To attempt to sanitize the record and life of Mao Zedung represents a shocking failure of intellect and will. It is a capitulation to evil. I attempted to click past this thread several times thinking it the product of a moment’s lapse, but as it continues to limp along, I can no longer restrain myself. This is the manner in which history is corrupted and repeated - in the failure, willful or otherwise, to identify its evils, in the fragmentary and unreliable nature of human memory and in the rewriting of history for political and ideological ends.
There is no “positive view” of Mao Zedong’s legacy. The question itself is an affront to the countless, faceless, nameless innocents buried en masse in the record of his “accomplishments”. Dialectic Materialism has no point of intersection with Christianity, is the enemy of Christianity and its complete antithesis. The attempt to draw lines between Lincoln and Mao is profoundly empty of scholarship and demeans the essential character of the first to create a hint of character for the second that never existed in him. It is a disgrace.
From Liu whom I agree with more:
The neo-liberal West goes so far as to accuse Mao of being a ruthless dictator, allegedly murdering 30 million of his fellow citizens with his radical programs, such as the controversial Great Leap Forward. Such propaganda bears little relation to the reality of Mao (as the greatest revolutionary in modern Chinese history who set a decaying China on the path to renewed greatness). Mao was neither perfect nor a superman. Like all humans, he made mistakes as a leader, but he provided a vision for a new China that will survive for centuries to come. Mao was demonized by the neo-liberal West simply because he was a communist. It is also a mistake for the Western left to interpret post-Mao China’s strategic response to changing global geopolitical conditions as an ideological deviation from Mao’s revolutionary vision for China.
Did you read the linked articles? Do you have any concrete argument against thesis of Mao has a great leader and revolutionary comparable to Abraham Lincoln on the former respect? (Lincoln, of course, was not a revolutionary as his greatest accomplishment was the preservation of the Union from the secessionist ambitions of the Confederacy. Lincoln suspended the civil liberties for the greater good of national unity and stability which is an uncontroversial historical view.) Will anyone engage Liu’s cogently argued position without deigning from a platform of moral superiority with the typical paroxysms or utilizing
ad hominems?
I first came across Liu by searching the Internet a year ago during the dire phase of the “financial crisis” (when 30 year Treasuries were yielding below 3%, the VIX was in the 50s, and the unemployment rate was rising rapidly) from a search engine query about the financial crisis and deflation leading me to one of his* Asia Times* articles discussing deflation and Alan Greenspan. Liu impressed me with his mastery of Eastern and Western history and his knowledge of the global financial architecture and economic challenges that Asian and European nations have to face although he uses every opportunity to relentlessly criticize Western imperialism. For that point, I slowly consumed much of his
Asia Times columns and I eventually ran across his “Mao and Lincoln” piece published in March 2004 although much of its content was derived verbatim from his posts on Marxist mailing groups five years before. I read his unconventional piece with an “open mind” knowing that he was arguing against the common (Western) perception of Chairman Mao being a sadistic tyrant, but while I still disagreed with Liu, I found some of his arguments valid and concluded that Mao was unfairly demonized by the West. At least, Liu shattered my previous perception of Mao being the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler and the embodiment of evil which is the prevalent consensus of the West . I do not lionize Mao unlike Liu, but he certainly does not fit the mold of a cartoonish villain, as he is a complex individual.
I still dislike Mao’s violent regime where he took pride about the brutal suppression of dissents since it is not condonable and supererogatory. For instance, he alluded to surpassing Qin Shi Huang, the emperor of the legalist Qin Dynasty (211-206 BC) who buried alive 460 scholars in an attempt eradicate memory of previous dynasties and ensure political unity, hundred-fold by killing more than 46,000 scholars positively. Furthermore, I see the religious persecution of the Cultural Revolution unnecessary and gratuitous; for instance, one does not see how destroying Buddhist monasteries and artifacts by the zealous Red Guards would contribute to any constructive political end. But political violence is not uncommon in China, for instance, the Kuomintang (nationalists) led by Chiang Kai-shek brutally suppressed communists violently in 1927 in the Shanghai massacre only cooperating when Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria in 1937. The fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 also left no political infrastructure and institutions that would allow a peaceful, orderly, democratic means of achieving power resulting in warlords competing for power and eventually the struggle between the CCP and the KMT. In addition, China retained its Confucianist feudalist culture rendering it somewhat resistant to political change.
The Great Leap Forward was not the consequence of malice, but the result of bad policies such as backyard furnaces for making steel, and killing sparrows that eat insects leaving China vulnerable to a plague of locusts, a trade embargo, and bad weather.
