In recent times it has become increasingly common for centre-right Western politicians, in order to show their profound understanding of modern China, to quote the declaration chairman Mao Zedong supposedly made at the founding of the People’s Republic.
“Zhongguo renmin zhan qilai le,” Malcolm Turnbull declares in Mandarin in almost any speech he gives on China. “The Chinese people have stood up.”
“Qi lai! Qi lai” (Stand up! Stand up!), exclaims British Prime Minister David Cameron to Beijing University students, channelling the Great Helmsman. “Today the Chinese people are not just standing up in their own country, they are standing up in the world.”
Australia’s new Foreign Minister is not immune from this odd trend. “Beset by occupation from colonial powers, invasion, wars and internal conflict over centuries,” says Julie Bishop, recounting the gripping tale, “a turning point came in 1949 when the modern People’s Republic was founded under the leadership of Mao Zedong, who famously declared, ‘The Chinese people have stood up’.”
Why do nominally conservative politicians talk like this about a communist takeover of a country? Bishop explains: “While its trials and tribulations were far from over, Mao was referring to the fact that the Chinese people had assumed control of their destiny, free from domination by external powers.”
By this logic, should we not also celebrate Lenin’s takeover in Moscow because it allowed Russians to “assume control of their destiny”? Why not also quote North Korea’s Kim Il-sung because he made his territory “free from domination by external powers”?
Frank Dikotter’s book The Tragedy of Liberation should hopefully put an end to this unreflective cant once and for all.
Dikotter is professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and has earned a deserved reputation for re-examining key areas of Chinese 20th-century history. His work – because it has focused relentlessly on historical truth – has tended to undermine the largely self-serving narrative that the Chinese Communist Party likes to tell about itself.
What he makes clear is that Mao’s declaration should not be seen as the culmination of a heroic story of national self-determination. Rather than “standing up”, the so-called “liberation” of China in fact resulted in a bloodthirsty subjugation of its people: it would be better described as a bowing down to a savage tyranny without parallel in the country’s long history.
There was no golden age or post-civil war reprieve before the more widely appreciated horrors of the “Great Leap Forward” (1959-62) or the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The revolution did not start off well and then go off the rails, as the conventional narrative goes.
The truth is a pathological bloodlust was intrinsic to Mao’s rule of the Chinese Communist Party from its earliest days. It was present in Changsha where he first acquired a taste for violence. It plainly existed in the famous civil war holdout in Yan’an, where he encouraged his notorious henchman Kang Sheng (China’s Lavrenti Beria) to run a campaign of terror. It explains the excessive and nihilistic brutality of his generals during the civil war (of which the siege of the northern Chinese city of Changchun stands as a bloody example). And it continued after his celebrated establishment of the People’s Republic in Beijing.
The nature of Mao’s rule did not substantially change throughout his career – it just expanded in scale.
Dikotter’s description of the horrors of the first decade of the newly established People’s Republic, based on newly unearthed party archives and documentation and first-hand accounts, are painful to read.
One reads about countless children being killed and tortured to death, of mock executions, of waves of suicides as people jump off buildings on the Bund in Shanghai (the same buildings where today people eat at upscale restaurants and party at rooftop discos).
One reads of arbitrary killings to fit quotas – designed to instil terror in the population (enthusiastically implemented, one notes, by China’s future leader Deng Xiaoping), of brainwashing and barbarity, and of an unfathomable sorrow as people lost their businesses and possessions, their families, their minds and often their lives. By Dikotter’s estimate, five million died non-natural deaths during the first decade of Maoist rule.
China will never be able to truly progress if it does not face its past honestly and openly. At the very least there is certainly no need for foreign politicians to be endorsing a clearly false historical narrative.
It is unrealistic to expect that The Tragedy of Liberation might one day sit on the bedside table of China’s leaders. One would hope, though, that before another Western politician goes on to perform his or her own Mao stand-up routine, they instead take time sit down and read Dikotter’s fine book.
First published in The Australian as “Pollies Cant Deny the Horror of China’s Communist Stand” on 4th October 2013 © Dan Ryan 2024. All Rights Reserved.
