Colleagues, rivals, academics and propagandists East and West have written much nonsense about Mao Zedong yet, when we correct for bias and discard patent falsehoods it becomes clear that, apart from the bloodshed that accompanies wars and revolutions, it’s doubtful that Mao killed anyone and indubitable that he gave life to billions. Indeed, no-one has done so much good for so many–and so little harm; no-one comes close.
The obloquy is easy to understand. Foreign powers vilified him for his independence and communism and charged that he had embarked on a chaotic and fruitless quest for a socialist spiritual utopia. Colleagues like Deng Xiaoping (whom Cambridge double blue Lee Kwan Yew called ‘the most brilliant man I ever met’) and Chou En Lai (who wrung from Henry Kissinger the admission that ‘the Chinese are smarter than us’) stood head and shoulders above any Western contemporary and the humblest of them–and father of the current president–was a general at age nineteen and governor at twenty-two.
They buried him with faint praise because in life, Mao stood effortlessly, head and shoulders above them all, chastening or dismissing them at will while exhausting them with societal upheavals that required a level of heroic exertion that would have killed or maddened lesser men. That was the thirty percent in their verdict, “Seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong” but the Chinese people never accepted that verdict for reasons that will become obvious.
