The founder and Chairman of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China has always been regarded as a hero and Chinese patriot.  But recently, more evidence has been forthcoming that he was a perverted butcher, not a nationalist hero.  A new book, entitled Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, reveals the depths of  this perversion and butchery.  A recent review of the book by Nicolas D. Kristof provides a salient summary of the truth about Mao.  Several summary thoughts:

1. The authors assert that Mao was not in fact a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party and that the Party in those early years (1920 to 1929) was entirely under the thumb of the Russians.  Mao became the leader, not because he rose through the ranks of the Party, but because Moscow chose him. 

2. One of the most treasured myths of the Party is the Long March—the flight from the dangerous east coast to the refuge of the northwest.  Part of the legend is the incredible courage and determination of Mao as he led the March.  Chang and Halliday demonstrate that they escaped from the east only because Chiang Kai-shek deliberately allowed them to escape.  They also demonstrate that Mao did not even walk most of the March—he was carried.  He wrote:  “On the march, I was lying in a litter.  So what did I do?  I read.  I read a lot.”  Chang and Halliday also reveal that the infamous battle of the March—at Dadu Bridge—was actually a complete fabrication!

3. Mao welcomed the Japanese invasion of China and, the authors show, actually collaborated with them.  He did so all in an effort to undermine the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang.

4. The unbelievable butchery of Mao is also clearly revealed in this book.  He used the Korean War as a chance to slaughter former Nationalist soldiers.  When peasants were starving in the 1950s, he observed, “Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel.  The State should try its hardest. . . to prevent peasants from eating too much.”  While in Moscow, he offered to sacrifice 300 million Chinese!

5. Chang and Halliday also demonstrate convincingly that the Great Leap Forward led to the worst famine in world history in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Estimates are as high as 38 million of the number who died in this famine.  His brutality also was manifested at a personal level.  In the mid-1970s, his trusted confidante, Zhou Enlai, was suffering from cancer.  Mao refused to allow him to get treatment—wanting Zhou to be the one who would die first.  He declared, “Operations are ruled out for now.  Absolutely no room for argument.”  So, Zhou died in early 1976, before Mao did.

6. In all, the authors estimate that Mao was directly responsible for over 70 million deaths in China.  If this is an accurate figure—and that is difficult to corroborate—Mao was the worst butcher in all of history.

The value of a biography like this is that it places Mao in an important context.  Mao was responsible for creating the modern nation state of China—the one with which the US today is competing so furiously in trade and influence.  But Mao rode to power on the bodies of millions of Chinese and remained in power by his relentless attempts to purge the Party, the Red Army and the government.  He was a megalomaniac who butchered millions.  He is hardly a hero; he is a modern monster.  Now he knows the depths of his butchery, and one day he will stand before Almighty God at the Great White Throne where his crimes will be laid bare.  At that point there will be no mercy for him.  He will receive justice—not from the historians who write about his perversion but from Almighty God.

See Nicholas Kristof’s most helpful review in the New York Times Book Review (23 October 2005).

David Horowitz has done us all a favor.  A former radical turned conservative, Horowitz has been probing the hypocrisy of the leftwing frontiers of our culture.  He has recently probed the faculties of journalism and law schools throughout the US.  His findings are telling.

• First of all, Horowitz, who is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, analyzed the political affiliations of the faculty at 18 elite journalism and law schools.  Columnist John Tierney summarizes his findings:  “By checking all the party registrations he could find, he concluded that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law schools, with the ratio ranging from 3 to 1 at Penn to 28 to 1 at Stanford.”  Only one journalism school, the University of Kansas, had preponderance of Republicans (10 to 8).  At the rest of the schools he studied, there was a 6 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans.

• Second, as Tierney argues, “Some academics try to argue that their political ideologies don’t affect the way they teach, which to me is proof of how detached they’ve become from reality in their monocultures.”  What is the result of their political affiliations?  When you have a press corps that is heavily Democratic—“more than 80 percent, according to some surveys of Washington journalists”—they tend to do stories that reflect Democratic interests.  Listen again to Tierney, “When journalists do exposes of government malfeasance, they usually focus on the need for more regulations and bigger budgets, not on whether the government should be doing the job in the first place.”  In short, for the liberal Democrat, government is always seen as the solution to right most wrongs.  Rarely is the question asked, “Should government be doing this in the first place?” 

• Finally, this political reality reflects where most higher education institutions are today.  Many do not even see this as a problem.  “They keep meticulous tabs on race and gender and ethnic background of their students and faculty.”  But the absence of any semblance of political diversity is not even on their radar screen.  That reality therefore reflects a deeply ingrained hypocrisy and thoroughgoing inconsistency.  That is ethically wrong, and it is a profound shame. 

See Tierney’s editorial in the New York Times (11 October 2005).