BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: Megan L
Date: 15 May 16 - 10:44 AM

Joe was not disputing the truth of the matter merely asking if the op had some opinion on the matter rather than just cutting and posting something with no reference to why it was posted at this particular time or an opinion on the matter.

Just out of curiosity I thought Mao was dead a while before the Tiernamin Sq protest.

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 15 May 16 - 08:49 AM

Wikipedia actually spells it Wu Ningkun.

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 15 May 16 - 08:39 AM

My wife and I were in China [see 3 posts back] by invitation of Professor Wu Ninkun, whom we met when he was visiting fellow in Cambridge, having at last been been rehabilitated after 20+ years of persecution and imprisonment after being lured back from a post in Chicago to help stinking 2-faced Mao's 'hundred flowers grow'. Look up Wu Ninkun's Wikipedia entry also, to learn at least part of what really happened.

≈M≈

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: Lighter
Date: 15 May 16 - 08:07 AM

Of course it's true. Even the Guinness Book knows about it, though there's some disagreement about the precise figures.

The following is also true. Many years ago I was discussing the matter with a (shall we say, "left-wing"?) college classmate.   

She was unperturbed, pointing out that "China has such a huge population that it wasn't that big a percentage."

She added that "revolutions are fragile" and "have to assert their authority until they can stabilize."

She seemed to be quite a normal person until that moment.

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: Rapparee
Date: 15 May 16 - 07:55 AM

From scattered sources I've read over the years I believe it is truthful and in fact may err on the conservative side.

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 15 May 16 - 06:16 AM

I lectured on English Folksong under the auspices of the British Council in Beijing & Guangzhou Universities, based at the Beijing Languages & Cultures University [then the Beijing Language Institute] and Guilin Normal University, for 2 months in 1989; leaving just as the Tienenman Square demonstration was starting. As my taxi to the airport drove off-campus, I could here our Language Institute students starting their demonstration up-campus, prior to their marching in a body to Teinman Sq to join the main demo already forming there under the diretion of oppositionist Hu Yaoban. My wife, who was a fulltime lecturer at the time at the Institute [see her entry on Wikipedia, titled "Valerie Grosvenor Myer"] regularly visited her students in the Square while their occupation of it continued. She learned of the demonstration's destruction by the Chinese People's Army by my phoning her from home here near Cambridge, having heard it on the 10 o'clock BBC Radio 4 News, the time difference meaning that it was 8.00 the following morning in Beijing.

Do not doubt that Dick's account is the truth, Joe. My wife was there, caught up in it. She was lucky to escape on a US army transport taking US citizens to the airport, her next-room colleagues being Americans who took her under their wing. I did not know of her whereabouts for several days, which you will appreciate was a worrying time for me. Her account of what happened when she returned concurs with what Dick posted above. Believe me, his account has it right — & this is something I do know about.

≈M≈

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: The Sandman
Date: 15 May 16 - 04:54 AM

I would be confident about the actions of the red guards, 0f course lee edwards is an american conservative.
MAO was also responsible for the invasion and occupation of neighbouring Tibet., Which is still under chines occupation
I googled mao mass murder, and that info came up.
i suspect that a lot of it is true because of some of Maos other behaviour, including this from Time magazine
Cookie Consent

The Chairman's Historic Swim
By RICHARD H. SOLOMON         Monday, Sept. 27, 1999

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the early 1960s, china was in the throes of economic catastrophe and widespread famine--both resulting from the radical political and economic experiments of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. As opposition to Mao's leadership grew, the Chairman left Beijing in late 1965 for Hangzhou, where he would map out his last assault on the Communist Party's revisionist leadership--the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. After months of cloistered plotting, Mao suddenly resurfaced in Wuhan in the summer of 1966 to stage one of his greatest acts of political theater. On July 16 he took a vigorous and well-reported swim in the Yangtze River by the Wuhan bridge. It was a signal that Mao was in robust health--and that he was launching a counterattack against his critics in the party leadership.Although Mao was in his early 70s, party propagandists claimed that the Chairman had swum nearly 15 km in 65 min. that day--a world-record pace, if true. The contention elicited guffaws from foreign observers, who took the claim as a sign that China was descending into political madness. Yet for the old man of the revolution, the swim was a call to China's younger generation to dive into a political struggle against counterrevolutionary party bureaucrats. If the aging Chairman could conquer the mighty Yangtze, surely the nation's youth could brave the winds and waves of a political storm and overthrow Mao's opponents. For Mao, the event appeared to be a symbolic reenactment of his own teenage rebellion against a brutal father, whom he had challenged by pursuing physical activities and learning to swim--in contravention of Confucian notions of physical reserve. Yet Mao's aquatic incitement of China's youth failed to produce a new generation of revolutionaries. Violent conflicts between contending Red Guard units in Wuhan and elsewhere served only to discredit the student zealots, and the military finally had to intervene. General Chen Zaidao, commander of the Wuhan military region (and a man who nearly drowned trying to keep up with Mao during an earlier Yangtze swim), rallied party and army conservatives in opposition to the Chairman's political challenge. Months of conflict between rival Maoist groups had crippled Wuhan's industries, and party conservatives, fearing that the leftists in Beijing would consolidate their power, supported Chen as his troops moved against the Red Guard factions. With one of China's major urban centers paralyzed by political turmoil and violence, Premier Zhou Enlai and other Mao lieutenants intervened to negotiate an end to the fighting. After two of the Chairman's emissaries were kidnapped, central military authorities under Lin Biao launched an invasion of the city. Lin's troops arrived via paratroop drop and in naval maneuvers up the Yangtze. Chen Zaidao was arrested, and Wuhan returned to leftist control. The political chaos that Mao had unleashed with his improbable swim would finally end only with the Chairman's death in 1976 and the purge of his wife Jiang Qing and other party radicals. Richard H. Solomon, China specialist in the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations, is president of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the author of A Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party

