主题：关于毛的一本新书：《毛真的是恶魔吗？》 -- 细脖大头鬼

17. Mao Compared with Hitler

Finally, we discuss JC’s central theme in the book: Mao is at least as bad as Hitler. Based on JC’s book, we will show the following conclusions: (i) Mao did not invade many nations and kill their people en masse as Hitler did. (ii) There was no evidence that Mao intentionally killed millions of civilians under his rule as Hitler did. (iii) Mao had more serious political opponents than Hitler did, but he did not kill any one of them, while Hitler killed all of his. Hence, a person with a reasonable mind may not agree with JC’s comparison of Mao with Hitler. We now give a more detailed comparison between Mao and Hitler in these three aspects.

(i) Their offence against other countries: Hitler invaded the major part of Europe in the WWII in which tens of millions of people perished.

Let’s look at Mao’s record. Mao sent Chinese troops to Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s, invited by the North Korean and North Vietnamese governments to fight a superpower from thousands miles away. In 1962, China had a brief war with India, because “China had refused to recognize the boundary that had been delineated by the British in colonial times” (p. 486). “As border clashes worsened” (p. 486), Mao sent troops into India. Then after a quick victory, he ordered all the troops to return home in days. JC’s words also imply that China was adjacent to the British India (the boundary “had been delineated by the British in” 1903) well before Mao sent troops to Tibet in 1950. Hence Mao’s troops did not invade Tibet (it was the Ching Dynasty’s army who did so two hundred years earlier and made Tibet a part of China). In 1969, China clashed with the Soviet Union. On “a small uninhabited island . . . Chinese laid an ambush that left 32 Russians dead”, while “Russia’s claim to the island was far from established” (p. 570). During his reign Mao never annexed any piece of land into Chinese territory.

(ii) Brutality against their subjects: Hitler intentionally killed millions of Jews, communists and leftists, homosexuals, Jehovah witnesses, Gypsies, and others.

The last mass killing under Mao took place in 1950–51 and led to 700,000 executions. However, this was at the end of the civil war and during the Korean War. Many, if not most, victims were executed for their military roles as we explained in section 11. During his reign, many must have died in prisons, but no evidence suggests this was nearly bad as Gulag in the Soviet Union, as discussed in section 12. Millions of people died during the famine because of Mao’s mismanagement, but there was no proof of his intention or indifference to let people die, as seen in section 14. Several political campaigns, such as the Cultural Revolution, caused many deaths due to persecution or maltreatment, but no direct order came from Mao, as we argued in section 15.

(iii) Treating political challengers: This is probably the most relevant comparison because both dictators’ personal responsibilities are irrefutable. There are few examples of how Hitler treated his political rivals because he hardly had any. But we do know that he ordered his fellow Nazi leader Roehn to be killed for alleged homosexual behavior and forced the best German general Rommel to commit suicide for his role in a suspected coup. Of course he also executed von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators for the assassination attempt.

Now let’s look at Mao’s record. According to the book, Mao’s first challenger was Chang Kuo-tao, who defected to the Nationalist side in 1938 (pp. 220-221). The second rival Wang Ming stayed in the CCP and even praised Mao after being defeated (p. 357), and later died in Russia in 1974. The third victim was Gao Gang, who committed suicide in 1954 (p. 405). The fourth un-cowed man, Peng De-huai “was put under house arrest” (p. 470) after his fight with Mao in 1959, and died of a rectum cancer in 1974 (p. 557). The fifth was Liu Shao-chi, who died in 1969 in much neglected conditions due to persecution (p. 556). The sixth, Lin Biao died in an airplane crash in Mongolia in 1971 (p. 582). The last one was Deng Xiao-ping to whom “Mao had had to give in and let him live in the comfort of his own home, among his family” (pp. 649-650) till his own death in 1976. None of his political challengers was executed. Nor were any of the co-conspirators associated with each case in this long list executed either. In the case of the most deadly and militant coup plot of Lin Biao, “incredibly, given that an attempted assassination – of Mao, no less – was involved, not a single person was executed” (p. 586).

Among those cases, let’s look at “Mao’s persecution of the man he hated most” (p. 548), Liu Shao-chi. The “report, which was delivered to the Central Committee by Mao’s faithful slave, Chou En-lai, called Liu a ‘traitor, enemy agent and scab’, and recommended the death sentence. But Mao rejected it, as he did for Mme Liu. He preferred a slow, lingering death” (pp. 555-556). However, it was “in April 1969, when the 9th Congress convened”, and Liu’s “death came . . . on 12 November 1969” (p. 556). It was not very slow. On the other hand, Mme Liu, Wang Guang-mei’s “slow, lingering death” not only lasted 10 years under Mao, but has still not been completed today, nearly 40 years later. A little bit too slow. If Mao really wanted her dead, whatever form that took, her health after 10 years of prison would not have allowed her such longevity.

