Mao Zedong: Greatest Mass Murderer in World History

leavingwt

When the JW Armageddon happens, I guess he'll be #2.

Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html

BurnTheShips

This is what happens when authoritarians attempt to create utopias.

BTS

JWoods

I would suggest that Josef Stalin would not be very far behind him as number 2.

beksbks

This is what happens when authoritarians attempt to create utopias.

BTS

Mao didn't appear to be much interested in utopia.

FatFreek 2005

Here's one list of mass murderersin the 20th century. Yes, Mao Zedong is at the top. Interestingly, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson are on the list but are way down.

Len

llbh

Read Mao The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, it is a long and harrowing book, but is well worth reading and is so informative about how China has come to be what, and where it is today. Also worth reading is Wild Swans by the same author. Quite prescient reading especially in view of the fact that this week China and Taiwan signed important bilateral trade agreements this week.

Mao used misogyny, homophobia, and anti education policies to control and divide.

It is interesting to note that President Nixon began the rapprochement between the US and China, and that President Bush did not seem to understand how far and fast the power of China would grow.

David