Subject: RE: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: Joe Offer
Date: 15 May 16 - 03:20 AM

Gee, Dick where did you copy this from? Have any thoughts of your own on the matter? I shouldn't have to look it up - this is something you should do every time you copy-paste something, Mudcatters deserve to know where you got your information from, if it is not your own.

This article is from the Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/02/the-legacy-of-mao-zedong-is-mass-murder. The Heritage Foundation is an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Subject: BS: chairman Mao mass murder is it true
From: The Sandman
Date: 15 May 16 - 02:39 AM

Can you name the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century? No, it wasn't Hitler or Stalin. It was Mao Zedong.

According to the authoritative "Black Book of Communism," an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao's repeated, merciless attempts to create a new "socialist" China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with -- by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.

For Mao, the No. 1 enemy was the intellectual. The so-called Great Helmsman reveled in his blood-letting, boasting, "What's so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars." Mao was referring to a major "accomplishment" of the Great Cultural Revolution, which from 1966-1976 transformed China into a great House of Fear.

The most inhumane example of Mao's contempt for human life came when he ordered the collectivization of China's agriculture under the ironic slogan, the "Great Leap Forward." A deadly combination of lies about grain production, disastrous farming methods (profitable tea plantations, for example, were turned into rice fields), and misdistribution of food produced the worse famine in human history.

Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million -- the population of California.

Rounding up enemies

Only five years later, when he sensed that revolutionary fervor in China was waning, Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution. Gangs of Red Guards -- young men and women between 14 and 21 -- roamed the cities targeting revisionists and other enemies of the state, especially teachers.

Professors were dressed in grotesque clothes and dunce caps, their faces smeared with ink. They were then forced to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. Some were beaten to death, some even eaten -- all for the promulgation of Maoism. A reluctant Mao finally called in the Red Army to put down the marauding Red Guards when they began attacking Communist Party members, but not before 1 million Chinese died.

All the while, Mao kept expanding the laogai, a system of 1,000 forced labor camps throughout China. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in labor camps, has estimated that from the 1950s through the 1980s, 50 million Chinese passed through the Chinese version of the Soviet gulag. Twenty million died as a result of the primitive living conditions and 14-hour work days.

Such calculated cruelty exemplified his Al Capone philosophy: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

And yet Mao Zedong remains the most honored figure in the Chinese Communist Party. At one end of historic Tiananmen Square is Mao's mausoleum, visited daily by large, respectful crowds. At the other end of the square is a giant portrait of Mao above the entrance to the Forbidden City, the favorite site of visitors, Chinese and foreign.

Repression continues

In the spirit of Mao, China's present rulers continue to oppress intellectuals and other dissidents such as human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo. He was sentenced last month to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power." His offense: signing Charter 08, which calls on the government to respect basic civil and human rights within a democratic framework. .

China presents itself as a vast market for U.S. companies and investors. But some U.S. companies are taking a second look at doing business in a country which considers Mao Zedong its patron saint. Google has said it is reconsidering its operations in China after discovering a sophisticated cyber attack on its e-mail which the government must have initiated or approved.

Google has revealed what many in the Internet world have known for some time -- China routinely hacks into U.S. and Western Web sites for national security and other valuable information. Mao would have enthusiastically applauded this intellectual rape.

I wonder: would President Obama be so ready to kowtow to China if in the middle of Beijing there was a mausoleum of Hitler and, hanging from the gate to the Forbidden City, a giant swastika?

Lee Edwards is distinguished fellow in conservative thought at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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