The Mao Regime and the United States

If you know what either the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution is, and are not from a Chinese family, I'm impressed.
For those of you who don't know, the Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong's proletariat revolution, with the Great Leap Forward as it's precursor.

In China today, the government censors anything related to these events, and in 2006, the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, it told Chinese artists, academics, and journalists to simply ignore the topic. Time is not stopping the censor. In fact, its growing stricter, if anything.

Why are these events are so important that the Chinese government does not even want its youth to know about them?

First, it must be noted that Mao Zedong is known as the world's greatest mass murderer in human history. Hitler's already impressive 12 million kills is dwarfed by those of Mao, estimated to have taken anywhere between 49 to 78 million lives. Most, if not all, of these deaths were of mainland Chinese.

During Chairman Mao's reign, people were beaten to death, eaten alive, drowned. When peaceful protesters demonstrated in Tiananmen Square, they were chased out and killed by tanks. But most prominently, people were starved to death, whether deliberately or by simple lack of food.

In the United States, we learn extensively about Hitler's concentration camps, about Stalin's Gulags, and yet the events of Mao's rise to power are glossed over in American history books, as are his policies, if they are even mentioned at all. The one forced interaction we had with the Cultural Revolution was in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, where we learned about oppression of intellectuals in China, but not about how Principal Bian Zhongyun was brutally beaten by her students using wooden sticks spiked with nails and then left to die.

I asked my dad why this was, thinking that as he had lived through it, he would have some insight. The only possible reason he could think of was this: "There are no concrete numbers. Many government documents were destroyed. We will never know how many people died, and no one likes to teach what they don't know."

Perhaps China is ignoring it, but that doesn't mean we have to.


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html
http://www.economist.com/node/6951123
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-chinese-cultural-revolution-remembering-mao-s-victims-a-483023.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/06/world/a-tale-of-red-guards-and-cannibals.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/opinion/confessions-of-the-cultural-revolution.html