Why is chairman mao bad

Fifty years on, there is still nostalgia for the period, with a recent performance of Cultural Revolution-era songs at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing triggering an online controversy. Professor Zweig said there was good reason for President Xi — a strongman leader himself — to reject any review that could further tarnish Mao's image. We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.

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Child rescued from alleged porn operation, as man faces 43 charges. Hard labor was not just physically trying but outright dangerous. Grandpa Yao worked on roofs without any protection, barely escaped a tractor accident, and toiled in a petroleum factory in the dead of winter during the Chinese New Year holiday, a time for celebration and family reunion. What I learned was that the Cultural Revolution was only one in a long series of national tragedies that Grandpa Yao personally experienced.

He was born in The next year, Manchuria fell to the Japanese. As Japanese forces swept into southern China Grandpa Yao was forced to flee his hometown of Hangzhou with his family, becoming war refugees. They faced hazards almost unheard of in China today. He lost his mother to typhus and younger sister to fatigue, and buried them in unmarked graves.

Even my grandfather almost succumbed to exhaustion on multiple occasions. By the time fighting ended in , 15 to 20 million of his countrymen had perished. The alliance between Chinese Communists and Nationalists soon fell apart, plunging the country once again into civil war, and Grandpa Yao took sides.

In July , at the height of the conflict, my grandfather went up north to Nationalist-controlled Beijing, where he enrolled in college but was soon expelled for repeatedly publishing anti-Nationalist propaganda and starting his own library with collections of Communist pamphlets.

It would have been impossible to imagine then that, less than 20 years later, my grandfather would be again made to suffer.

Many in my generation receive such good education in China that we are able to study in world-class universities abroad. We lead lives my grandparents could scarcely have imagined. They feel not just fortunate to have survived; they are grateful for what China has become for their children and grandchildren. Those ideals inspired millions of Chinese like my grandparents to devote themselves to building a brighter future. But Grandpa Yao, just like many other loyal party members who suffered under Mao, simply refuses to believe that the cause to which he committed so much turned out to be an illusion.

He believes, instead, that individuals — but not Mao — subverted communist ideals for personal power and gain. We can no longer understand exactly why those ideals matter or how they are relevant to the materialistic society that China has become. He told Premier Chou En-lai that the business was worth six times the official Yanan budget.

And there are many other well-documented assertions: Mao was not dragged into the Korean war by the Communist leader Kim Il Sung and the American assault on the north: he wanted the war and knew Chinese losses would be astronomical, but was willing to trade hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives for Stalin's help - he didn't get it - in building a Chinese arms industry.

Later he lured President Nixon to China and persuaded, beguiled and dazzled the president and Kissinger into offering him secret intelligence on the Soviet Union. All this knocks big holes in the Mao legend. But the ultimate target of Chang and Halliday's onslaught on Mao is the cold heart that drove his pitiless behaviour. Four times married, he abandoned, one way or another, all his wives and most of his many children. The three wives of his adult life seemed to have been crazy about him no matter what.

His surviving children tended to go mad. For a man once famed among women's liberationists in the West, he exploited and devoured numbers of women right up to his final senile, unwashed, toothless days. I knew one such woman, who as a teenage air force soldier attended Mao's dancing parties in the late Sixties where the great moment was being invited into the Chairman's bedroom to "make me some tea". What about Mao the national leader?

Actually, he cared little for peasants and during the worst famine ever, suggested they eat leaves while he sold their produce abroad, partly to give the impression that China was thriving. Of Premier Chou En-lai, famed among Western leaders for his courtly manners, and believed still by many Chinese to have saved certain people from Mao's wrath, Chang and Halliday write: "When Mao gave the word, Chou would send anyone to their death.

In the case of Chou, it seems, Mao remembered that in he had criticised the young Communist Party in a newspaper, and on the basis of this ancient document - which may not have been authentic - Mao was able to blackmail Chou into years of slavish obedience.

He instilled fear and obedience in ever wider circles until he achieved something Hitler and Stalin had never attempted: turning millions of his people against each other, by persuading them that spies, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, and Mao-haters were everywhere. He had learnt early that rather than shipping victims off to camps or the Gulag, or torturing and murdering them in secret, what really terrified the masses was watching torture and execution and making such murderous acts a revolutionary virtue.

In short, he was a monster, and Chang is right to claim that Mao "was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did". She also says - hence "the Unknown Story" subtitle - that "the world knows astonishingly little about him.

This is untrue. Millions of Chinese know enough about Mao to be glad he is dead. More than 20 years ago the Party itself held Mao chiefly responsible for the Cultural Revolution, "the greatest disaster" since , although it also insisted that his good points greatly outweighed the bad.

One of his former secretaries, Li Rui, has written that Mao "did not care how many he killed" and others have long-since pulled the veil away from Chou En-lai.

In the West, the opium story has been published, as has much of Mao's reckless self-serving behaviour on the Long March, Chou En-lai's grovelling, and how Nixon and Kissinger crawled. There are excellent biographies of Mao.

In a very short one, Mao, based on already published materials, Jonathan Spence of Yale wrote that Mao's rule "was hopelessly enmeshed with violence and fear". Harvard's Stuart Schram, an early biographer, has published his multi-volume Mao's Road to Power, a collection of every existing scrap of paper Mao wrote up to , which shows his ruthlessness. In the late s, Lucian Pye of the Massachusetts Institute of Technologylaid out Mao's psychopathology, at a time when this was regarded as over the top.

Harvard's Roderick MacFarquhar's three volumes, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, compares Mao to Stalin and describes his eating well even while his policies were creating "the worst man-made famine in history". I discuss these earlier works not to undermine Chang and Halliday. What they fail to do, when they say "the Untold Story", is credit others - even if they cite them in their bibliography - with insights similar to their own.