Mao Zedong Was A Monster

The 50th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong has just passed.  (He died on September 9, 1976.).  I did not see large amounts of commentary about Mao on the occasion of the anniversary, but everything that I did see was either neutral or positive, with the majority being praise.  And as I looked around for any commentary I could find from around the date of the anniversary, most of what I found is again praise.

How could that be?  This man was a monster.  Certainly, the death toll for which Mao was responsible was a large multiple of anything ever attributed to Hitler, and also a multiple (although a smaller one) of the carnage committed by Stalin.  Does any self-respecting person give effusive praise of either of those two?  And if not to them, then why to Mao?  And it’s not just the death toll.  Mao’s frankly ignorant and stupid extreme Marxist economic “theories,” if you want to call them that, caused decades of abject poverty, needless suffering and misery and often starvation for hundreds of millions of Chinese.  And then there was the ruthless suppression of dissent (or even the slightest disagreement), which obstructed all efforts to introduce any sanity to counter the economic destruction.  I can’t even think of a coherent defense for what Mao did to China and its people.

So let’s see what we can find in the press on the occasion of the anniversary of this man’s death.  

The South China Morning Post had a piece on September 9 with the headline “Young Chinese turn to Mao Zedong for life advice, 50 years after his death.”  (SCMP, based in Hong Kong, is owned by the Alibaba Group, and has no official relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.  However, their independence in today’s Hong Kong is highly dubious.). Excerpts:

When you are denied a pay rise, when you feel anxious about your children’s education, or when you are alienated by colleagues, Chairman Mao can help.  At least, that is what China’s online influencers and their hundreds of thousands of followers believe.  Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong, founding father of the People’s Republic of China.