Now let’s see how Mao obtained his evidence against Liu. “Mao had told it (Liu’s case team) he wanted a spy charge. . . . A large number of other people were imprisoned and interrogated, to try to turn up evidence against him. . . . Shi Zhe, who had interpreted for Liu with Stalin . . . was pressed to say that Liu was a Russian spy. . . American Sidney Rittenberg, . . . had known Mme Liu in the 1940s. Pressure was put on him to say that he had recruited her, and Liu, for American intelligence.” (p. 555). JC does not mention any torture being used. “The team . . . found itself in a Catch-22 situation, as concocting evidence could be as dangerous as failing to unearth it. On one occasion, the team claimed that Liu had wanted American troops to invade China in 1946, and that Liu had wanted to see President Truman about this. ‘Making such a claim’, Mao said, ‘is . . . to treat us like fools. America sending in troops en masse: even the Nationalists did not want that’” (p. 555). The result: Liu was not charged as a spy.

JC does not show in any case Mao allowed his team use torture to obtain evidence or imposed his charge without evidence, though his evidence was often proven to be wrong.

The points made in this section are sufficient to refute JC’s comparison of Mao with Hitler. In fact, it is easy to find counter-arguments to most, if not all, of JC’s claims in the entire book. It just takes careful reading and reasoning. We leave them as interested readers’ exercises, for fun.

In revealing the numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in JC’s book, we do not need any specific knowledge or information regarding China. Now the question is: why cannot those Western journalists and those China experts see? It is hard to believe that none of them is capable of logic thinking, or has read the book carefully. The most plausible explanation is their profound pride and prejudice towards China.

The first version, Aug. 7, 2005, the newest revision, Dec. 4, 2005.

Appendix A:

Jung Chang, the well-known story

According to her bibliography Wild Swan, JC was sent to a rural area in the western Sichuan after her graduation from high school in 1969, an unfortunate fate shared by millions of Chinese youths that time. What made JC special is that she only stayed there 26 days. She was then transferred to the suburb of Chengdu by forging several documents, an act most Chinese youths would not even contemplate, especially those whose families were allegedly under “persecution”.

While officially living in Chengdu suburb, JC stayed there only about one third of the time, during which she seldom joined other fellow city youths and peasants in farm work.

In 1971, JC’s mother used her connection to bring her into a state owned firm in Chengdu, the best option a Sichuan youth could hope for that time.

When the door of entering a university was opened in 1973, JC’s mother arranged a slot for her in the Sichuan University’s Department of Foreign Language, an ideal place particularly for those no good at science. Such behavior of “going through back doors” marked the beginning of the Communist corruption in China.

As she graduated, JC’s mother helped her to get a job at the university by blocking her normal destiny --- returning to the company which sent heer to study.

Finally, the opportunity of studying abroad came the first time in 1978, and JC’s mother used her influence to make the chance available to JC, who would not have been qualified otherwise.

Appendix B:

Miscarriage of the Chinese version of “Mao, the unknown story”

Quoted from Wanwei web site 2006-04-23

(http://news.creaders.net/china/newsViewer.php?language=gb2312&id=652625)

· The Yuanliu Publisher in Taiwan has decided to cease its original plan of publishing the Chinese version of Jung Chang’s book, “Mao, the unknown story”.

· The president of Yuanliu, Mr. Wang Rongwen says that the editor and authors cannot reach an agreement to modify the book to make its descriptions more neutral. He expects that the evidence in the book to be reliable, while that provided in Jung Chang’s book is insufficient to convince him.

· The publication was originally planned to be around the end of 2005, later postponed to April and to May 2006.

· Historian Li Yongzhong from Taiwan and bibliographer Hu Zhiwei from Hong Kong claim that the failure of the book’s publication “represents a victory of the true history over the false one”.

· A fellow of Social Science Academy of China in Taiwan, Xu Zhuoyun says that the book is not an academic one, but was unfortunately regarded as such. He even considers the book basically garbage, and believes it is not necessary to publish garbage in order to protect the freedom of press.

· The director of the History Institute of SSAC, Chen Yongfa says the relation between Jung Chang’s conclusions and her evidence is weak, hence the book cannot be treated as an academic work. He thinks of Jung Chang’s book “Mao” as “a popular book with academic background”.