide, resulting in the deaths of another million people.
With some 5.5 million deaths under his belt, Mao got around to actually improving the country as he had promised. Following the Soviet model, he began campaigns of industrial modernization, public education, and public health which did a lot to help begin transforming the country. Unfortunately, none of this made Mao or his contemporaries any saner. In 1956, wanting to be seen as a benevolent leader, Mao called for intellectuals across the country to feel free to voice their opinions on how the country was doing. Not happy living under a dictatorship, thousands of intellectuals responded with criticism of the regime. Not being all that happy with this response, Mao had some 500,000 people killed and another one million imprisoned. Unfortunately, many of these people were the ones who had made the initial reforms in China so successful. As a result, Mao took a more direct role in planning the next set of reforms, which he called The Great Leap Forward, a planned major expansion of agricultural and steel production which started in 1958.
Here’s a little fun fact about Mao Zedong. He and the sycophants he surrounded himself with knew absolutely nothing about agriculture or steel production. However, rather than ask anybody, they instead came up with all sorts of crazy theories which pretty much immediately resulted in a sharp drop in Chinese food production. Scared of being sent to labor camps for failing to meet quotas, communist officials claimed record production, which gave Mao the great idea of seizing already scarce grain supplies to sell as exports. Things only got worse when the same officials forced farmers to hand over their farming implements to melt down in order to meet the ridiculous steel quotas. The end result was one of the worst famines in world history, killing some 42 million people over a five year period. When Mao learned of all of this, he just kind of shrugged his shoulders and stated that fewer mouth to feed meant it would be easier for China to feed those who remained. When people began to complain about, you know, starving to death, he had some 3 million people killed, many beaten to death or buried alive.
Even for the most hardcore of communist supporters, the disaster that was The Great Leap Forward was a little much. Not wanting a crazy man like Mao running things, they conspired to reduce his role to mainly a ceremonial one. At first Mao seemed to take this development in stride, spending most of his time writing about his political views, collected in what became known as the Little Red Book, which became widely distributed across the country. This was part of a long-term propaganda campaign meant to basically deify the aged dictator, which was particularly effective amongst younger people who had spent most of their lives under communist rule. Tiring of just being a figurehead, in 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, wherein gangs of mostly young people, known as the Red Guard, rose up and began attacking and persecuting anyone who was seen as being too intellectual or not socialist enough. Mao regained full power over China, but things quickly got out of hand. The Red Guards went from persecuting people they saw as enemies of the state to outright murdering their asses. Massacres became common, with the Red Guard beheading, beating, burying alive, stoning, drowning, boiling, disembowling, and even eating those they viewed as dissidents. When that got old, the various Red Guard groups began fighting and killing each other. Eventually the military had to be sent in to restore peace, but by then some 9 million people were dead.
Mao Zedong continued to rule China for the remainder of his life. He died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 82 in 1976 from complications brought about by heavy chain smoking. Despite being directly responsible for the death of some 60 million people, four times more than either Hitler or Stalin, he is still widely viewed in a positive light in China, where his atrocities are largely played down by government propagandists.